Ethereal Effect. Chapter 23 (Patreon)

Interlude: Jaron Or'Kesh, Captain of the Salarian Reconnaissance Cruiser Iltanar

"Sir, the rachni have detected us. Passive infrared sensors show seventeen of their medium vessels approaching."

I listened to the junior officer's report and felt nothing—not even that peculiar focus that came before a battle. Seventeen medium rachni ships were a serious threat to a lone reconnaissance cruiser.

"Can we reach the relay in time?" I asked calmly, already calculating the distance, our present speed, possible interception vectors, and the time the enemy would need to accelerate.

At the very beginning of my career, when I was only a junior officer aboard another cruiser, I had first taken part in the defense of a civilian asari planet located in a star cluster where, for thirty years now, we had been trying to contain the damned devourers of worlds. After that, space battles followed one another without pause. It was almost surprising that I had survived.

Then, after fifteen years of service—an immense span for us salarians, in truth—I was promoted to captain of my own cruiser. I was even surprised they had chosen me, a member of an utterly insignificant clan, rather than some subordinate of an influential Dalatrass, the sort whose career was built on connections rather than merit. But at the time I was genuinely happy. My own ship, my own crew, my own missions—what more could a salarian who had devoted his life to the fleet dream of?

And, I dare say, I was one of the best captains. Where others panicked, I became focused, and my already rapid salarian mind accelerated to the point where I made decisions vital to the ship in an instant.

This was my final mission. If it went perfectly, I would spend my remaining years in warmth and comfort, far from the endless war that had already lasted ninety-five years.

Unfortunately, our chances of getting out alive had just become very small indeed.

One by one, every species in the galaxy had placed its economy on a war footing, and the process had been long, painful, and full of resistance. At first, it was merely a reaction to the Salarian Union expanding its production—we had encountered the rachni first and understood the scale of the threat first, but no one wanted to take part in a conflict with a new species that, at the time, seemed to threaten only us. And the news that the rachni had attacked one of the Asari Republics' planets was a true blessing for the entire Union—a bitter, vicious blessing. Only when the bugs reached their precious worlds, when their own colonies began to burn, did they finally understand that the problem did not belong to the salarians alone.

That was when the asari quite literally forced the other species into the war by economic means, and their methods were far removed from the gentle diplomacy of which they were so proud. What happens when several exchanges on Thessia and the Citadel close to a species that refuses to understand a galactic-scale threat? What happens when its assets are simply frozen? The asari found ways to pressure virtually everyone into sending fleets against the rachni. They controlled financial flows, trade routes, credit ratings, and investment portfolios, and once the matriarchs decided the war was everyone's concern, refusing to participate became economic suicide.

Even the quarians, whose planets lay on the far side of the galaxy and could not possibly have been threatened by the rachni for another century, sent warships into battle.

Had all of it produced results? Yes and no. The rachni advance had been halted—after the first catastrophic losses, we had finally established a defensive line, entrenched ourselves in key systems, and stopped retreating. But the fighting never ceased, and each victory came at such a price that it could only be called a victory in reports written for civilians. As we had long known, the rachni could produce new ships at a colossal rate: in the time it took us to build one cruiser, they grew three, and despite all our efforts, that gap was not narrowing. The rachni had no hesitation about activating new relays themselves, opening one front after another. While we contained them in one direction, they could calmly seize other systems and continue increasing their strength.

The Citadel understood this perfectly well and sent individual ships deep into enemy space on reconnaissance, seeking to learn how many worlds the rachni controlled and to plan the campaign intelligently. Lone cruisers crossed the front line and vanished into the darkness. Many never returned, but even those that died often managed to transmit their data through FTL communications. Every such transmission reached the analysts' desks: system maps, hive locations, fleet movement routes, and estimates of swarm strength in each sector. The Council's entire strategy was built on that information. Without it, we would have been fighting blind.

There was also hope of discovering their homeworld, where their "Great Mother" lived. Hope that if their central world were destroyed, the queens would lose the will to resist and the swarm would fragment into isolated hives that could be defeated one by one.

Naturally, the farther we traveled from Union space, the lower our chances of returning. Every jump through a relay into the unknown could be the last; no one knew what waited on the other side. So far, the record among ships that had returned alive from beyond the front was three clusters into rachni territory—and back.

Unfortunately, we had also fled rachni ships in the previous system, which meant the way back was closed. Their patrol still hung near the relay through which we had entered—perhaps the same ships, perhaps others, but in either case enough to tear a lone cruiser apart.

"Jump to the neighboring cluster," I gave the only order available to me.

We could hardly fight our way through. Against a pair of enemy ships we might have had good odds, but against an entire fleet? Fortunately, rachni ships were about fifteen percent slower than ours—the asari had finally shared their technology. Enough for us to break away, though not enough to relax.

That was how our race with death began. During the first month, we passed through three clusters in an attempt to hide somehow from rachni sensors. But stealth technology was theoretically impossible—any engineer would confirm that—and sooner or later they found us. We emerged from a relay, scanned the system, tried to conceal ourselves behind a gas giant or within an asteroid field, transmitted our data, and waited. A few days later—or, more rarely, a few hours—the sensors detected approaching ships. We jumped again. Transmitted more data. Waited again.

The only advantage was that the Citadel worlds had already named us heroes, because we had penetrated farther than anyone before us. Messages from home arrived regularly; FTL communications worked flawlessly. Our names had already entered the textbooks—Captain Jaron Or'Kesh and the crew of the Iltanar, holders of the record for the deepest reconnaissance raid. And all the while we continued sending intelligence: coordinates of cluster relays, fleet strength, activity near the relays. Our deaths would not be meaningless. The thought was comforting. Not as comforting as a hot meal on the Citadel would have been, but still.

After using yet another relay, we emerged onto a true battlefield.

The tactical display flared with contacts before the ship's systems had fully recovered from the jump. I had time to identify the characteristic signatures of two rachni dreadnoughts—each at least a kilometer long—and then detected two more objects. Two objects that made me freeze for a second before I began issuing orders.

Two titanic vessels, each roughly a kilometer and a half in length, were methodically tearing the rachni dreadnoughts apart. It could hardly be called a battle; a battle implied at least some measure of equality. This was an execution. The first dreadnought had already lost its shields. Its hull had been breached in several places, and organic matter spilled from rents in its chitin, freezing into bizarre crystals in the vacuum. The titans had left the crippled giant to smaller ships circling it like a school of fish around a dying whale. The titans themselves had already shifted their fire to the second dreadnought, whose shields weakened with every salvo.

"Contact the Citadel!" I ordered without taking my eyes from the tactical display. "I think we have found new allies."

Admiral Tiberius Kirk. Commander of the First Fleet of the Aiterri Dominion. Half an hour earlier.

I became fascinated with the fleet through the stories of my grandfather, Jace Kirk. I practically forced him to tell me about his adventures in service every time I saw him. The old veteran would wave me away for appearances' sake, then settle into his chair, take a cup of steaming infusion, and begin. He told me how he became captain of the Enterprising, a cruiser that protected intelligent life in the galaxy during the years when the Dominion had not yet expanded beyond its home cluster. How he repelled rachni attacks on a planet when they broke through a relay. And how he nearly vanished with his entire crew when the rachni destroyed the relay in a neighboring system.

His stories of service in the expeditionary fleet were no less fascinating, from the days when our home cluster had not yet been fully explored and every new world was a genuine mystery. He spoke of planets whose oceans boiled with volcanic activity, of binary-star systems where navigational instruments went mad, and of first contact with the Aruns, who were only beginning to realize they were not alone in the universe. Grandfather said it had been the best time of his life.

And now I, his grandson, Tiberius Kirk, had become admiral of the most elite fleet in the Aiterri Dominion. At the age of one hundred and fifty!

For five years now, our fleet had continuously guarded one of the two approaches from which the rachni attacked us without pause.

Fortunately, the Dominion had placed two kilometer-and-a-half monitors on this approach, the more dangerous of the two. One had once guarded Eirena, before being dismantled, transported across half the galaxy, and rebuilt beside our frontier relay. The second had been deployed only recently and rushed into production on the forge world Hivekor. That did not include more than a dozen standard eight-hundred-meter monitors, each capable of matching an enemy dreadnought one on one. The defenses were layered: the monitors kept the relay under constant aim, frigates and cruisers protected them against torpedo attacks, and my flagship—the dreadnought Impregnable—held the center of the formation, ready to strike any target that broke through the first line with its main gun. Two other dreadnoughts, Indomitable and Proud, remained in reserve with their fleet groups in case the enemy attempted a maneuver.

The only time the defense became truly tense was when more than twelve rachni dreadnoughts attacked us. Then even our ultimate sublight missiles ran out, and once they had all been launched, we had to rely on the main guns, shields, and maneuvering alone. Losses rose noticeably on such days. Unfortunately, some losses were unavoidable in every battle, and those battles came every six months with frightening regularity. It was as though the rachni were testing our resilience, trying different tactics and searching for weaknesses in our defenses. Each time, their strikes became a little more coordinated and a little more precise.

We were very fortunate that the route into the greater galaxy passed through only one cluster, which was still occupied by the rachni. It formed a bottleneck through which the enemy was forced to break toward our worlds. That was probably why we had not yet encountered truly enormous fleets. Something prevented the rachni from gathering the resources of the thousands of worlds they controlled and bringing their full power down upon us.

"Lord Kirk, relay activation detected. A rachni fleet has emerged fifty thousand kilometers from us. Two dreadnoughts and one hundred smaller ships."

I glanced at the tactical display. Two large contacts—dreadnoughts, each around a kilometer long—and a scattering of smaller ones: frigates and cruisers forming into battle order. One hundred pennants.

"Proceed according to established doctrine. Our dreadnoughts and both monitors are to concentrate fire on the first enemy flagship. The moment its shields fail, shift fire to the next."

The orders went out, and the fleet moved. The monitors were already rotating their weapons, bringing their main guns to bear on the lead rachni dreadnought. Frigates advanced, preparing to establish defensive fire and intercept torpedoes. Cruisers moved into position for a flanking strike.

That was how the battle began. The monitors' opening salvo struck the enemy flagship, and its shields flared with their characteristic blue glow as they absorbed the impacts. It would not last. From our experience in previous battles, the concentrated fire of two monitors and two dreadnoughts could strip the shields from a kilometer-long rachni vessel in ten minutes at most. After that, the rest was routine: once its shields collapsed, we would transfer fire to the second and leave the first to the frigates and cruisers to finish. We were fortunate that the rachni had brought only a hundred standard ships. This might be our first battle without losses—unless, of course, the rachni had prepared some surprise.

But the surprise came from the other direction.

"My lord, the relay is activating again."

I turned sharply toward the officer. A second fleet? In the middle of the battle? That had not happened in almost two years; the rachni usually did not coordinate their attacks so closely.

"More rachni? Prepare to launch sublight missiles!"

"My lord, the relay cycle is complete. Only one vessel has appeared, thirty thousand kilometers away." The officer hesitated as he studied the readings. "It is not rachni. Its thermal signature is very similar to that of our cruisers, but the construction is entirely different."

I removed my finger from the button.

"Very well. Have the dreadnought Indomitable and its group move to protect that vessel. Initiate first-contact protocol. But if it attempts to escape through the relay, destroy it at any cost. Contact headquarters on Aetris immediately as well. I require additional first-contact instructions."

"At once, my lord."

Only an hour later, once the rachni forces no longer posed any serious threat—the two dreadnoughts had become clouds of debris and the hundred smaller vessels had been scattered and destroyed—did the order arrive from headquarters. The unknown ship was to be taken by assault as quickly as possible. Its crew had to remain alive, and the vessel itself intact. But if there was any risk of the ship being destroyed, the aliens' lives were to be disregarded.

In general, two entirely separate branches of the space forces were responsible for ground and space warfare. Marines intended to take part in planetary assaults traveled aboard landing ships—specialized transports fitted with barracks, assault modules, vehicles, and everything required for prolonged fighting on the surface. The vessels under my command, however, were pure warships intended for battles in space. They simply had not been designed to carry landing forces.

But even though they were not assault troops, nearly every captain and officer aboard my ships was one of the Blessed. Telekinesis, barriers, bodily enhancement—each of them could destroy a squad of ordinary soldiers single-handedly. And I commanded the most combat-capable fleet in the Dominion. Naturally, I could spare enough fighters to tear even a dreadnought apart piece by piece.

Therefore, as soon as we confirmed that the unidentified ship appeared willing to engage in peaceful dialogue and was prepared to allow a "welcoming party" aboard—the aliens transmitted that they were opening their airlocks and awaiting us—we began a careful assault on the foreign vessel.

The assault itself, carried out by five hundred Blessed shock troops, lasted less than fifteen minutes. The counter-boarding action, if it could even be called that, was genuinely laughable. The tiny rounds fired by their mass weapons—light, fast, and designed to penetrate ordinary armor—simply could not deplete our shields in time. By the time the xenos realized intruders had entered a compartment, the attackers were already within close-combat range and carefully restraining the living crew.

We did not even consider trying to knock them unconscious. With their unknown biology, the risk of killing rather than merely incapacitating a xeno was too high. Who knew what dose of neuroparalytic would be lethal to these creatures? Perhaps a quantity that sent an aiterri into a light sleep would stop their hearts. Perhaps they were allergic to standard sedative gas. Perhaps their nervous systems operated at different frequencies and a stunner would simply burn out their brains. So we used the simpler, more reliable approach: every alien was first disarmed, then immobilized completely, stripped of all clothing, and escorted to the "welcoming" assault shuttle.

The only difficulty arose when an assault team encountered heavy intercompartment doors half a meter thick. The xenos had apparently designed their cruiser with serious boarding actions in mind: composite armor, layered construction, intricate locks. But we broke through those barriers head-on. Composite armor could not stop a hundred Blessed who were sufficiently motivated to reach the other side of a door. Bodily enhancement, precise blows against weak points, telekinetic force pulling the structure apart—and within a minute, only twisted wreckage remained. I doubt the engineers who designed those bulkheads had ever imagined someone smashing through them with bare hands.

Once we had secured control of the ship, a systematic inspection began of every cabin where aliens had simply hidden themselves. Assault teams swept compartment after compartment, opening doors one by one and dragging terrified xenos out from behind bulkheads and from technical recesses where they had crawled in hopes of waiting out the capture. No one resisted. After the first fifteen minutes of fighting, even the most desperate understood that they had no chance against the Blessed.

We also captured a unit wearing specialized suits that rendered their users invisible in the visual spectrum. The assault troops encountered them entirely by accident while moving at full speed toward the reactor compartment to seize control of it. The invisible soldiers simply failed to get out of the path of a Blessed warrior charging at full speed. One of them suffered a great many broken bones; colliding at such speed with a Blessed under enhancement was equivalent to striking a wall.

Although greatly surprised by the unexpected obstacle, the assault troops did not hesitate. Using biotic abilities, they tripled the gravity around themselves and sent the possible enemies crashing into the deck. However many invisible soldiers there were, they were pinned down so hard that they could not move a finger. The situation was reported at once, and the alien cruiser was soon flooded with still more specialists—technicians, analysts, xenobiologists, all of whom had been waiting for permission to come aboard.

They safely shut down the element-zero core first, which looked suspiciously similar to rachni technology, and then deactivated every other shipboard system. Everything was brought under control within a matter of hours.

Over the following days, engineers examined every system aboard the ship so as not to overlook any possible communications device capable of transmitting information about the vessel's condition. Only when a special Inquisition flotilla arrived and took both the ship and its prisoners away could I return to my normal duties.

Aellarin

This was to be expected. Sooner or later, the aiterri would encounter the Citadel worlds. We had been at war with the rachni for almost a century, which meant the krogan had already been discovered. One fast-breeding species had been sent to fight another. The Citadel worlds should already have been advancing. As they moved from one rachni cluster to the next, they were bound to run into us eventually.

Fortunately, we had met under circumstances in which Citadel space could not possibly afford another conflict with an unknown species. The war with the rachni was draining its resources. The krogan, despite all their virtues as cannon fodder, required constant attention: they had to be armed, supplied, and moved between fronts. The asari and salarians, I was certain, were already beginning to understand what sort of power they had awakened on Tuchanka. Opening a second front against a species that had held the rachni back alone for almost a century? Suicide.

Besides, I did not know exactly how many worlds the Citadel controlled—the figures varied in canon, and relying on memories from a previous life would have been foolish—but one hundred and sixty planets were already under our authority. Would they choose to quarrel with a state that powerful? I strongly doubted it.

The decision to seize the salarian vessel had been very easy to make. Somehow breaking through two clusters in which our reconnaissance had reliably confirmed a rachni presence, a lone warship had emerged directly into Dominion territory.

The proper thing would have been to conduct a normal first-contact procedure, assure them that we were a rational species and also hated the vile bugs against whom we were fighting a war of extermination, exchange embassies, sign a cooperation agreement, and organize joint military operations.

But remembering the rotten nature of every single Citadel species in canon, treating a salarian military reconnaissance vessel gently was an openly terrible idea.

As soon as a safe route opened between our states, our space would be flooded with swarms of spies, regardless of whether the war had ended. Civilian freighters with false compartments. Tourists carrying cameras that recorded every detail of our orbital defenses. Merchants buying up information. And our civilian ships that ventured into foreign territory would disappear without a trace.

So there was nothing terrible about another ship disappearing as well.

The salarian scout had been destroyed by a second wave of rachni that passed through the relay some time after the vessel arrived in our system. The scout had found itself between hammer and anvil. We simply had not been able to save it.

And we would be able to prepare for a proper meeting once we possessed all the necessary information.

We did not know exactly how soon another salarian ship would follow the first. There simply was not enough time for the xenolinguists to study the rules of the species' language, compile dictionaries, and carry out standard decoding procedures.

Inquisitor Vale had been raising her apprentice for twenty years, and according to her, he was an even greater fanatic than she was. Her apprentice had several peculiarities. To him, only two authorities existed in the universe: Emberlis herself, as teacher and adoptive mother, and Aellarin, as a deity.

It was a pity she had neglected to mention what species her apprentice belonged to.

After his special interrogations, however, we obtained absolutely every piece of information stored in the mind of every crew member. Even when they did not survive... I did not ask about the methods. The Inquisition knew how to work with sources, and judging by the reports, Emberlis's apprentice had surpassed his teacher in zeal. The result was a complete extraction: languages, navigational charts, command structures, and most importantly, the true scale of the galaxy.

Once I had those figures, I abruptly lost all desire to quarrel with the Citadel worlds. We aiterri were, in general, a peaceful species. Circumstances simply forced us to behave otherwise.

The salarians alone now possessed twelve hundred developed worlds. The asari had nine hundred. Nine hundred worlds, each thousands of years older than our civilization. The batarians controlled roughly four hundred, despite never having ranked among the leading powers in canon. The quarians had three hundred. The other species together accounted for another four hundred or so. And I was speaking specifically of developed colonies. The aiterri had forty such worlds. Forty against more than three thousand.

Rachni presence had been confirmed on more than seven hundred worlds. But those were only the worlds reconnaissance ships had managed to reach. What lay hidden in the depths of space was completely unknown.

Nothing else truly shocking could be extracted from the crew. We obtained a great deal of valuable strategic information about Citadel space and the armies at war, as well as the political, economic, social, and spiritual structures of the canonical Mass Effect species. The organization of the Council, the division of authority among species, the role of the Spectres, asari economic leverage, salarian intelligence networks, the batarian caste system—all of it now lay on my desk in detailed reports. Along with star charts: complete, precise, with mass relays, major trade routes, and combat zones all marked.

But apart from the scale of the galactic states, I found no other differences from canon. Everything was exactly as in the game, only with the scale turned all the way up.

As though fate considered the suffering awaiting the aiterri two thousand years from now insufficient and had decided to strengthen our enemies as well.

Jaron Or'Kesh, Former Captain of the Salarian Reconnaissance Cruiser Iltanar

When a large formation of ships belonging to the unknown species began moving toward us, the entire crew breathed a happy sigh of relief. We had been saved, miraculously finding an enclave of civilized space deep within rachni territory.

I personally led the first-contact delegation. We prepared greetings in every language known on the Citadel. I was the first to step forward to meet the saviors of both myself and the entire crew of the Iltanar.

What a pity not every species in the galaxy was as diplomatic as the salarians.

Even as the assault "welcoming delegation" rushed toward us, I thought we had been attacked by asari commandos. Their silhouettes looked remarkably similar: the same blue outlines, the same fluidity of movement, the same unnatural grace. I even had time to curse the matriarchs in my thoughts—apparently, they had decided an independent salarian scout had learned too much. But even for the asari, that would have been foolish. They would not attack an allied ship in the middle of a war. At least, not so openly.

Only after they stripped me completely and delivered me to their ship, where each of us was locked in a separate cabin, did I accept that they were an entirely different species. One that strongly resembled the asari, except for pronounced sexual dimorphism and hair on their heads.

Then came long weeks in captivity, one interrogation blurring into the next. At first, their scientists began deciphering our language, and by my calculations the process should have required months of painstaking labor—recordings of speech, comparisons of context, the construction of semantic maps. By some miracle, however, they completed it in a week.

The interrogations followed one after another, broken only by the solitude of my cell. First they asked about Citadel fleet tactics. Then about political organization. Then about the krogan, the asari, and the batarians. Their questions grew increasingly precise, and each time I understood that they already knew more than I had told them. They were merely testing my honesty.

The brief encounters with my crew, which occurred when we were escorted to the interrogation room, became less and less frequent. At first, I saw my officers every other day. Then once every three days. Then once a week. Until I realized I had not seen another salarian for two weeks.

I told them only what a ship's captain could reasonably know, withholding nothing except Union secrets. All of it would have become available the moment a new species joined the Citadel. Why take the risk of seizing our ship? It was absurd to imagine any species choosing to wage war against the Citadel while simultaneously fighting off the rachni. Technology? But if they could construct kilometer-and-a-half dreadnoughts, then their species was already more advanced than even the asari. Those questions tormented me throughout my captivity, and I found no answers.

This time, however, they did not take me to the interrogation room, but somewhere farther away. We wandered through the ship for some time and even used an elevator, which meant I was aboard a very large vessel—perhaps one of the dreadnoughts I had seen before our capture. Eventually, they brought me to a chamber guarded by a unit bearing a distinctive eight-pointed star on their uniforms. Not ordinary assault troops, but an elite guard. That meant something—or someone—very important waited beyond the door.

An injector pressed into my neck, and they led me inside. With every step, walking became more difficult. My legs grew heavy as lead, and the air seemed dense and viscous. Only when I passed through the doorway did I understand why they had received us so coldly. Before my eyes stood a rachni queen.

I could no longer scream.