Ethereal Effect. Chapter 26 (Patreon)

Aellarin

No matter how long the embassy from Citadel Space remained, sooner or later their fleet still had to leave the Dominion. I cannot say their return came easily. The diplomatic mission stayed in our territory for eight months, and for almost all of that time the asari and salarians were either aboard Harmony, continuing negotiations, or on their own ships. Part of their crews served alongside our forces, covering the system against the rachni, while the rest repaired the damaged vessels.

We supplied them with raw materials, reactor fuel, food, metals, and everything else needed to restore their ships, yet the representatives of the Citadel never allowed us inside their vessels. Even the most devastated sections were repaired exclusively by their own crews. The asari and salarians preferred to spend extra months manufacturing parts in their own fabricators rather than allow our engineers to study the internal structure of their ships.

I did not consider that caution an insult. In their place, the Dominion would have done exactly the same.

Half a year after the negotiations began, reinforcements from Citadel Space finally reached us. I do not know whether the asari wanted to demonstrate their strength or simply believed that a smaller fleet could not safely pass through rachni-held territory, but they made an impression. The Fifth Strike Fleet of the Asari Republic arrived to aid the diplomatic mission, numbering more than fifteen hundred ships of various classes and twenty fully combat-capable dreadnoughts.

The Fifth Strike Fleet traveled the entire route from Citadel Space to our borders without lingering in systems captured by the rachni. Near each relay, the asari destroyed everything that tried to block their path, then immediately moved on, not allowing the enemy to gather enough forces for a counterstrike. They reached the Dominion almost intact, losing only a small number of light ships and taking damage that did not affect the formation's overall combat capability.

Yet it was precisely the success of that breakthrough that led to what followed. The movement of fifteen hundred ships could not be hidden, which meant that every major hive along the route received information about the asari advance. While the Fifth Strike Fleet moved from relay to relay, the rachni did not have time to concentrate sufficient forces against it. But after arriving in the Dominion, the fleet stopped, and the enemy finally understood where its path ended.

When less than a week remained before the Citadel fleet's departure, a rachni armada poured through the relay. It contained hundreds of large ships and such a number of small craft that the sensors soon stopped producing exact data. Behind the first wave came the second, behind it the third, and new ships continued to appear even when the space around the relay was already filled with debris.

The battle lasted almost two days. The main problem was not a lack of strength, but the fact that two large fleets with different commands, communications channels, and combat doctrines were present in one system at the same time. Our admirals were responsible for defending Dominion territory; the asari commander was responsible for the Fifth Strike Fleet and the safety of the embassy delegation. If both formations acted independently, the rachni would have an opportunity to break them apart piecemeal.

For that reason, the commander of the Fifth Strike demanded operational control over the entire defense of the system. Formally, she cited the lack of a unified allied command circuit and the fact that the Dominion had not prepared a command structure for a combined fleet. If we refused, the asari threatened to withdraw their ships from the common formation, focus on defending Harmony, and begin retreating at the first opportunity.

It was an insolent way to pose the matter, but not without sense. The Fifth Strike Fleet made up the majority of the ships already present in the system, and its command had spent many years operating that formation as a single whole.

The asari commander acted quickly and efficiently. She did not try to fold our ships into her own formations, but instead used the differences between the fleets. Dominion monitors became immobile anchor points, heavy ships held the most dangerous approaches, and the more maneuverable asari formations closed the gaps that opened and shifted between sectors of the battle.

Naturally, no one intended to protect our monitors at any cost. The asari covered them only as long as the platforms' heavy guns remained useful. When a monitor lost the ability to withdraw from an inevitable attack, the escort ships pulled back, allowing it to take the final blow. It looked cruel, but the monitors themselves had been built to hold a position until complete destruction.

Every platform that died managed to inflict enormous losses on the rachni. Their heavy guns tore apart large enemy ships, punched through formations, and forced entire groups to change the direction of their attack. But the rachni continued advancing, heedless of losses. The first waves tied the defense down in battle, the next struck at identified weak points, and then new formations appeared to finish off already damaged ships.

By the end of the first day, our system defense had practically ceased to exist as a unified structure. Of the Dominion's five dreadnoughts, only one survived - the one that had spent the entire battle holding the space around Harmony and preventing the rachni from approaching the diplomatic station.

The other four dreadnoughts died while holding the most difficult directions. For each of their destruction, the rachni paid with many of their own ships.

The Fifth Strike Fleet's losses were also enormous. Almost half of the formation that had arrived was destroyed or damaged so severely that it could not continue the journey. Most of the losses fell on frigates, light cruisers, and escort ships, with which the asari commander covered flanks, intercepted torpedoes, and stopped rachni breakthroughs.

At the same time, fifteen asari dreadnoughts retained full or nearly full combat capability. The Republic preferred to sacrifice small ships while preserving the heavy core of the fleet.

Through joint effort, the rachni armada was destroyed. Without the Fifth Strike Fleet, the Dominion would still have repelled the attack, but the battle would have unfolded differently. We would have had to abandon the border system, fall back to the next relay, and stretch the enemy fleet along a route prepared in advance. Perhaps one of the crossings would have had to be destroyed to cut the main mass of rachni off from reinforcements.

Victory would still have been ours, but its price would have been far higher. We would have lost several liberated clusters, disrupted the supply lines of advancing armies, and delayed final consolidation in the region for years.

After the battle ended, the Fifth Strike Fleet began preparing for the return journey almost immediately. The asari collected the embassy delegation, evacuated the survivors, and inspected the wreckage of their own ships. Everything of technological value they either took with them or destroyed. Even damaged hull sections were shot into clouds of metal if they could not be loaded onto transports.

The salarians were even more thorough. Several large fragments of their ships exploded after the battle had already ended, even though not a single enemy remained nearby. Our recovery crews received far fewer trophies than they had hoped for, but we could not prevent our allies from destroying their own property.

The Dominion, too, did not intend to miss the opportunity to conduct its own diplomatic mission safely through rachni territory. Nine of our battlecruisers departed together with the Fifth Strike Fleet, carrying several thousand specialists from a wide range of fields. Among them were diplomats, trade representatives, engineers, xenobiologists, cultural experts, translators, military observers, and intelligence officers.

The mission did not consist only of aiteri. Representatives of the aruns and the lizardfolk were also being sent to the Citadel, but they were not considered separate delegations. During the negotiations, the Citadel representatives had tried far too insistently to treat the peoples of the Dominion independently from one another, and we had no intention of making that task easier for them. All specialists represented a single state and answered to one leadership.

The nine cruisers remained full combat vessels. Sending unarmed diplomatic ships through rachni-held systems would have been pointless, but they carried no secret equipment.

Nor were there secret facts in the heads of the mission members. Each specialist knew only what was required for their work. Aiteri with access to the most important military or scientific projects were not included in the expedition. That did not mean we intended to hide every feature of the Dominion from the Citadel forever. Some information would inevitably become known sooner or later.

The technology of artificially growing citizens, for example, was already being used too widely to keep secret for centuries. Many specialists had access to it, and production complexes operated in many systems. We did not expect to hide the existence of an entire industry. The question was only when the rest of the galaxy would learn of it, and how prepared the Dominion would be for the possible reaction.

The cruisers took significant stores of Aether with them. It was meant to become the Dominion's first major commodity on the markets of Citadel Space. Aether was too valuable to be used only for technical purposes. If necessary, it could be exchanged for local currency, equipment, political concessions, or access to information.

The mission was departing for a long time. Most likely, its ships would spend no less than a hundred years away from home. During that time, the specialists would have to study the structure of Citadel Space, establish relations with its states, understand local laws, and create a permanent network of information sources. The Dominion needed information about everything - from prices for industrial materials to political contradictions between the asari republics.

Some specialists were eventually supposed to remain on the Citadel itself, while others would travel to asari and salarian worlds. The cruisers became embassies, transports, military bases, and shelters for Dominion citizens all at once. If relations worsened, they were to ensure the mission's evacuation; in the event of an open attack, they were to defend themselves for as long as they remained able.

Not all representatives of the Citadel left our territory either. Several dozen asari and salarians remained on Harmony as a permanent diplomatic mission. Formally, they were to study the Dominion, help resolve disputed questions, and prepare future trade agreements. In reality, their primary task remained observing us.

That did not worry anyone. Harmony had been created precisely as a place where outsiders were allowed to see the Dominion without gaining access to anything we did not intend to show. The diplomats who remained could study our culture, speak with carefully selected specialists, and visit approved sites. Everything else remained closed to them.

When the combined fleet finally left the system, the space around Harmony became almost empty. Not long before, there had been hundreds of ships here: repair vessels, transports, and patrol groups. Now only rescue ships and surviving Dominion formations moved among the debris, taking positions in place of the destroyed platforms.

After the Citadel fleet's departure, new Dominion formations began arriving in the border cluster. No one doubted that the rachni would try to repeat the attack. The route of the Fifth Strike Fleet had drawn the attention of hives across an enormous territory, and the enemy now knew exactly where the relay chain ended and how important this system was for communication with Citadel Space.

We would have to meet the next armada with our own strength. Full fleets, pulled from less dangerous directions, were arriving to replace the destroyed ships. Defense platforms were being restored, temporary monitors deployed, and new minefields and automatic gun complexes installed around the relay.

The loss of the border direction would not destroy the Dominion or lead to defeat in the war. But it would force us to abandon a vast stretch of territory and begin a new offensive in a region where the rachni had already been considered beaten. That was exactly what we intended to prevent.

Interlude. Liarra, a Blessed of Eternal Taireon's retinue

On the maps, the planet had already been considered Dominion territory for half a year. Our cruisers controlled orbit, the last rachni ships had been destroyed at the very beginning of the campaign, and the anti-space batteries and launch complexes had become melted craters after several days of bombardment. Yet the Dominion's authority ended where the underground tunnels began.

Before the rachni invasion, this world had been a garden planet. Warm seas, a gentle climate, and immense forests made it one of the best worlds in the cluster, which was why the Council of Eternals intended to place its future capital here. The rachni had already poisoned several rivers and covered sections of the surface with their organic growth, but the biosphere could still recover. That was why the fleet had been forbidden to carry out full orbital strikes against the hives. To destroy a nest located tens of kilometers deep, we would have had to crack the crust and destroy a significant part of the planet.

The hives had to be taken from the ground. In six months, Taireon's army had destroyed only four, even though on other worlds we could clear an entire continent in the same time. The network here went too deep and intertwined with natural caverns. Separate nests were connected by tunnels hundreds of kilometers long, and the rachni constantly returned to already-cleared areas through passages even seismic scanners failed to notice.

The fifth hive lay beneath a plain that had once been covered in silver forests. The upper tunnels began almost three kilometers below the surface; the central chambers lay at least fifteen kilometers down. For the last three weeks, sappers had drilled slanted shafts, placed charges, and collapsed side passages, gradually limiting the enemy's movement. That day, they were to open one of the hive's main transport arteries and force the queen to throw her main forces there.

Four landing ships stood on the surface, resembling fortresses more than vessels. They could land on unprepared ground, transport thousands of soldiers, and serve for months as bases, hospitals, and repair centers. Taireon's other eight ships shuttled nonstop between orbit, captured regions, and other continents, delivering ammunition, equipment, and fresh units. Six escort cruisers controlled the system, maintained communications, and carried out precision strikes against detected rachni fortifications.

Only Taireon's army was on the planet: one hundred thousand lizardfolk and ten thousand Blessed, not counting crews and support personnel. It was armed with the best mass-produced technologies of the Dominion. Only the ten thousand warriors of the Flame of Aethra, who guarded the palace of the Council of Eternals, had more advanced equipment. But if the Flame's task was to protect the heart of the state, we were sent to destroy whatever the Council pointed at.

Taireon's army captured worlds the fleet needed as footholds, stormed the largest hives, and saved garden planets the rachni had not yet managed to poison completely. For the last fifty years, the Eternal had accepted the hardest assignments because he sought to create his own order. Not a temporary army that would one day be divided between other commanders, but a permanent organization with its own worlds, schools, traditions, and industry. He wanted the glory of his order to one day equal the glory of the Flame of Aethra.

I belonged to his retinue - his personal combat reserve, sent to the most dangerous sectors. It consisted of the strongest Blessed in the army, operators of heavy robots, shield specialists, and fighters trained to destroy rare rachni forms. The largest machines towered dozens of meters above the lizardfolk and could hold a tunnel in place of an entire battalion. We were not spent on ordinary assaults. We entered battle where the line was about to collapse or where something appeared that regular units could no longer handle.

The forward camp was located in an artificial chamber two and a half kilometers underground. Thousands of lizardfolk stood behind heavy shield machines, the Blessed occupied platforms above the main line, and artillery was aimed at an eighteen-meter-thick stone wall. Behind it ran a hive tunnel more than a hundred meters wide.

They did not intend to kill the queen yet. As long as she remained alive, the hive acted as a single army: defenders gathered where she saw a threat, held important chambers, and obeyed a common plan. A queen could be deceived, forced to transfer troops into prepared traps. If she was destroyed too early, however, the rachni scattered across the entire network. Then every tunnel had to be checked for years, smoking separate groups out of caves and destroying new clutches. So first we had to strip the queen of her army, cut off her retreat routes, and destroy the production chambers. She was to die last.

Taireon stood beside the command node in heavy armor covered with marks from old hits. He allowed the armor to be repaired, but forbade the removal of scratches and melted edges if they did not weaken the protection. In fifty years, almost no empty space remained on the plates.

"Main line ready," reported the lizardfolk commander. "Shields raised. Side groups will begin movement immediately after detonation."

"The retinue remains in reserve," Taireon ordered. "Do not enter battle until the enemy identifies the main direction of attack."

I relayed the order to the others. Operators took their seats in cockpits, the Blessed checked their weapons, and specialists connected our generators to the common grid. A few seconds later, the charges went off.

The wall before us bulged and vanished in a cloud of stone and incandescent dust. The shock wave flared against the shields, but the fortifications held. Beyond the breach, darkness opened, from which only debris flew at first. Then the sensors detected movement.

The rachni appeared in less than half a minute. Several scout forms were destroyed by the first shots, but behind them the tunnel filled with a living sea of chitin, claws, and open jaws. They ran across the floor, clung to the walls, moved along the ceiling, and climbed over their own kin. Behind the close-combat forms came shooters with mass rifles, firing directly over the attackers.

Projectiles struck the common shield, covering it in thousands of white flashes. The rachni barely aimed, but the tunnel was packed so densely with our soldiers and equipment that every shot hit either the barrier or a target behind it. The generators distributed the load between sections, but the energy reserve immediately began to drop.

At Taireon's command, the forward line returned fire. Thousands of mass accelerators fired at once, heavy platforms added plasma and guided projectiles, and the Blessed brought magical strikes down upon the enemy. The first ranks of rachni disappeared, but the next wave simply passed over their bodies. The queen correctly assessed the danger and continued sending more and more forces toward the breach.

The first heavy forms reached the shield within minutes. One of them slammed into a weakened section, broke through the barrier, and managed to crush two lizardfolk before I received permission to join the fight. I crossed the distance in a single leap, took the impact on my armor, and knocked the rachni onto its back. Two fighters of the retinue severed the joints of its front limbs, and my shot into the lower plate finished the matter.

Three more forms broke through the shield after it, and the retinue entered the battle along the entire line. Huge robots stepped forward, covering the damaged generators with their own barriers. Their guns fired almost point-blank, turning stone and chitin into a molten mass. The Blessed destroyed those who penetrated inside the formation while engineers replaced burned-out elements and brought the shield back online.

The queen continued sending reinforcements toward us, not noticing that the side groups had already penetrated less-protected parts of the hive. While the main rachni army tried to seize the breach, our units collapsed transport tunnels, destroyed growth chambers, and cut the upper tiers off from the central levels. The more enemies gathered before us, the fewer remained in other directions.

The battle lasted nine hours. By its end, rachni bodies lay in such a dense layer that new forms climbed over them almost to the ceiling. The common shield fell several times, four heavy machines were destroyed, and eleven more lost part of their armament. The lizardfolk suffered heavy losses, but the position remained ours. When the flow began to weaken, Taireon ordered the advance.

Over the following weeks, the army methodically divided the hive into parts. We collapsed tunnels, burned clutches, destroyed stores of organic matter, and forced the queen to throw defenders toward false directions. Sometimes the rachni found natural caverns and appeared in our rear. One such breakthrough nearly ended with the destruction of an ammunition depot; another cut six thousand lizardfolk off from the main forces. Then Taireon held a collapsing ceiling with his Gift for seven hours while engineers reinforced the passage and led the soldiers out.

By the end of the fifth week, only the central levels of the hive remained. The production chambers were destroyed, paths to neighboring nests blocked, and most of the defenders had died in battles we had prepared. Only after that did Taireon allow the advance toward the queen to begin.

Her chamber proved so large that one of the landing ships could have fit inside it. The queen was surrounded by the last heavy forms and several rows of shooters. She controlled them precisely, shifting fighters to weakened sectors and concentrating fire on damaged machines, but now she had nowhere to retreat. Engineers were already collapsing the last open tunnel behind our backs.

The assault lasted less than two hours. The robots suppressed the shooters, and the lizardfolk destroyed the remaining close-combat groups. The queen continued giving orders until there was not a single form left nearby capable of carrying them out. Only then did Taireon approach her and end the existence of the fifth hive.

For four more days, detachments checked the main tunnels, but no large enemy groups remained there. The queen herself had gathered most of her warriors in the central chambers, so we did not have to smoke thousands of scattered forms out of the entire underground network.

The operation was declared complete on the thirty-ninth day. Unit commanders and the surviving retinue gathered beside one of the landing ships, where the captain of the flagship cruiser was already waiting for us. She had come down from orbit in person, which meant the message was more important than an ordinary report.

"The Council of Eternals has completed its review of Taireon's petition," the captain announced. "The creation of a new order has been approved."

For several seconds, the army remained silent, and then the plain exploded with shouts. The lizardfolk beat weapons against armor, the Blessed raised their hands, and the operators of heavy machines activated their external signals. Taireon had walked toward this goal for fifty years, and now his army received the right to become a permanent order.

The Council assigned the order a planet under strict control of the capital. Within one hundred years, it was required to create an industrial system there capable of supplying new troops and equipment to the Dominion's armed forces every year. That planet was the world we had been fighting for over the last half year.

Taireon said nothing. He merely opened the planetary map, on which the marker of the fifth hive had disappeared. Around it, hundreds of others continued to burn: major nests, thousands of smaller colonies, and vast regions that reconnaissance groups had not yet reached.

In half a year, we had destroyed five hives. The Council had not given Taireon a finished world, but the right to create one with his own hands.

Judging by the Eternal's smile, that was exactly the reward he had wanted.

Aellarin

After the Citadel fleet departed, I was presented with a project our scientists had been working on for several decades. It was not connected to increasing the size of ordinary dreadnoughts: the Dominion already knew how to build ships a kilometer long. The problem was that almost the entire heavy fleet could move only along the relay network. Its zero element cores reduced the mass of ships and allowed them to use relays, but such vessels could not cross interstellar distances on their own. For flights to systems without relays, the Unified Core was used. It moved a region of space together with the ship, but could stably encompass a hull no longer than three hundred meters.

Because of this, expansion beyond the ancient network proceeded slowly. First, a scout ship was sent to a new star; then transports followed with people, equipment, and components for a shipyard. If rachni were present in the system, three-hundred-meter vessels could deliver a detachment and several machines, but not a heavy army. Sometimes decades passed before local industry appeared that could build a full fleet. We needed a ship that could independently leave for the void between stars and immediately transport enough forces to secure a foothold.

Attempts to enlarge the Unified Core produced no result. The larger the grown Aether crystal became, the harder it was to maintain a uniform field around its entire structure, and energy consumption grew faster than useful power. Linking several Cores proved even more dangerous: each created its own spatial shell, and even a slight desynchronization could tear the hull apart. The solution was found when we stopped considering Aether only as a source of mass alteration.

Zero element itself linked the electromagnetic field with the gravitational one. Under the influence of a charge, its structure altered local mass and thereby curved space. We had used this property for centuries, but treated it as an indivisible quality of Aether. New research showed that the crystal did not create the link from nothing, but multiplied the transition of one field into the other. Our scientists managed to reproduce this transition without zero element. A system of superconducting rings, vacuum resonators, and synchronized electromagnetic pulses created a weak but measurable gravitational disturbance.

On its own, it was useless. The power was insufficient even to noticeably change the weight of a small object, but the disturbance could be given the desired shape in advance. The resonators created a slight compression of space before the bow, expansion behind the stern, and an even region around the hull. After that, the Aether was activated. Small cells of zero element did not build their own shells, but resonated with the geometry already formed and amplified it. In that way, many local sections combined into a single field.

The project received the name Continuum Chorus. The first experimental ship was four hundred eighty-seven meters long - almost two hundred more than the limit of the Unified Core. The designers did not yet dare go beyond five hundred meters. Phase error accumulated along the hull, and beyond the calculated boundary the stern sections began to amplify an already distorted field. The new limit remained temporary, but even it allowed the creation of an autonomous heavy cruiser, large transport, or expedition vessel independent of relays.

The ship looked like an elongated asymmetrical ellipsoid. Its narrow bow flowed smoothly into a broad rounded stern, where the reactors, accumulators, and cooling systems were located. A through-cavity about forty meters in diameter ran along the entire hull. It contained no decks, cargo bays, or weapons. Around the channel were resonance rings, phase sensors, and hundreds of Aether amplifiers. Along this axis, a weak gravitational disturbance was first formed; then the activation wave of the cells passed through; and after the shell assembled, a traveling metric wave moved the ship.

They decided to conduct the test on the Aethris-Eos route. An ordinary ship with a Unified Core covered it in roughly two months, reaching about twenty-five light-years per year. The new drive was supposed to cut the time in half. Fifty light-years per year could not compare with the speed of a relay, but a relay delivered only where the network had already been laid. The Continuum Chorus was supposed to fly where no road existed at all.

I watched the launch from the bridge of a cruiser on the far border of the Aethra system. The test ship carried a minimal crew of engineers and drive specialists. They had refused a fully automated test: automation could not correct a failure that did not yet exist in any list of malfunctions.

First, the non-Aether resonators came online. Outwardly the ship did not change, but instruments registered a faint curvature along the central cavity. For almost an hour, the computers compared its shape to the calculated one. An error at this stage posed no threat, but after Aether was connected, any deviation would be amplified together with the field. Only after three independent checks did the head of testing request permission to activate.

I gave it, and the first ring flared in the depths of the channel. Neighboring ones lit next, and then two lines of light ran toward bow and stern. Each cell seized the existing disturbance and amplified it without forming its own geometry. A phase error appeared in one of the stern sections, but the automation isolated the cell and redistributed the load between neighboring ones. The field trembled, but did not fall apart.

After the last amplifier engaged, the stars behind the ship distorted, and its outline lost sharpness for an instant. The spatial shell enveloped all four hundred eighty-seven meters of the hull. Then the resonators began changing phase in sequence, creating a traveling wave along the central channel. The ship vanished without a flash or acceleration, leaving behind only a rapidly fading disturbance.

For a month, we received its messages through faster-than-light communication. On the twelfth day, another cell failed; on the twenty-first, a block of four amplifiers had to be shut down; and part of the stern resonators overheated more than calculated. Speed was reduced by several percent, but the shell held. Failure of a single section no longer meant the loss of the entire drive.

Thirty-one days later, the Eos observation station detected a disturbance at the edge of the system. The experimental ship emerged from transit almost eight hundred thousand kilometers from the calculated point. Seven cells were nonfunctional, the stern block needed repairs, but the hull remained intact, and the crew had not lost a single aiteri. A route that had taken two months had been crossed in one. The average speed reached almost fifty light-years per year.

Serial production remained far away. The central cavity consumed useful volume, field preparation took hours, and the five-hundred-meter limit could not be exceeded without risk. But the main result was no longer in doubt. We had not simply enlarged the Unified Core. We had replicated the fundamental action of Aether, learning to link the electromagnetic field with the gravitational one, and then used Aether itself as an amplifier of a structure we had created.

The Dominion's main fleet still depended on the relays, but that was ceasing to be an insurmountable limitation. Five hundred meters was only the first step, yet even a ship of that size was already enough to deliver an army, industrial equipment, and the foundation of a future shipyard to an isolated star.

Where the network of the ancients ended, the Dominion had for the first time gained the ability to lay roads of its own.