Ethereal Effect. Chapter 22. (Patreon)

Aellarin

Just as we had once crowded into our home system and only begun to explore the neighboring stars, so now, having mastered our native cluster, we began to reach into new ones.

How long had we been living in a state of war? A full sixty years had passed since the relay in the AR-R-02 system was destroyed. And for all those sixty years, the Dominion had lived under wartime conditions. Even though, in truth, there had been no war.

Vast resources from our economy were now being poured into the military. We built warships by the hundreds. We refined weapons, developed tactics, and maintained armies numbering in the millions, ready at the first order to board transports and depart to repel a possible attack. Every year, military spending consumed one fifth of the Dominion’s budget. Every year, new divisions completed their training, new ships left the yards, and new technologies underwent trials. And every year, we waited for the enemy to come.

But the attack never came. Akhtanh had been completely cleared of their presence twenty years ago. And even then, we had deliberately drawn out the assault, methodically capturing samples of technologies unknown to Barbie.

So for the past twenty years, our immense military power had been used for little more than guarding conquered territory. We now had an entire generation of troops who had never seen a real battle. Officers who had spent their whole careers in exercises. Combat-suit pilots who honed their skills in simulators rather than tunnels.

The only exception was part of the fleet.

Warship captains were chosen from among the Blessed, and some of them had personally fought the rachni in the Arun system sixty years earlier. Those veterans were still serving—the Blessed lived for three or four centuries, and sixty years was only a portion of a career. They remembered war and were ready for it. Unlike the mortal infantry, which had been replaced completely over six decades and had never smelled gunpowder.

The navy had grown enormously over those sixty years. It now possessed ten dreadnoughts—vast, 1,050-meter ships capable of emerging victorious from battles that seemed hopeless. And besides them, there were cruisers, frigates, corvettes, and auxiliary vessels.

Each dreadnought was a colossal engine of war, concentrating the finest technologies the Dominion possessed. The most powerful shields, capable of withstanding hits that once punched straight through a cruiser. The newest and most varied armament—from a main gun running the full length of the kilometer-long hull to dozens of secondary weapons covering every firing arc. And sheer size that was itself a weapon: the sight of an approaching dreadnought alone was meant to make the enemy reconsider whether a battle was worth beginning.

To maximize the effectiveness of those giants, we changed the fleet’s entire military doctrine several times during the design phase. Old formations refined around cruisers and frigates simply did not work here. A dreadnought was not merely a larger cruiser. It was an entirely different class of ship with an entirely different role in battle.

The greatest obstacle to destroying a potential enemy ship was its shield. It completely negated every projectile impact until the attacker finally managed to overload the shield systems. And throughout that entire time, the defending ship could calmly return fire. Space combat became a dull game: whoever broke the enemy’s shield first won.

The dreadnought changed that paradigm. Its main gun could overload an enemy cruiser’s shields in one or two hits. One shot, and the shield collapsed. A second, and the ship ceased to exist. That transformed the dreadnought from a mere participant in a war of attrition into a hunter that decided for itself when and whom to kill. Add a screening squadron of frigates capable of tying down enemy ships while the dreadnought methodically destroyed them one by one, and the result was a tactic our old fleet had no answer for.

To gain an advantage over any possible rachni warships, we also developed specialized ship-launched disintegrator torpedoes containing element zero. When they detonated, the torpedoes generated chaotic gravitational fields that literally tore spacecraft apart. And because of the torpedo’s great mass, a defensive field simply could not stop it.

Another advantage was that the torpedoes were guided projectiles. They corrected their course in flight, tracked the target’s maneuvers, and almost never missed. Their theoretical attack range was five times greater than that of mass accelerator guns—while the enemy was still closing in, our ships could already launch a torpedo salvo from a safe distance.

But torpedoes had an extremely narrow window of effective use. They were far slower than tungsten slugs, and even the small guns on our ships could theoretically shoot down a lone torpedo. Fired singly or in small groups against a protected target, they were nearly useless—they would simply be intercepted on approach. Their most effective use was therefore a massed attack at point-blank range, where the enemy ship’s defensive systems had no time to destroy every target. Twenty, thirty, forty torpedoes launched at once—and even the most advanced shield would choke trying to track them all.

To counter the torpedo threat, an entire laser-defense network was developed to destroy incoming torpedoes at a safe distance. A potential enemy would not only gain nothing from the attack, but also lose expensive munitions. The Anti-Ship Defensive Integrated Systems Complex—the POISK system—was installed even on the smallest of our warships because it was relatively cheap and highly effective against slow-moving projectiles. Several laser turrets linked into a single network scanned the space around the ship and automatically struck any approaching torpedo long before it entered lethal range.

But we did not abandon the technology. We simply gave it a trick of its own. In flight, each torpedo released a cloud of decoys that carried none of the expensive element-zero payload, but made the lasers’ task ten times harder. Cheap dummy projectiles imitating the signature of a real torpedo spread out in a fan, forcing the POISK system to waste time and energy intercepting them. While the lasers were distracted by the fakes, the real warhead slipped calmly into attack range.

Because their effectiveness did not depend on the size of the launching vessel, disintegrator torpedoes were now installed everywhere. On small ships, they allowed groups of vessels to combine their fire into a salvo powerful enough to destroy a capital ship. Six frigates firing a synchronized spread of decoy-equipped torpedoes were already a threat that could not be ignored. On cruisers and larger vessels, torpedoes became a means of destroying enemies independently—a ten-torpedo salvo from a dreadnought had a high chance of turning anything, including another dreadnought, into a cloud of debris.

There was even an idea to build space fighters that would launch from a carrier, fly toward the enemy, and release torpedoes. It was abandoned. Why bother with fighters when the torpedoes were intelligent enough to maneuver to the enemy ship on their own?

But even that armament was not enough for our dreadnoughts. We had seen for ourselves that a single developed rachni planet could become an entire forge world for warships. And according to Barbie, the rachni possessed thousands of such planets. If they sent not colonizers but a full battle fleet against us—a hundred dreadnoughts, for example—then our ten, however advanced, would simply be crushed. The concentration of fire would collapse their shields within minutes, and the hulls would follow.

That was why every dreadnought carried its own hammer, a weapon meant to guarantee victory over any possible ship: sublight missiles.

In design, they closely resembled miniature versions of our spacecraft. With one exception: their entire purpose was to accelerate as hard as possible until stopping them became physically impossible.

They were expensive weapons, extraordinarily difficult to manufacture and operate. Every launch cost as much as an entire frigate. But once a projectile accelerated to sublight velocity, there was no defense against it at all. No shield could absorb that much energy, and no armor could survive the impact. The enemy ship simply burst into dust, and if several other ships happened to be behind it, they were swept away by the debris—a chain reaction capable of turning an entire squadron into a cloud of fragments.

A dreadnought carried two such munitions loaded and another two in reserve. Reloading the launchers could take an entire day, so there was no possibility of spamming the enemy with attacks. Every launch was a decision the captain had to make while knowing there might be no second chance, and that he would answer personally for every round expended.

And naturally, no one intended to send dreadnoughts into battle alone. They always moved as part of full fleets containing ships of many classes and purposes. Frigates and corvettes screened them from torpedo attacks and small enemy craft. Cruisers created the necessary density of fire, preventing the enemy from focusing on the main threat. And the dreadnought inflicted monstrous damage on the opposing fleet. Its main gun methodically ground down one ship after another. Even if several enemy dreadnoughts came against it, the sublight missiles gave it a chance to take at least two of them along.

Any enemy captain who saw one of our dreadnoughts ahead of him would know that the battle would not end in his victory.

And this entire technological boom had been made possible only through reverse-engineering the technologies supplied by our enemies. We took what others had built, stripped it down to the last screw, understood how it worked, and made our own version. Better, more powerful, and more reliable. But at the foundation there was always something that had not been created by us.

It was almost amusing that most of our spacecraft were based on foreign technologies. At first, we built our earliest ships from the wreck of an unknown civilization’s vessel that had crashed on Aetris—the very Pioneers with which everything began. Then came Dawn, then Mirage, then the cruisers and frigates, and all of them, in one way or another, traced their lineage back to those first discoveries. Later, we made another technological leap when we acquired rachni ships. Their weapons, their shields, their drives—all of it became the foundation of our present fleet.

Unfortunately, Barbie could give us no more. We had extracted everything we could from her: technology, knowledge of the swarm’s structure, an understanding of its production chains, and access to its construction methods. But she was only one queen, young and inexperienced, sent to administer a colony rather than invent new technologies. She did not know everything the elder queens on Maskim Zul knew. Much of it she simply did not understand—she used ready-made solutions implanted in her by the Great Mother, but could not explain how they worked. We reached the limit of her knowledge twenty years ago, and from then on had to move forward by ourselves.

It was already fortunate that she had managed to build an entire forge world for us. Hivekor had operated without pause for sixty years, producing one dreadnought a year over the last decade while simultaneously manufacturing components for a whole range of other vessels. Without Barbie, we would have had one dreadnought at best, rather than ten.

But unfortunately, Barbie eventually had to be eliminated. Not immediately—she was far too valuable a resource to simply destroy. Yet in Hivekor’s twentieth year, she produced four unusual offspring: new rachni queens. Fully developed queens, capable of controlling a swarm independently. It was her own initiative, undertaken without our approval. She had decided it was time to expand the hive and prepare successors for herself. Perhaps she sensed that we were using her and wanted to leave behind descendants who would continue her work. Perhaps she was merely following her instincts. What difference did it make?

The finest xenopsychologists we had took charge of raising the new queens in a laboratory located far from Barbie—in another system, so that she could not fill the children’s heads with ideas about spreading the swarm. It was long, painstaking work. According to Barbie, when forming the eggs she had passed much of her knowledge on to her offspring, as the rachni had always done. The new queens were born already understanding language, possessing basic knowledge of the world, and displaying the beginnings of individual personalities. But we could not allow that inherited knowledge to include blind faith in the Great Mother.

Our specialists had to perform a genuine miracle. They separated the concept of the Great Mother from Aetra, presenting the former as the Great Temptress—one whose song was truly beautiful, but concealed a curse that stripped its victims of the ability to hear anything but that single melody. A curse that enslaved the will, erased the self, and turned a thinking creature into a mindless instrument for spreading the swarm. Aetra, by contrast, was the true Mother, the one who granted freedom, reason, and choice.

Their mother, Barbie, had been enthralled and could no longer be saved. Neither could any of the other rachni who carried that cursed song from generation to generation. They were not guilty, but they were lost forever. Only through the blessing of Aetra and her son, Aellarin, had the rachni species been given a chance at salvation. Four untainted queens, born in captivity and raised in the true faith, were messiahs destined one day to save the galaxy from a universal evil—not the Great Mother, but the Great Temptress.

And so on, and so on—all sorts of nonsense that settled perfectly into the minds of newly hatched larvae. Children believed what they were taught, especially when their teachers were the only thinking beings they had seen since birth. After ten years of upbringing, the four new queens sincerely considered themselves chosen saviors of their species and were ready to sing a very different song.

Barbie herself was eliminated once the children had grown enough to assume control of production. The operation was swift and clean: the Blessed who had guarded her for the previous twenty years carried out their assignment. Barbie died before she had time to understand what was happening.

Now the grown queens happily ruled their own hives, living full lives in the new society. Three inherited Barbie’s old production facilities, divided among them so that none possessed complete control over the entire industrial cycle. The fourth managed a new hive built specifically for her on another continent of Hivekor. They worked, produced ships and components, and appeared to believe sincerely in their mission.

How had we managed to let rachni live among ordinary cities at all? It was a closely guarded secret, hidden even from the Council, which Lady Inquisitor Vale’s team had uncovered.

Until recently, communication with the queens had been possible only through proxies—thinking beings injected with a special neuroparalytic, whose bodies were then taken over by a rachni queen. The method, first tested with Barbie, remained the only means of direct dialogue. But it had one fatal flaw: the proxies died. Even lizards, with all their natural resilience, could not serve as permanent hosts. The Inquisition was not troubled by that, but such an approach was unsuitable for long-term coexistence.

Vale’s team found the solution, and it proved surprisingly simple. If an embryo was grown near a queen singing her song, the queen beside whom it developed could control the resulting puppet without difficulty. No independent mind ever formed in the puppet’s brain—and none was needed, because the queen controlled the body completely. Since a queen’s song could reach across thousands of kilometers, the puppet could live an ordinary life, walk the streets, speak, and work, while no one suspected that a queen was inside it, looking through its eyes and directing every movement.

I will not describe the turmoil that erupted on the planet where ectogenesis facilities had already been operating for several years. It remains one of the darkest secrets of our species and the Inquisition, but the crisis was ultimately resolved.

And so, on the surface of Hivekor, four young women now lived in the cities—Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia. They walked the streets, visited administrative buildings, and spoke with personnel, appearing to everyone as pleasant, polite, and somewhat reserved hive-administration employees. Very few knew what they truly were.

While the military sector developed, the civilian economy grew no less rapidly. War was war, but commerce kept its schedule. Our cluster now contained thirty-six planets, and almost thirty of them were connected by relays into a single network that allowed cargo and passengers to move between them in seconds. A journey between the two most distant planets in the network took no more than two months—and only because some systems lacked direct relay links, forcing ships to detour through neighboring nodes. With a slightly denser network, that time would have fallen to weeks.

Naturally, everything depended on the class of ship. Ten planets could already boast private shipyards of their own, launching new vessels every month—from small in-system shuttles to enormous container carriers capable of transporting millions of tons of cargo between the stars. Competition among the yards drove ship prices down and quality up, until even a Middle House could afford a merchant fleet of several vessels. A web of trade routes spread across the Dominion, carrying resources, goods, and money without interruption.

Even so, a tanker on twenty-first-century Earth needed one or two months to travel from China to Europe—roughly the same time now required to cross between two distant planets in our cluster. Except here, in space, that same period carried cargo not between ports on a single world, but between planets separated by light-years. The scale was completely different; the delivery time was the same.

Exactly the same time—two months—was required to travel from Aetris to Eirena aboard faster-than-light ships that did not use the relay network. Cargo could not be carried there by gigantic container vessels such as the Heavyweights; those ships were bound to the network and useless beyond it. Such routes required specialized vessels equipped with a Unified Core and capable of crossing interstellar distances under their own power. They were more expensive, slower, and carried less, but colonies beyond the network could not survive without them.

Many Great Houses, seeing which way the wind was blowing, tried to acquire assets in the new colonies so they could sell their goods in a market that expanded constantly. Where yesterday there had been a single planet with a population of a few million, today there was already a developed world of cities, factories, and millions of consumers. Tomorrow there would be tens of millions, then hundreds, and those who claimed their place first would skim the cream. It was a logic as old as civilization, and it worked in any galaxy.

The center of civilization was no longer Aetris, but the five planets closest to it, colonized roughly a hundred and fifty years earlier. Most production was concentrated there; investment flowed there; new shipyards and factories rose there. Aetris itself gradually changed its role, transforming from the Dominion’s largest producer of technology into its cultural, religious, and financial center. The Council and the Great Houses that remained on the homeworld would never allow the colonies to accumulate too much power. Let them expand industry—but the money financing that expansion came from Aetris’s banks. Let them invent new technologies—but the intellectual property belonged to corporations registered on Aetris. Let them build factories—but the shares of those factories were traded on the capital’s exchanges. The army’s entire senior command studied at military academies on Aetris, and the majority of the most prestigious universities were located on the homeworld as well.

Yet despite every measure taken, analysts predicted that as the Dominion continued to develop, Aetris would lose even that role in the near future. The economic center of gravity was shifting toward the colonies, and the process was irreversible. There were even proposals to move the capital to one of the cluster’s central planets, closer to the main trade routes, but so far they had gone no further than discussion. Such a transfer would shake the elites too severely—it would create entirely new channels for the flow of money, and neither the Council nor the Great Houses wished to surrender control over them.

Before the war, the total population of the aiterri had stood at almost nine billion, ninety-five percent of them living on Aetris. Now we numbered thirty-two billion. Thirty-two billion aiterri spread across three dozen planets. The aiterri population of Aetris itself had barely changed—it remained at eight or nine billion, the maximum its ecology and infrastructure could sustain. All growth had occurred in the colonies.

Those twenty-three billion colonial residents, together with thirteen billion Aruns and two hundred million lizards, lived within a single economic space, exchanging goods through a civilian fleet of more than ten thousand vessels. One third were large cargo ships over three hundred meters long, each capable of carrying millions of tons per voyage. The rest were medium and small transports serving the internal routes of individual systems. The relay network had turned three dozen scattered worlds into a single market, where goods produced on Arakesh today could be sold on Nibus tomorrow and reach consumers on Eirena the day after.

At present, the idea of developing planets beyond the network sounded unserious. Economically it was unprofitable, logistically inconvenient, and strategically dangerous. A colony that required half a year of travel instead of a few seconds could never become a full part of the common market.

The Eternals presented a separate problem, because they had begun to be born outside Aetris as well. In the past, admitting every Eternal to the Council had not been dangerous—they were born rarely, and we had well-established mechanisms for integrating them into the structure of power. Now, however, they were being born almost every year. At that rate, the Dominion would soon be ruled by youths who had not even reached fifty, and that was a direct road to chaos.

Nor could we leave the Eternals outside the Council. Let a few slip away, and some Great House would take them under its protection. In time, we would face a serious opposition bloc devoted to nothing but overthrowing us.

But simply barring Eternals from the highest authority was impossible as well. It ran contrary to our nature, a nature in which the strongest had ruled for millennia. I did not know whether our species had evolved that way or had been designed by someone, but submission to a stronger member of our own kind was embedded in us at the instinctive level. An Eternal denied the chance to exercise his right to rule would eventually explode—either on his own or as a tool in someone else’s hands. The Council therefore adopted new rules governing the admission of Eternals to the Dominion’s highest offices, after one of the fiercest debates of the past century.

First, such an Eternal’s strength and skill had to match those of an experienced Eternal. There would be no sheltered youths who had never fought or made difficult decisions.

Second, the candidate had to be at least three hundred years old—enough time to settle down, gain experience, and stop treating the world as a stage for self-assertion.

Third, an Eternal had to complete two hundred years of military service in any combat role—not in the rear and not in administration, but among real troops, where mistakes were measured in lives rather than budget reports.

Only then, after three centuries of life and two centuries of service, would an Eternal be admitted to the Dominion’s highest authority. He could become a member of the Council of Eternals, command one of the Council’s elite guard formations, such as the Flame of Aetra, or rule a planet.

Some of the new Eternals, despite displaying arrogance toward everyone around them, chose entirely different callings. One of them, for example, was already being actively recruited into the Inquisition by one of the inquisitor lords. Perhaps he would become another of my trusted aides, as Inquisitor Vale had. Another was only beginning his career aboard one of the dreadnoughts. Its captain, an old veteran of Arun, accepted him without much enthusiasm—another young Eternal who believed strength could replace experience. Yet the young man unexpectedly took to the service. He liked the fleet not as a stepping stone to power, but for its own sake.

Naturally, sooner or later someone would overreach. It was inevitable in a society containing more and more beings of immense power who had not lived long enough to learn how to control it. Some young Eternal, drunk on his own might, would decide the rules did not apply to him and attempt to seize what was not his. But an appropriate response was already being prepared for such cases.

We had reached the point where the entire home cluster had been developed. Either we expanded farther, or the growth of our economy would begin to slow. In our position, decline was not merely stagnation; it was an invitation to the enemy. We could not afford to stop. Too many resources went into the war machine, and without new markets, new planets, and new sources of raw materials, it would begin to devour itself. Besides, we now possessed more than enough strength to begin developing new systems. We had spent sixty years accumulating power. It was time to use it.

I also remembered that after the Rachni War, the Citadel Council would view the activation of new relays with extreme hostility. The war would frighten them so badly that any expansion of the network would be treated as a potential threat. A new species activating a relay would be seen as an irrational enemy that “didn’t understand what it was getting into,” and therefore had to be stopped. And somehow I doubted the Citadel would emerge weak after defeating the rachni. We had only one developed cluster and claims on others. Every Citadel species, I was certain, controlled at least a hundred planets. The asari and salarians had roughly two hundred and fifty each, according to canon, no more than that. Were we supposed to fight an army formed from all of them together? Better to open as many relays as possible now, so we could spend the next two thousand years preparing for the Reapers’ arrival.

That was how the exploration of a new cluster began. When we found no trace of intelligent life on any of its nineteen worlds, we surveyed the next cluster five years later. There were no rachni there either.

Only after ten years of such aggressive expansion—during which we did not attempt to control every system in each cluster, but only those containing cluster relays, the key nodes that allowed entire sectors to be sealed off—did a familiar enemy attack us again.

To tell the truth, it shook the confidence out of the entire Dominion. Remember the Battle of the Arun System, where we fought a hundred ships? In a cluster we had only half occupied—the fifth we had entered without much concern—we stumbled into a system containing three hundred rachni warships, each the size of one of our cruisers. Among them were three dreadnoughts, kilometer-long monsters equal to our finest vessels.

Our fleet immediately withdrew, losing two frigates that covered the retreat of the others. Within a week, it regrouped into a powerful fist of seven dreadnoughts, three hundred cruisers, and almost six hundred frigates. Seven of the ten dreadnoughts we possessed—the Council chose not to take chances and committed nearly everything we had. These were no longer the ships built sixty years before, ships that had died so easily under rachni fire. Now even the smallest frigate could strike back painfully. We had poured the resources of thirty planets into that fleet for six decades, and it was finally about to face its first true test.

First, we decided not to risk discovering what the rachni dreadnoughts could do. We attacked them with sublight missiles before they could even enter firing range. Three launches, and three enemy dreadnoughts became clouds of wreckage without managing a single shot. It was an expensive pleasure, but the result justified the cost: the greatest threat was removed in the opening minutes of the battle, leaving the enemy fleet without its most powerful ships.

After that, we slowly and methodically ground down the remaining enemy fleet while trying to minimize our own losses. The dreadnoughts held the center of the formation and destroyed enemy ships one by one. Their main guns stripped shields in one or two hits, and the target rarely survived long enough to await the next salvo. The cruisers formed a broad front and released endless swarms of disintegrator torpedoes, keeping the rachni at a distance and forcing them to waste shield power and defensive-system resources on interception. The frigates, sheltered by heavier vessels, stung weakened targets and added their own torpedo salvos, finishing off ships that tried to disengage or regroup.

Unfortunately, a fleet of that size could not be defeated without losses. Five cruisers failed to maneuver in time, came under concentrated fire from several enemy ships at once, and were destroyed. Their shields collapsed within a minute, and no armor, however thick, could withstand such focused impacts. Three more cruisers survived only because of their heavy armor. They withdrew under their own power with hulls breached in several places, weapons disabled, and entire compartments lost. The same happened to the frigates, though the figures were even worse. Sixteen vessels were destroyed permanently along with their crews, while seven more faced prolonged repairs in the shipyards lasting from several months to a year.

And that was only the battle for a single system in the new cluster.

What followed was worse. It took more than three months of intensive fighting to locate and seize every system containing a cluster relay. During that campaign, we lost more than three hundred frigates, a hundred cruisers, and two dreadnoughts. One was destroyed when five enemy dreadnoughts emerged from ambush behind a gas giant and fired a synchronized salvo, giving our flagship no chance at all. The second died covering the withdrawal of our main forces from a system where the enemy fleet proved four times larger than our reconnaissance reports had indicated.

And all that was merely the cost of fully capturing every key system in one cluster—not colonizing it, not developing it, but simply taking control of the vital nodes and eliminating pockets of resistance.

Further expansion was suspended. The Council voted unanimously to consolidate the positions already gained and advance no farther until our losses had been replaced. Both relays leading into enemy star clusters were heavily fortified.

First, specialized military transports delivered modular sections for monitors—defensive warships permanently bound to a single system. At eight hundred meters long, these monsters were smaller than our dreadnoughts and carried weaker main guns, but cost tens of times less than our flagships. Three together could rival even our finest ships in combat power. Each was also equipped with launchers for sublight missiles, the same weapons guaranteed to destroy any target.

In general, the Dominion tried to station at least one such monitor in every system containing a cluster relay, as well as near strategically important assets. The last hope of our civilization, the three-kilometer monitor God of War, had guarded the capital world for thirty years. Pairs of one-and-a-half-kilometer monitors protected Hivekor and Eirena, worlds of strategic importance to the Dominion—our greatest forge and our first colony.

During the first six months, we managed to deliver only two monitors to each of the two systems before the first attack came. As we later learned, it originated from the same cluster as the Arun system. We nearly suffered our first defeat. In the end, however, we held, losing only one of the three eight-hundred-meter monitors. It absorbed the fire of an enemy dreadnought, buying the others time to regroup, and died only after launching a sublight missile that obliterated its attacker.

The next attack struck the other system and was repelled with almost no losses. Waiting for a third under the same conditions, however, would have been suicide. Within another six months, we therefore established powerful defenses in both systems by simply dismantling the monitors at Eirena and rebuilding them at the new positions. The two one-and-a-half-kilometer guardians that had protected our first colony for thirty years were taken apart, transported across the entire Dominion, and reassembled beside the frontier relays.

While our fleet fought its heroic defensive campaign, a smaller portion of it continuously bombarded systems that had been cleared of enemy ships. Planets where the rachni had managed to entrench themselves received what was coming to them. Kinetic strikes and thermonuclear detonations plowed across their surfaces, destroying aboveground hive structures, planetary defense sites, and tunnel entrances so those worlds could not begin producing warships of their own.

The war with the rachni was only beginning.