Ethereal Effect. Chapter 21. (Patreon)

Aroon Combat Suit Pilot Lin. AR-R-03 System, Planet Akhtankh.

"You are not on the sunny beaches of Neirina anymore, gentlemen. You are on Akhtankh. Respect that every second of every day. If Hell exists, you'll want to go there to catch your breath after a tour on Akhtankh."

Colonel Quaritch, tall for an Aroon and with an ugly long scar slashing across his face, paced before the ranks of the new arrivals. He spoke slowly, almost lazily, yet every word fell with the weight of a coffin lid.

"Out there, beyond this fence, every living thing that crawls, wallows in the mud, or, Aellarin forbid, flies will want to kill you and eat your eyes like jelly candies."

Safety briefings had always calmed me. If I was hearing one, it meant everything was still going according to command's plan. It became far more frightening when even the people in charge had no idea what to do to keep you alive.

Life had been wonderful only ten years ago. I had a great life: a family, school, a girl I loved. Even my beloved pet, Ripley, a small black creature with a long glossy head and a habit of urinating corrosive acid—a habit I personally spent more than a year trying to break. He slept at my feet, purred when I scratched him behind the ear, and sneezed in a funny way whenever the house got too dusty. An ordinary life for an ordinary Aroon. I had no idea how soon it would end.

Then the bugs came. The first rachni wave reached Tedros. By some monstrous coincidence, I was away in a neighboring city at the time. Our class had gone to a UFO museum, where various sculptors presented their ideas of what alien life ought to look like. Our teacher said it was important for our general education. It simply turned out to be a very different kind of education from what she had planned.

I remember how happy I was as I laughed at a wax figure of an enlarged Ripley. The artist had depicted the creature bursting out of an Aroon's chest—fountains of wax blood, shattered ribs, a dramatically horrified expression on the victim's face. We schoolchildren thought it was unbelievably funny. I took a picture in front of the sculpture and sent it to my parents. It is a pity they never had a chance to see it.

I also remember thinking the wax figures of the standard "white Aroons" were impossibly absurd. How could there be two-meter-tall white Aroons with multicolored fur on their heads? It contradicted everything about our biology. We were small, we had no fur, and our skin was bluish gray, not white. I stood in front of those figures thinking how stupid they were. The artists had simply taken us and stretched us in Photoshop.

It is almost funny that our saviors turned out to be near-perfect copies of those "white Aroons." Their skin was blue and their ears were pointed, but otherwise they were the same two-meter giants from the UFO museum. The first time I saw the Aiteri on television, stepping out of a shuttle in Area 51, I nearly laughed. The sculptors had guessed correctly. Without knowing it, they had portrayed our future masters.

Back then, I did not yet know that my entire life would collapse half an hour later. I dreamed of joining the army. I dreamed of dying in the same radioactive caves where millions of other Aroons were dying, weapon in hand, taking back even a single meter of our homeland from the bugs. But I was too young. I was sixteen, and the recruiters only shook their heads when they looked at my thin arms. "Grow up, kid. The war isn't going anywhere." They were right. The war truly did not go anywhere.

And when it seemed victory had finally been won—when we had burned out the cursed hive, collapsed the tunnels, buried millions of our own, and tried to move on—the creatures came again. I should have died there. I was among those scheduled to join the next assault. We all understood it was a one-way ticket.

But fate intervened again. Our new saviors launched an orbital strike against the anthills. I watched from a hill above the city: flashes in the sky, bright as a second sun, and a minute later the ground shuddered while columns of smoke and steam rose above the hives. Yes, many Aroons who had been fighting desperately in the tunnels died in those strikes, unable to retreat in time. But the bombardment gave us the breathing room we needed. A month later, the armies of our saviors began arriving on the planet. Real armies. Trained Aiteri with glowing shields and lizardfolk in heavy armor.

Behind the regular troops came the combat suits of the Great Houses. I fell in love with them at first sight. Machines that walked through fire like gods of war. Power capable of slaughtering dozens of cursed rachni alone, forcing a path through tunnels, enduring the fire of an entire nest, and continuing onward. That love determined the entire course of my life.

First, I became an experienced test pilot for combat suits produced by Avrux, a company owned by the united Aroon government. The first suit, the XV-01, was more of an experimental prototype, a way for our engineers to test the new knowledge brought by the Aiteri. It broke down often, and its right arm failed during sudden movements. But it was a great step toward allowing the small Aroons to defend themselves.

Then the company received substantial investments from ten Great Houses at once. There was some complicated arrangement connected to laws that prohibited the Houses from directly producing large quantities of weapons—I understood none of it. In the end, the Houses gained control of forty-nine percent of the shares while leaving formal ownership of the corporation in our hands. From that moment on, the combat suits stopped resembling children's toys and became true instruments of war. The XV-03 could already produce respectable results on the proving grounds. The XV-05 could withstand a genuine storm of fire. And the XV-07...

And I was among the first who would test the new XV-07 Impulse, the first mass-produced Aroon armored suit. A three-meter machine designed specifically for Aroons. Not an adapted version of an Aiteri suit, not an inferior copy, but our own creation from frame to interface. Pilots were selected with great care. They spent several years studying military science and training in simulators until the suit began to feel like their own body. I spent so many hours in those simulators that I still sometimes wake with the feeling that my arms are manipulators and my eyes are sensors.

The suit was expensive and not intended for conventional front-line warfare. But it was perfect for rapid landing operations, urban combat, caves, and boarding actions.

The first thousand Impulses, following the initial hundred suits already in active service, would be tested along with their crews on the Dominion's largest proving ground: the still-unconquered planet Akhtankh.

"As commander of the Dominion's First Aroon Armored Suit Brigade, my duty is to keep you alive," Colonel Quaritch continued, studying us closely. He walked slowly along the formation, letting his gaze linger on every pilot, and beneath that stare you wanted to stand even straighter even if you were already rigid at attention. "I will fail. I will fail some of you. If you want to survive, you must obey the rules of Akhtankh."

He stopped in front of a young man—completely green, probably fresh out of training—and looked him directly in the eyes.

"I must warn you about how you are expected to behave on this base. Back on your own planet, you may have been the elite of the elite. Here, you are ordinary meat. There are one hundred thousand lizardfolk stationed at this base right now, the best of the best, veterans who assaulted the radioactive hive beneath Tedros back on our homeworld. To them, your advanced technology means nothing."

"Seventy suits from the first hundred were lost in the caves," the colonel continued, his voice hardening. "Eighteen of them were destroyed because their pilots were arrogant enough to imagine their suits could do the same things as the Great Houses' combat suits, which are also deployed here. Am I making myself clear?"

I learned exactly what the colonel meant during another assault on the hive.

Anthills were everywhere on Akhtankh. They covered every continent on the planet and even one large island—the very island where the main fighting was now taking place. A vast hive had spread across an enormous mountain range there, effectively occupying it in its entirety. It had been named the Crest because it stretched along the entire ridge for dozens of kilometers. The orbital bombardment had, of course, radically altered the landscape. We had plowed up the surface with kinetic strikes, but the natural shield above the hive meant the attack accomplished almost nothing. We only managed to bury the uppermost levels. The bugs dug new exits within a week, and everything returned to where it had begun.

Now the assault was being conducted carefully and methodically. Command was testing different technologies and tactics, examining how the new suits performed under real combat conditions, and comparing the effectiveness of various weapons.

The military base itself stood on the surface, but the assault was taking place deep inside dark caves where not a single ray of light could reach. And who did they send at the very tip of the spear? Whoever carried the largest shield and the largest caliber. That almost always meant our combat suits—Aiteri and Aroon—with the lizardfolk advancing behind us. We went first, drew the fire, broke through the barricades, and left the infantry to clear whatever remained. It sounded simple, but in reality, you could never guess where the next attack would come from.

The difficulty was that the rachni did not reinforce every cave, especially the secondary passages. Such tunnels could collapse at any moment, burying both the bugs and our own troops. That was why we preferred simply to blow them up. Find one, plant charges, fall back, detonate. That way, hordes of enemies could not emerge behind us, and none of our soldiers could accidentally fall into a trap.

During the first battles, I could do nothing but marvel at the power of the newest armored suits. With proper tactics and support, they rolled through the endless caves like an unstoppable machine, crushing hordes of enemies. We cleared tunnel after tunnel, forced our way through the bugs' defenses, and it seemed the Impulse was an invulnerable machine capable of handling anything. But the farther we advanced, the harder it became. The enemy grew more numerous, and their attacks more desperate. They poured from every side passage, crawled across the ceilings, and burst from beneath the floor. It was as though they understood we were approaching their heart.

The Impulse's shields, caliber, and maneuverability had once been enough. Now, sometimes, it was terrifying to climb behind the controls of that vacuum cleaner. After every sortie, the mechanics could only shake their heads at what the suit had become. We returned with bent manipulators, shattered shields, and dead sensors.

After six months of field-testing the new suit—six months in which machines sometimes returned with catastrophic damage and engineers had to assemble one working suit from two wrecks—the hive queen was killed. So was every other rachni in that cursed anthill, which extended two kilometers underground. We burned out the central chamber, collapsed the vaults, and withdrew, leaving a dead hive behind us. At least we had not needed to storm every branch. We only had to move toward the queen, and the rest of the rachni came running into our fire.

After the fighting in the depths, where toxin concentrations were so high that even the lizardfolk had to wear sealed breathing systems, only one hundred of the thousand delivered suits remained. Nine hundred machines had been lost in six months. But those thousand suits proved that even the small Aroons could become a formidable force in the galaxy.

Aellarin

The entire Dominion had finally begun preparing for a prolonged galactic war that might last several centuries. After the first clashes with the rachni and the destruction of the relay, one thing became completely clear: there would be no swift victory. We could win battles, but the war was only beginning, and its scale far exceeded anything we had ever faced before.

And, honestly, all of this would require titanic effort. This was not an ordinary war that lasted a decade at most and ended with the signing of a peace treaty. In Mass Effect canon, the Rachni Wars lasted three hundred years. Three hundred years meant five generations of Aiteri for whom war would last their entire lives. Mortals born today would die of old age without ever seeing peace. So would their children. Perhaps their grandchildren as well. That could not help but change society. And the change would run deep.

Without question, a common enemy would bind the Dominion's species together like steel. Lizardfolk, Aroons, Aiteri—we would all fight shoulder to shoulder, and that shared experience would gradually erase many barriers. Nothing unites people like an external threat. Our military technologies would advance at a frantic pace. War had always been the greatest engine of progress, and there was no reason to doubt that in fifty years we would be building ships that would seem like fantasy to us now.

But if the Dominion was not to descend into a regime that squeezed every last drop from its people, serious measures had to be taken now. Over three hundred years, not only the economy would change, but culture and religion as well.

And once victory came—as I was certain it inevitably would—the entire war machine would become unnecessary. The immense fleet we could build over centuries of war, thousands of combat vessels, would turn into dead weight on the state's balance sheet after the final shot was fired. Ground armies numbering in the millions, hardened in battles across dozens of planets, would have no purpose. Soldiers who had spent their entire lives doing nothing but fighting would return home and discover there was no place for them there.

Factories producing hundreds of starships a year, and the supply chains employing billions of Aiteri, lizardfolk, and Aroons to sustain them, would simply no longer be needed. They could be converted to civilian production, but that would take decades and require colossal investment. More importantly, why? Why would we continue building new ships and frightening Citadel Space, which I hoped we would eventually encounter? If we emerged from the war with a fleet capable of wiping any known species from the face of the galaxy, the Citadel Council would hardly greet us with open arms. It would more likely see us as a threat to be either appeased or destroyed.

That was why we had begun developing an entirely different kind of ship for use throughout the coming war. Yes, they would cost twice as much as conventional vessels. But with the hive on Hivekor already operating at full capacity, we could afford the increase. When the primary production—hulls, armor, weapons, and even ethereal cores—was handled by the rachni, cost ceased to be the decisive factor. We could afford to build more expensive ships if doing so gave us an advantage in battle and saved resources after the war.

What made them special? First and foremost, they lacked the ability to travel between stars independently. Much as I wished otherwise, our current level of technology simply did not permit a competitive interstellar state to exist outside the relay network. FTL ships remained limited in size, difficult to manufacture, and prohibitively expensive for a mass fleet. The new ships would therefore be bound to the network. It was a disadvantage, but a calculated and temporary one.

Second, they had far greater carrying capacity. Our warships had once resembled elegant spears: long, slender hulls built around a single bow-mounted gun. Now they looked more like enormous sausages. Their usable internal volume had increased fourfold.

On our older cruisers, even the least protected areas had at least one meter of specialized multilayer armor. On the new ship types, that armor was three times thicker. And after reconsidering the layout principles used in rachni vessels, we had organized the interiors so that a ship would lose only the sections directly struck. That gave it a chance to escape even the most brutal bombardment.

Most importantly, every one of these ships could be converted into a civilian vessel with relative ease after the war. All weapons could be removed and replaced with much smaller ones. The space freed by the weapon systems could become additional cargo holds or living quarters. Expensive armor plates could be dismantled and replaced with thinner, cheaper equivalents. The end result would be an exceptionally reliable civilian ship with military-grade shields, good armor, moderate firepower—excellent by civilian standards—and an enormous amount of usable cargo space.

Barbie, of course, complained that we were not building ships according to rachni technology and were merely using her as a factory to manufacture designs alien to her. Instead, we had forced her to mass-produce individual ship components piece by piece using rachni methods. To her, it was like ordering an artist to paint fences. But the results of combining the technologies of two species spoke for themselves: we had gained the ability to build our own nine-hundred-and-fifty-meter dreadnoughts.

We had not yet begun producing them in series, however. For now, we were testing the new technologies on ten brand-new Dawn-class cruisers constructed over the past five years. In the same period, our own shipyards had only managed to bring the total number of cruisers to ten, including those built earlier.

Just a little longer—perhaps fifty years, perhaps a hundred—and we would become a power capable of confronting the rachni, the asari, or the krogan without fear.

Krogan Battlemaster Krodd. Former Asari Planet, Teyra System.

"I am the hammer."

I say it quietly, so only I can hear—and perhaps Rax, standing just behind my shoulder. The lamp on my helmet cuts a patch from the darkness: a chitinous wall slick with some kind of slime, and a tunnel extending ahead before vanishing into blackness twenty meters away. Beyond that, nothing. Only darkness, only sounds, only waiting. We have been at war for five years. Five years without pause—on different planets, in different systems, yet always in the same cursed holes where the sun never shines, the air is a poisonous suspension, and the floor beneath your feet can collapse at any moment.

"I am the roar of the mass rifle and the crunch of chitin beneath my boot."

The clatter of countless chitinous legs surrounds me as they rush toward us. Stomping, scraping, mandibles clicking—I could recognize that sound among a thousand. I heard it on Teyra, on Asojes, and on a dozen other worlds whose names have already faded from memory. Rachni soldiers know no fear. They know no doubt. They simply charge, and there are many of them. But there are twenty of us: handpicked krogan who have survived so many battles that the scars on our faces stopped being distinguishing features long ago and became nothing more than background.

"I am the final thought that will never form inside a tiny insect brain."

I throw a grenade into a side branch of the tunnel and press myself against the wall. Rax does the same to my right; the others spread out behind us among the positions we selected on the approach. Three seconds. Detonation. The fragmentation charge erupts in the midst of the charging rachni, scattering pieces of chitin and painting the walls with green blood. Howls, shrieks, and pounding footsteps break rhythm. That is when I lean out from cover.

Twenty monstrous mass rifles open fire. Their bursts merge into a single continuous thunder, and the first ranks of rachni simply disappear. Their shields collapse in seconds, chitin bursts apart, and limbs fly in every direction.

The smoke clears. The tunnel ahead is buried beneath corpses. I open my mouth to speak the final line of the mantra, but I never get the chance. A huge bug bursts through a breach in the wall that we failed to notice. A two-meter creature with a gun mounted on its back, apparently waiting for precisely this moment. One shot, and Kirr, standing on the left flank, falls with his shield punched through and his chest torn open. Dead. The others make it into cover, and somewhere behind me I hear Rax growl with fury.

I take up my hammer, a massive weapon not every krogan could wield. Power rises from somewhere within me—not rage. No, rage is what the weak leave behind. This is a cold, tranquil strength that comes when you accept death as inevitable and cease to fear it. My eyes flare blue. Biotics awaken, strengthening every muscle and every movement.

I burst from cover directly in front of the creature, which has already reached our position. It swings its gun toward me, but I am faster. One blow from the hammer, and its carapace cracks like an eggshell. Chitin explodes into fragments, and green blood lashes across the walls. The creature collapses onto its side, limbs jerking in convulsions. I bring the hammer down on its head to make certain it will never rise again.

"I am war."

It is almost amusing how every time you believe you have learned everything there is to know about war, fate shows you how wrong you were. I am Krodd, a warrior who has lived through enough battles for ten lifetimes, and still I learn the same lesson again and again: war is not a craft that can ever be mastered completely. It is an endless lesson. Either you learn quickly enough, or you remain in the mud with a hole through your carapace.

I earned recognition as a great warrior on Tuchanka back when we knew no power except good steel, and I have witnessed more battles than I could ever count. In those days, war on my homeworld was simple and honest: you and your enemy, blade against blade, and the stronger survived.

I made my first kill when I had only just shed my first plate. Some idiot decided that because I was small, he could easily take my food. I smashed his head with a huge stone, took the food back, and finished eating it while sitting on his corpse. I have not stopped since.

Then the battles came one after another. For food, for money, for females, for glory. My skills grew, and with my Gift—the power that made my eyes blaze blue and filled my muscles with inhuman strength—my ambitions grew as well. Ordinary glory was not enough for me.

I became a Battlemaster. That title is not granted lightly. It can be borne only by a Gifted krogan who has mastered both the science of killing and the use of biotic power. Biotics without combat skill are merely tricks. Combat skill without biotics is merely a brawl. Together, they become art. I became a truly unstoppable killing machine. It did not matter who stood before me—a krogan, a thresher maw, another Battlemaster. The only difference was how many blows it would take. I killed a thresher maw in single combat armed with nothing but my faithful hammer.

But after a hundred years of endless war, I grew bored. Tuchanka is a harsh world, but even it has limits. There was no predator left on the planet, sapient or otherwise, that could truly challenge me. I became careless.

That carelessness nearly killed me. An artillery shell shattered my carapace and crushed one of my hearts. Had it not lost much of its energy over the enormous distance it traveled, it would have passed straight through me. Even so, I lay bleeding in the mud for half a day before my own people found me.

Then I began learning all over again. I trained with the newest weapons, taught myself never to offer the enemy an easy target, and learned to wage war through tactics and strategy rather than mindless fury. The old school—tearing the enemy apart with your bare hands without counting the cost—remained in the past along with my shattered carapace. I understood that strength without intelligence was merely a way to die beautifully. And that understanding eventually saved me, when I realized where our latest war would lead.

For fifty years, we destroyed Tuchanka with nuclear strikes, improving our missiles and bombs with every new turn of the conflict. We became ever more inventive—and ever more merciless. But the true end began when even the krogan became too few to sustain a planetary war. Clans that had once numbered millions of warriors could now field only a few hundred thousand. Cities lay in ruins. The factories still capable of producing weapons could be counted on one hand. Was that a reason to end the war? No. It was a reason to finish it with a single overwhelming strike. The shock waves circled Tuchanka several times. But the worst came afterward.

A nuclear winter began and lasted for two decades. Ash choked the sky, the sun disappeared, and temperatures fell below anything we had ever known. Almost all surface life died. Herbivores vanished first. Predators followed. Then the krogan began starving. Clans that had survived the bombardment died in their bunkers because there was nothing left to eat. Even then, the wars did not stop. We fought for the last stores of food, for water, for functioning reactors, for warmth. We fought over anything and were prepared to fight forever. Because war is our entire nature. War against a brutal planet. War against wild beasts. War against ourselves.

And perhaps only creatures like us can survive in this galaxy. The moment things turned ugly on the galactic stage—when the blue women's foolish diplomacy and the frogs' inflated opinion of their own intelligence stopped working—the whole galaxy came to us. To those unafraid to dirty their hands. To those who do not weep over enemy corpses, but simply step over them and keep moving.

And we will show them what a true warrior looks like.

Interlude: The Lucky Servant Auction House, Khar'Shan, Capital of the Batarian Hegemony.

"Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to an auction held in honor of yet another victory won by the united armies of the Citadel over the accursed rachni!" The host, a middle-aged batarian in an immaculate suit with gold inserts along the collar, spread his arms wide. His voice, amplified by concealed speakers, carried beneath the vaulted ceiling of the luxurious hall. "And I assure you, today's auction will bring you just as many pleasant emotions as the joy you felt upon hearing that wonderful news!"

The hall answered with restrained applause. Beneath crystal chandeliers, amid gilded columns and velvet draperies, the cream of Batarian Hegemony society had gathered. Members of the highest castes, whose families had controlled trade, politics, and military supply contracts for centuries. Men in severe suits embroidered with silver and platinum, massive rings on all four fingers. Women in dresses that flowed to the floor, shoulders and throats bare beneath jewelry so costly that a single necklace could buy a small starship—not a decommissioned one, but a new vessel fresh from the shipyard. They sat in comfortable chairs, sipped drinks from delicate glassware, and traded meaningless remarks while waiting for the evening's main event to begin.

At least one asari attended to each of these important batarians. Young women in translucent garments, wearing collars encrusted with gemstones—less a means of control than a display of status—carried drinks, adjusted cushions, and fanned their masters. Their faces were calm, their movements precise, their gazes lowered to the floor. Perfect property.

Two hundred years had passed since the batarians joined the galactic community, yet the fashion for asari had never faded. During the first contacts, capturing a member of that species had been incredibly difficult and therefore incredibly prestigious. Centuries later, little had changed. In many extremely wealthy families, such a slave was passed down from generation to generation. A daughter inherited an asari from her mother just as she inherited the family estate or an art collection. If the asari happened to die, it was a tragedy less moral than financial. Their price was extraordinarily high; capturing one without complications was no simple matter.

Meanwhile, the host continued warming up the audience. He was good: energetic without being exhausting, obsequious without becoming pathetic, and blessed with that particular tone of an experienced auctioneer that made people reach for their wallets before they even understood what they were buying.

"I see that the richest and finest audience in the capital of our magnificent Hegemony has gathered here tonight!" The host spread his arms again, his voice surging with renewed energy. "It would be an insult to offer you anything dull or commonplace—the sort of thing you could surely find beyond our hospitable walls!"

He paused briefly, swept his gaze across the hall, and continued in a conspiratorial tone.

"But I assure you: if our first lot appears perfectly ordinary, do not rush to judgment!" The host pointed theatrically toward the wings. "Applause, ladies and gentlemen! Before you stands Gorotak the Bloody! Once a successful batarian raider, he made the unwise decision to sell information about a space station in the Sarabarik system to the wrong people! A terrible loss both to the Hegemony and to our culture!"

An ordinary batarian was escorted onto the stage. Ordinary except for the fact that two of his four eyes had been gouged out. Roughly healed scars gaped in their place, making it clear that little care had been taken with his appearance during the procedure. Gorotak stood on the stage, stared at the floor with his remaining eyes, and made no attempt to struggle or protest.

"But what makes him special, you ask?" The host lowered his voice to a theatrical whisper. "Why, this two-eyed specimen belongs to the very one percent of survivors born healthy after their mothers were exposed to element zero! Before you stands a biotic!"

Whispers rolled through the hall. A batarian biotic was a rarity even by the Hegemony's standards. Sensing the audience's interest, the host pressed harder.

"Just imagine: you breed this jackal with one of your slaves, and perhaps—I repeat, perhaps—you will obtain another biotic slave, one who has been loyal to you since birth! No expensive mercenaries, no risks! Your own biotic, personally devoted to you!"

The host was not exactly lying, but he was withholding a great deal. The Hegemony's scientific community possessed only a theory that a biotic's offspring might also be biotic. There was no evidence to support it: no research, no statistics, not even a single documented case.

Despite that, a small contest began among several guests. The price rose slowly but steadily until it reached a sum comparable to the cost of a rather fine house in the Hegemony's capital. Gorotak the Bloody was eventually sold. His new owner, a heavyset batarian with gold rings on every finger, leaned back in his chair with satisfaction. Judging by the host's enigmatic smile, the most interesting part of the evening was only beginning.

"Our next exhibit is a true exclusive!" The host paused, savoring the hall's attention. "A representative of a species that serves in an aquarium inside the palace of the Hegemon himself! Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you—a hanar!"

The curtains behind him parted, and a large glass tank filled with greenish water was rolled onto the stage. A hanar floated inside, slowly moving its tentacles. Its body shimmered with soft bioluminescence, waves of pink and blue flowing across translucent skin in a mesmerizing display. It resembled an enormous jellyfish trapped inside a glass prison.

"You all know how difficult it is to encounter a hanar beyond its homeworld!" the host continued while the guests examined the lot. "Due to the peculiarities of their species, they rarely engage in tourism, almost never travel beyond systems belonging to the Illuminated Primacy, and can generally be encountered only on the Citadel, where they work as merchants or religious preachers. Yet our team has performed a genuine miracle and obtained this marvelous specimen!"

The hanar in the tank barely moved. Its tentacles drifted weakly through the water. A massive collar with a glowing indicator rested near the base of the tank, a device designed to suppress any attempt to use biotics, assuming the hanar possessed such abilities at all.

An approving murmur swept through the hall. A hanar in a private collection was indeed a rare trophy. Not one of those present paused to wonder precisely what "miracles" the auction house's team had performed to acquire this specimen, or how many hanar had died in transit before this particular one reached Khar'Shan alive. Such details interested no one here.

The bidding began immediately. Two guests—an elderly batarian from the planet Kari'Shan and a young but clearly very wealthy woman from Ull'Shan—became locked in a fierce, if outwardly polite, struggle. The price climbed rapidly: one hundred thousand, one hundred fifty, two hundred. The host skillfully fed their excitement with remarks about the specimen's uniqueness and how magnificently it would adorn any collection.

The woman won. She smiled with satisfaction and gestured to her assistant: complete the purchase.

The next lots were exotic, but familiar to such a sophisticated audience. There were rare, heavily protected birds from Thessia—three specimens in an elegant gilded cage, chirping hysterically and beating their wings against the bars. The host spoke at great length about their rarity and the challenge of smuggling them out from beneath the noses of asari customs officers.

There were also biotic animals from across the galaxy: a small predator from Tuchanka capable of enhancing its muscles like a krogan Battlemaster, and some sluglike creature from the distant colonies that the host described as "the perfect pet for your children." The bidding remained lively but lacked any real passion. This audience was too experienced to be impressed by merely rare animals.

Then a cage containing an entire group of young asari was rolled out—five women who had decided to take a "tourist excursion" into Hegemony space. Well, their journey would certainly last longer than expected. Perhaps a thousand years, if their lifespans and the mercy of their owners allowed it. The women huddled together, eyes wide with terror and humiliation. One was crying. The others tried to remain composed and failed badly. They were offered as a single lot—an exclusive deal, five asari for the price of four, as the host put it—drawing approving laughter from the hall. The bidding was intense but brief. The lot was simply too attractive. The winner, an older batarian with cold eyes, did not even bargain. He merely raised his hand and named a sum no one dared surpass.

"And now, ladies and gentlemen," the host's voice dropped to a theatrical whisper, "the reason you have all gathered here. Something not even the Hegemon himself possesses. Something no amount of money can ordinarily buy. Something seen only once in a generation. Behold—the principal lot of tonight's auction!"

The lights in the hall went dark, and a single spotlight struck the center of the stage, where a massive cage was slowly rising from beneath the floor. Its bars were as thick as an adult batarian's finger, decorated with gilded patterns and soft illumination—a purely ornamental structure designed to impress the guests rather than restrain those inside. Five krogan. Real veterans, hardened and covered in scars and old battle marks. Their carapaces were scored by rachni claws, and their eyes burned with a grim fire.

"This unit belonged to an army en route to purge the Barenk system of rachni," the host continued, savoring the effect he had created. "Our friends in the transport fleet intercepted the supply ship carrying these beauties to the front. Five combat krogan, hardened in battle against the bugs. Five perfect machines of war. And every one of them can become yours—separately or as a single lot."

He snapped his fingers, and dim red lights glowed around the krogan's necks: collars of a special design. Or rather, not collars. The thin metal bands merely marked the location of the true devices—implants extending deep beneath the carapace and directly into the brain.

"Our special team named this system the 'Butcher's Nails,'" the host said with near reverence. "Unlike standard collars, which suppress resistance through electrical shocks delivered across the skin, these implants are placed deep inside the brain's pain centers. The surgical procedure is performed by our finest specialist—who, incidentally, is here in the hall and ready to personally advise the buyer. The implants connect directly to the regions of the nervous system responsible for the perception of pain."

He stepped closer to the cage, stopping at a safe distance.

"When the master gives an order and the bearer refuses to obey, the Nails activate. The pain they produce is beyond comparison. It is not a burn, a fracture, or torture by fire. It feels as though red-hot needles are piercing your brain from within—slowly, one after another, without end. The bearer cannot lose consciousness. The implants stimulate the same centers that prevent the mind from shutting down."

The hall was silent. One guest adjusted his collar nervously. Another leaned forward with greedy curiosity. Feeling the audience's reaction, the host intensified his pitch.

"Imagine it: you receive not a slave, not a servant, but a weapon. A living, thinking weapon, capable of making decisions on the battlefield yet remaining entirely under your control. A krogan squad that will walk through any fire at your command. One that will never betray you, never flee, and never sell you to your competitors."

He paused, allowing the audience to absorb the moment.

"The opening price is five million credits each. Or twenty-two million for the entire squad. Who will begin?"

Silence. Then one finger rose. Then another. The bidding began.

But the auction's owner evidently knew little about krogan physiology. The cage holding the captives served a purely decorative purpose for the guests: beautiful gilded bars, elegant illumination, graceful flourishes. It had been designed to present the merchandise attractively, not to contain it. Even the lock on the door was purely symbolic, a simple bolt that had not been pushed fully into place because no member of the staff could imagine that sapient beings held under guard in the center of the Hegemony's capital world, with implants driven into their brains, might even contemplate resistance.

The largest of them, marked by a deep scar across his entire chest, simply rose to his feet. The other four did the same. The host stopped in mid-sentence.

The krogan struck the door with his shoulder. It swung open with a faint chime. Five krogan stepped into the hall.

Fifteen minutes later, a Hegemony special response unit eliminated the krogan. The hall, which had glittered with gold and jewels only moments before, had become a slaughterhouse. Shards of crystal, overturned chairs, pools of blood across the marble floor. Only a handful of guests survived—those fortunate enough to be near the distant exits when the massacre began. The host did not survive. He was found beneath the wreckage of the stage with his chest crushed inward. The auction's owner, seated in the VIP box, managed to escape through a concealed passage.

The following week, the Hegemony lodged an official complaint with the krogan government over the terrorist attack carried out in the center of Khar'Shan. The note employed the harshest possible language and demanded compensation, apologies, and the extradition of those responsible for organizing the crime. The krogan sent back a brief reply. Only three words: "Blame yourselves, idiots."

The diplomatic scandal dragged on for months.