Ethereal Effect. Chapter 24 (Patreon)

Matriarch Velaria T'Salla. Citadel Tower, Citadel Council Chamber

The Citadel Council's urgent summons caught me off guard. I was in the middle of exceptionally important negotiations with the armaments clans of the Salarian Union, discussing a change to the supply chain for salarian element zero from their mining colony of Mor'Tann to the major asari industrial world of Ellaris Prime. The negotiations had already entered their third week—the salarians, as always, contested every figure, recalculated the cost of every jump, and demanded security guarantees for every leg of the route.

At present, shipments traveled directly between those colonies. The Citadel Council very much wanted the Citadel itself to become an intermediate transit point.

Yes, that would make the logistics considerably more complicated. Every voyage would have to detour to the Citadel, pass a customs inspection, file transit declarations, and wait its turn to unload and reload. Yes, transportation would become ten percent more expensive and twenty percent slower. But the freighters would then be required to pay the Citadel treasury a duty for carrying especially dangerous and valuable cargo. And that would weaken both the power of Thessia's matriarchs and the power of the dalatrasses.

Anyone who thought the councillors were merely mouthpieces for Thessia's matriarchs, obediently relaying the will of the Asari Republics and the Salarian Union, was profoundly mistaken. That had been true four hundred years ago, when Matriarch Neina sat on the Council. She openly disregarded the Citadel's interests and regarded the station as nothing more than an instrument of asari hegemony. But when Councillor Livella took office, things slowly began to change. Livella was the first to declare publicly that the Council served not Thessia, but the entire galaxy.

The Citadel ceased to be merely an embassy ship, a vast diplomatic forum where species exchanged notes of protest and signed treaties with no real force behind them. It became the true center of the civilized galaxy—financial, political, and cultural. Decisions made here changed the fates of trillions of sapient beings. Politics was conducted here on a scale that made even the ambitions of the matriarchs seem small.

Most importantly, money began to flow through the Citadel. For all three hundred and fifty years of my diplomatic career here, I had done little else but slowly pry the threads of power from the governments of the species that had joined the civilized galactic community.

Roughly thirty percent of all major transactions between different alien species were now conducted not directly, but through the Citadel's economic ecosystem. And the citizens of the Citadel—the status literally everyone in the galaxy dreamed of attaining, from a batarian merchant to a quarian engineer—owned substantial portions of the member states' economies. Nearly all of the largest volus banks that sustained the galactic credit system, for example, were registered on the Citadel. And paid their taxes here as well.

This particular deal was especially important because it diverted profit away from our most difficult opponents: the government of the Asari Republics. The matriarchs of Thessia were accustomed to element zero flowing through their hands, and every concession on the issue had to be won in battle. I had been forced to leave the meeting in my assistant's hands and hurry to the Citadel Council chamber.

"Councillor Livella, Councillor Kar'Tosh, my greetings," I said to two of the most powerful beings in the galaxy.

And no one should imagine that Councillor Kar'Tosh played the secondary role here. His clan's influence over the Salarian Union was several times greater than Councillor Livella's influence over Thessia. Livella was asari, and she still had to look over her shoulder at the matriarchs, balancing the interests of the Citadel against those of the Republics. Kar'Tosh was a salarian from a clan that controlled a third of the Union's military shipyards. Livella, with all due respect, had to spend half her political capital merely to keep the matriarchs from recalling her from office.

"Welcome, Velaria," Livella said. Her voice was as calm as ever, but I noticed that her fingers gripped the arms of her chair slightly more tightly than usual. "The Council summoned you because of an emergency. You remember the heroic feat of the Iltanar, of course?"

How could I not remember the heroic voyage the salarians had publicized so widely? A film was already being planned about it—VIA, apparently, had bought the rights—and half the galaxy now followed the reports from the front with bated breath. No ship had ever remained in enemy territory for so long before. Especially without fleet support, as a lone cruiser.

Certain private circles on the Citadel had already begun taking bets on when the ship would finally be caught by the rachni. The pool was not advertised, of course—it was unpatriotic to profit from the deaths of heroes—but money was being made. I had wagered a considerable sum that they would survive at least another two weeks. My staff analysts had calculated the average advance rate of rachni fleets in that sector, factored in the wear on the Iltanar's systems, its fuel reserves, and the crew's psychological condition, and produced a forecast.

"Yes, Councillor. It is a great feat by salarian heroes."

I hoped they had not summoned me because the ship had been destroyed. I had no desire to lose my money.

"It transmitted a new message," Kar'Tosh continued. "It reported the discovery of a new spacefaring species actively fighting off the rachni. It also sent us a thirty-minute recording of the space battle. From the data received, we reconstructed the engagement in three dimensions."

The holographic table began displaying a large-scale battle between unidentified ships and a medium-sized rachni fleet. The recording had been assembled from the Iltanar's sensor data. The salarians, as always, had approached the task analytically, supplementing the footage with tactical annotations, range calculations, and estimated weapon outputs.

The smooth white spacecraft immediately caught my attention. Their shapes were closer to salarian vessels than to asari designs, though their armament showed several striking differences.

Disintegrator torpedoes were used extensively throughout the engagement. I watched salvo after salvo streak toward the rachni ships, each projectile carrying an element-zero warhead that generated chaotic gravitational fields upon detonation. We mounted such torpedoes only on large vessels—heavy cruisers and above—because of their enormous cost.

That indicated either an abundance of element zero in their systems or an extraordinarily militarized society in which virtually every resource had been directed toward defeating the enemy.

Two one-and-a-half-kilometer superdreadnoughts stood out in particular.

"You are looking at precisely the right thing, Velaria," Kar'Tosh said. "Military specialists from the Union and the Republics studied this footage closely, especially those two enormous vessels, and concluded that they cannot travel beyond the system in which they are based."

I shifted my gaze from the hologram to the councillor.

"If this new species possessed the technology to build interstellar superdreadnoughts of that size," Kar'Tosh continued, "their main batteries should be three times more powerful. The recording shows the opposite: their guns only slightly outperform our best designs. Therefore, these are not true dreadnoughts, but defensive platforms bound to their home system. Extremely powerful on defense, useless on offense."

"We have also estimated the species' technological level. It differs very little from that of the asari or the Salarian Union. Their ships' main batteries are five point two percent more efficient than our designs, while their shield technology is seven percent inferior to ours. The difference falls within statistical error. They are neither an ancient supercivilization nor primitives who have only just reached space. They are our technological peers. They simply followed a somewhat different path."

"From the composition of their fleet and the tactical positioning of their vessels," Livella added as the hologram changed to display annotated diagrams of the unknown fleet's formations, "the Republics' analysts are convinced that the force shown here is only one of many. Note the ship numbering that we managed to partially decipher from the recording. Note the condition of the hulls—some of that damage was clearly sustained in earlier engagements, long before this battle. We estimate that the new species possesses between three and seven such fleets. That implies between one hundred and twenty and five hundred developed planets, potentially making them the third most populous species in the galaxy."

"Your new mission," Matriarch Livella continued, "is to make first contact with this civilization and establish diplomatic relations."

"Councillor Livella, what else do we know about the new species?" I asked, keeping my voice even. "Did Captain Or'Kesh establish first contact?"

"Unfortunately, contact with the Iltanar has now been lost," she replied. "The cruiser's final message reported that an alien dreadnought was moving to place itself between the Iltanar and the rachni vessels. It appeared to be a gesture of goodwill—at least, that is how our analysts interpreted it. First contact should have followed, but communication with the ship was lost."

"Was the ship destroyed?" I could not help asking. There was money at stake, after all.

"There is a thirty-five percent probability of that," Kar'Tosh interjected. "The other possibilities are destruction of the transmitter, signal suppression by electronic warfare, antenna damage during evasive maneuvering, or the ship's capture by the unknown species."

"But none of that changes anything," Livella said firmly, meeting my eyes. "The Citadel Council, together with the governments of the Asari Republics and the Salarian Union, places great hope in a new ally who may help us in this war."

After that meeting, events accelerated to faster-than-light speed. A fleet was urgently assembled to cross no fewer than eight star clusters safely and deliver a diplomatic delegation to the new species.

The Council committed enormous resources: two of the newest Alatania-class dreadnoughts, the pride of the Republics, each worth as much as a major city, while the Salarian Union contributed another three ships of the same class. We were also accompanied by twenty heavy asari Nefrein-class cruisers, thirty light Vaeno-class cruisers, and fifty salarian cruisers of comparable size.

Although I headed the diplomatic mission—my status as the Council's trusted envoy was not disputed—I had rivals within it. My so-called assistants included representatives of both the asari and the salarians. Matriarch Issalia was Thessia's appointee, whom I had known for two hundred years and who had never missed an opportunity to put a knife in my back. General-Scout Ren'Tosh, a younger cousin of Kar'Tosh himself, had ostensibly been assigned to ensure the mission's security, but in reality he was there to ensure that the salarians gained access to the new species at the same time as we did, rather than through us.

And my unofficial mission—the one written in no formal document, but explained to me personally by Livella before departure—was to secure preliminary agreements ensuring that the new species' goods would pass exclusively through the Citadel. It would be a tremendous victory for asari diplomacy, which was uniting the galaxy into a single whole.

Aellarin

We continued studying the captured salarian ship at one of our secret scientific bases in deep space, located within the home cluster. The site had been chosen carefully: two light-months of direct travel from the nearest relay. Reaching the station required knowing its exact coordinates and possessing the ability to cross a stretch of space containing no navigational landmarks whatsoever.

On the one hand, that increased the cost of every trip to the laboratory. On the other, it multiplied the facility's security. The research station and the warships guarding it could detect any object approaching from millions of kilometers away. Any vessel would be seen long before it came within weapons range.

And the journey itself took little longer. Our Unified Core FTL vessels needed no more than a day and a half to cover the distance. For the scientists, engineers, and inquisitors working at the base, such a delay meant nothing. For security, it was decisive.

While the scientists energetically studied literally everything that could be extracted from the ship and from the minds and bodies of its crew, the Council of Eternals prepared just as actively to receive the diplomatic corps of Citadel Space. It also developed plans for revealing the existence of Citadel Space to our entire species. This would be the greatest disclosure of information since first contact with the Aruns—and perhaps the most dangerous.

We prepared with particular care to tell the public about the existence of the asari: a species every member of which had been gifted by Aetra. Or at least, that was how our religious masses would perceive them. The asari were a species in which every individual possessed biotics from birth. For our society, founded on the belief that the Blessed were chosen, this would be a shock.

We had already faced something similar when the first biotics began to be born among the Aruns. Several private spacecraft had crashed into a planet's surface, and the explosions of their reactors released a substantial quantity of element zero into the atmosphere. Thousands of aiterri and Aruns caught at ground zero suffered severe ether poisoning. Most died. But some time later, the surviving Aruns began giving birth to children with the Gift.

The Council of Eternals had been forced to recognize them as recipients of Aetra's blessing. The official interpretation was framed in politically convenient religious terms: it was thanks to the aiterri that the goddess had turned her gaze upon the Aruns. By living beside the chosen people, they had proven themselves worthy of her attention. It was an elegant formula that preserved theological consistency without undermining the foundations of the faith. The existence of biotic lizards, meanwhile, was scientifically disproven. Their natural regeneration was so powerful that it purged even severe ether poisoning. Element zero was simply expelled from their bodies before it could accumulate the critical mass required to awaken the Gift.

Since then, several Minor Houses and even one Middle House had arisen under the leadership of Aruns. To our aristocrats, it had been a profound shock: short alien creatures, savages only yesterday, suddenly entering the system of Houses as equals. But there were no formal grounds to refuse them. They possessed the Gift, however weakly, and ancestry was a secondary matter. Fortunately, such Houses could never become Great. Recognition as a Great House required more than the mere presence of the Gift; it demanded power and mastery in its use. And that was precisely where gifted Aruns faced serious difficulties.

Their abilities were structured incorrectly. The concentration of ether in their bodies was immense, comparable to that of a powerful Blessed. But it was distributed unevenly: in some areas the deposits within their nervous tissue were very large, while in others they were entirely absent. The autopsies of the first Blessed Aruns produced discouraging results for their species. Because the ether was distributed so irregularly, their abilities were severely limited and confined to gravity manipulation—telekinesis, attracting and repelling objects, and creating localized gravitational fields. They could neither enhance their bodies to superhuman levels nor create fire and lightning. The Gift itself was only about as powerful as that of the weakest aiterri Blessed.

An implant inserted directly into the base of the skull improved matters somewhat by multiplying the abilities of an Arun biotic. But even with an implant, the strongest gifted Arun would lose decisively to some scion of a Middle House. Their ceiling was simply too low. The uneven distribution of ether was a congenital defect that an implant could compensate for, but not correct.

Unfortunately, the implants did not work on the aiterri. Our bodies contained a structure that was far too delicate and complex: ether was distributed evenly through the neural nodes, and its currents were perfectly balanced. Such implants were too crude to interact with us. Every attempt to implant an aiterri with an analogue of the Arun device ended the same way: the balance was disrupted, the nervous system overloaded, and the subject either lost the Gift at best or died at worst.

Society had only just grown accustomed to non-aiterri Blessed, and soon another informational bomb would be dropped on it. This one would be an order of magnitude more powerful than the last. It was one thing to accept that a few short Aruns could possess the Gift, however limited. It was quite another to learn that an entire species existed in the galaxy in which every individual possessed it.

Fortunately, we had an ironclad argument: the Eternals. Properly trained, an Eternal became the ground-war equivalent of a dreadnought. What better proof could there be that we were the goddess's most beloved children?

The theologians were already working feverishly on a revised doctrine. The asari were blessed, yes—but blessed as servants, as assistants, as younger children given exactly as much as they needed to serve. The aiterri, by contrast, were heirs, granted power capable of rivaling the gods. The important thing was not to encounter a Leviathan. With abilities like that, some aiterri would certainly identify it as Aetra and begin to worship it.

Besides preparing the public for first contact, we prepared militarily as well. The chances that the Citadel would begin a war with us were minimal—they had fought the rachni for almost a century and could not afford a second front. But I still remembered the absurd cause of the First Contact War in canon. I had no intention of repeating that mistake from our side, so we prepared thoroughly. If necessary, we would destroy both the relay in the neighboring system and the one where contact was to take place. That would, of course, sever our only route to the greater galaxy and set our expansion back by centuries. But such was the price of our species' survival.

A spacecraft built specifically for diplomatic purposes had also been brought in: a monitor-station that would later serve as a transit zone between the greater galaxy and the Dominion's central worlds.

Using our warships for the first negotiations would, first, have been undignified, since they had never been designed for such events, and second, it was simply impossible. When a ship went to battle stations, the air was completely evacuated from many compartments, leaving only an extremely thin atmosphere. This limited the spread of blast waves through the vessel during catastrophic damage and prevented them from killing the crew. Combined with the special hull design, which incorporated lessons from rachni vessels—we had studied their survivability and adapted their best solutions—our ships were extraordinarily resilient. The entire crew was also required to wear pressure suits during an alert. Hosting a diplomatic reception while half the compartments were depressurized and everyone around the guests wore combat suits was not the best way to make a favorable impression.

The enormous station, shaped like a gigantic flying brick—we had deliberately chosen a modular design so that new modules could later be layered over those already built—was positioned on the far side of the system in case of a major rachni attack. If the enemy broke through the relay, it would encounter the battle fleet rather than the diplomatic station. The station itself had been built to accommodate up to ten thousand guests: residential modules, conference halls, dining sections, recreation areas, and a medical center capable of working with every biochemistry known to us. Everything required for prolonged negotiations.

Why were we certain a diplomatic delegation would come? Because it was the natural response of a spacefaring civilization. Any sapient species that discovered an unknown neighbor fighting a common enemy would attempt to establish contact. And Citadel Space, judging by the information extracted from the minds of the captured salarians, lived and breathed diplomacy. For centuries they had built a system of treaties, alliances, and trade agreements. They did not attack immediately; they talked first. And after spending almost a century at war with the rachni, a new ally who might help them win was worth more than any pride.

And so it happened. Three months after the military ship was captured, an entire battle fleet arrived, which was hardly surprising given that eight whole clusters controlled by the rachni lay between us. Crossing eight enemy-held clusters was not a diplomatic cruise; it was a military operation.

The fleet contained two asari dreadnoughts, one of them visibly damaged. Its bow had melted, its shields operated erratically, and breaches gaped in the hull beneath hastily fitted emergency patches. It had evidently absorbed the brunt of the fighting during the breakthrough. One salarian dreadnought looked more intact, though it too had been badly battered. There were also thirty ships the size of our cruisers, damaged to varying degrees. Some were running on little more than luck, and whether they could be repaired at all remained an open question. They had clearly fought their way to us.

When we finally met—not aboard the negotiation station, but on one of our dreadnoughts—the delegation from Citadel Space was deeply unsettled.

We looked remarkably similar to the asari: the same height, the same build, the same pearlescent skin, faintly luminous in the dim lighting of the ship's corridors. The only differences were the existence of males and the hair on our heads. For the asari, who had never encountered a species so close to them in appearance, it was a shock. First contact took place: we stared at one another, took a great many holoimages of the historic moment, and left the scientists to sort each other out. Let them measure skulls, compare DNA, and construct theories of panspermia. It only benefited us.

Then our side began a veritable circus. According to our version of events, the reconnaissance cruiser had been destroyed by the rachni. A dreadnought strike had torn it into countless fragments and scattered them throughout the system. A tragic accident. We had been unable to help. We mourned with the families of the dead. We had even prepared several bodies and pieces of wreckage that had been 'fortunate' enough to remain intact after the brutal destruction.

And since the ship had been 'completely destroyed,' we had received no information about the Citadel. We therefore had to perform first contact from beginning to end. Or rather, the only ones performing were five Eternals from the Council of Eternals, who acted as the leaders of the contact, myself as the Council head's personal confidant, and several inquisitors. For the tens of thousands of other aiterri fortunate enough to attend, it truly was first contact with an unknown civilization. Even the scientists tasked with deciphering the visitors' methods of communication had not been told the secret. They sincerely tried to decode the asari and salarian languages from recordings of their speech, unaware that finished linguistic matrices extracted from the prisoners were already stored in the next compartment.

Fortunately, our fellow sapients were anthropomorphic, and both sides had developed simple language models that immediately translated speech into the required language.

The Citadel delegation was invited to the diplomatic station. By then it had been brought to full readiness: negotiation chambers with holographic tables and simultaneous translation systems, living quarters adapted to asari and salarian physiology, and a welcoming committee drawn from the Council of Eternals.

Official first contact was a success.