Ethereal Effect. Chapter 28. (Patreon)

Abael Vekt

Politics had always been a dirty and unfair business. It felt especially clear when you were nothing more than a poor guest who had arrived at the center of galactic civilization. No one in the embassy delegation had expected selfless hospitality, but they started stripping us bare before our ships had even finished unloading.

The first proposal after our arrival concerned the sale of one of our cruisers to the joint military committee. A few days later, a similar offer came from one of the asari republics, and then from a salarian clan connected to the fleet. Everyone spoke of friendship and the common struggle against the rachni, but the price they named would not have built even half of a reactor section in the Dominion.

The Presidium around us looked as if the war existed somewhere in another galaxy. An artificial sky hung above the gardens, water flowed through perfectly clean channels, and the embassies stood among greenery without fortress walls or visible garrisons. Only the Keepers calmly opened panels in the floors and walls, reminding everyone that even the asari and salarians did not fully understand the station they called the center of their civilization.

After our refusals, no one threatened us openly. The cost of cargo storage simply rose, and new safety requirements appeared at the docks. The Citadel politely reminded us that hospitality ended where someone else's profit began.

The station itself was arranged with surprising harmony. The asari created the impression of order, the salarians filled offices with analysts, the volus managed the accounts, the elcor interpreted treaties, the quarians maintained complex equipment, and the batarians took on work no one wanted tied to their own name. There was room for almost every species except the krogan, who had been dying on rachni worlds for twenty years and were still considered too dangerous for true autonomy.

The clans constantly requested that new planets be transferred to them. Each petition passed through commissions, after which it turned out that the rewards had already been consumed by transport leases, the cost of ammunition, medical treatment, compensation for lost ships, and penalties for uncoordinated actions. The krogan destroyed hives and saved the galaxy, but they possessed no warships of their own and could fly only where the Citadel fleets agreed to carry them.

They tried to treat the Dominion more gently, though the principle remained the same. Because of our state's uncertain status, the entire mission was allowed to open only a diplomatic account. It could pay for housing, berths, transport, and goods necessary for life, but nearly all commercial operations remained closed.

We could buy dinner for a quarian engineer, but we could not purchase an industrial program from him. We could bring element zero as diplomatic cargo, but we had no right to sell even a single container. A sale required certification, a trade office, and a commercial account.

Formally, no one prohibited anything. We merely had to open a commercial account. But to do that, we needed a first completed transaction, and completing a transaction without an account was impossible. To register a trade office, we needed a guarantor bank, but no bank intended to guarantee the obligations of a state with no credit history, and such a history could only be obtained after several operations.

In addition, the volus required an assessment of the Dominion's economy, property laws, the currency exchange rate, debt collection procedures, the structure of the Great Houses, and an explanation of who would bear responsibility if the Council of Eternals refused to comply with a ruling by local arbitration. I had no intention of hiding such information, but the documents had to be translated, recognized as legally valid, and carried through dozens of commissions. Even by a favorable estimate, the procedures would take no less than ten years, during which five thousand seven hundred and eighty-one aiterri could spend money, but had no right to earn it.

And then the Council representatives offered help. The Dominion could transfer several warships as a voluntary donation to the common struggle against the rachni, and the Council promised to accelerate review of our documents. The ships would be handed over without payment, and in exchange we would receive only a promise that someday we might be allowed to sell raw materials.

If the Council's power had been real, we would have had no choice. Fortunately, the Citadel was still not the capital of a united galaxy, but a diplomatic station where the asari and salarians coordinated war and trade. Real power remained with the republics, clans, and governments of the member species, each of which could conclude its own treaties.

I could have tried to sell goods to the quarians or batarians, but the Council would immediately have found reasons to delay certification, inspect the carrier, and freeze the payments. We needed a partner capable of guiding us through the financial system itself, and interested enough to withstand pressure from the founders. That left me with no option but to approach the volus.

Tarek Vess, Operational Directorate of the Salarian Union

Every one of the five thousand seven hundred and eighty-one aiterri on the Citadel was under surveillance. Most of the work was done by cameras, transport logs, financial terminals, and purchase analysis, so the guests themselves barely noticed the control. So far, they behaved impeccably: diplomats conducted negotiations, scientists visited laboratories, and military officers studied reports on the rachni.

Even their acquisitions looked harmless. The aiterri bought omni-tools, medicines, food synthesizers, civilian programs, fabric samples, and equipment for different atmospheres. Formally, all of it belonged to the open market, though taken together it allowed them to quickly assess the level of everyday Citadel technology.

Abael Vekt was of separate interest. Xenopsychologists considered him one of the most educated and cultured sapients the group had encountered. He spoke with equal confidence to matriarchs, bankers, and krogan commanders, almost never asking direct questions whose answers he truly wanted.

The salarian government was already considering options for an alliance with the Dominion. Clan memory had not forgotten how the asari republics had become involved in the war and gradually claimed the right to determine common policy. A new species with a strong fleet, reserves of element zero, and experience fighting the rachni could become a useful counterweight.

No one, however, intended to trust the new power. There were certainly intelligence personnel among the diplomats and scientists, though most acted within acceptable limits. Only one woman, designated as Gray, began gathering information about unofficial docks, forged codes, smuggling stations, and ways to leave the Citadel without registration.

She hid her face behind a mask, did not use embassy transport, and worked through batarian intermediaries. In two months a small network had formed around her, consisting of port workers, a bar owner, and several carriers. It was not yet a criminal organization, but in a year such a network could conceal people, money, and equipment.

There was not enough proof of Gray's affiliation with the Dominion for an official accusation. Her body proportions matched the aiterri, her time of appearance corresponded with the mission's arrival, and biological traces were close to existing samples. That was enough for an internal conclusion, but a public detention would only force the embassy to change methods.

Tarek was troubled by the woman's mistakes. She was careful enough to avoid cameras, but several times used the same intermediary, and once left a biological trace in an establishment serviced by a salarian company. Each error looked accidental, yet together they seemed to invite intelligence to keep watching.

It was decided to remove Gray from the Citadel and obtain a living specialist without a diplomatic scandal. Through her batarian contact, a message was passed about an exposed intermediary ready to sell a list of port employees working for criminals. The capture was assigned to pirates, who were to carry the prisoner out on a freighter and hand her over to a salarian operational group in an empty system.

After the transfer, the woman would face a closed interrogation, and the vessel with the contractors was to disappear together with its crew. No one enjoyed the brutality of the operation, but intelligence could not allow a foreign network to take root in the largest ports. Gray confirmed the meeting suspiciously quickly, but the plan had already been approved.

The woman disappeared from the cargo sector cameras, after which the batarian ship left the station. A few hours later, it changed course, appeared at the illegal cargo station Charon's Edge, and then exploded at the dock. The blast disabled the control room and forced one hundred and forty-three ships to immediately leave the system.

The salarian group arrived too late. The pirates were dead, no remains of the prisoner were found, and the station's records were damaged. Gray had either died or dissolved among the many cargo routes leading to different relays.

Only then did Tarek understand the true purpose of her work. The woman had never intended to build a large network on the Citadel, nor had she tried to deceive salarian surveillance. She had left exactly enough traces for intelligence to arrange an unregistered departure from the station for her.

Kelara Veyn, Dominion Inquisition

I woke up already in the cargo hold, chained to the deck and with a suppression collar around my neck. The batarians did not try to remove my mask and barely spoke, which finally confirmed professional intelligence involvement. Ordinary pirates would first have determined the value of their prisoner; these ones only checked the restraints and reported the condition of the cargo to someone every ten minutes.

I allowed the ship to get far enough from the Citadel before freeing myself. The collar was designed for direct contact with skin, and under my mask and collar there remained a small gap, enough for a weak pulse of the Gift. The first guard lost consciousness, the second did not have time to raise the alarm, and the rest understood what was happening only after the passages between compartments were locked.

They did not resist for long, but the captain refused to name the client or the transfer route. The interrogation took twelve minutes and ended only when he stopped hoping to keep his health. After several attempts to lie, the captain provided the coordinates of an empty system and the confirmation code. I did not ask for the name of the salarian handler, because the contractors would not know it anyway.

In the stern section I found a device even the crew had not known about. The charge was built in beside the fuel circuits and was meant to destroy the vessel after the prisoner's transfer. I reset the timer and ordered the captain to point out the nearest cargo station where one could change ships without identity checks.

Charon's Edge turned out to be an old transshipment hub around which a market of smugglers and independent carriers had grown. We entered the dock under the freighter's active codes, after which I left the ship in a worker's cloak and another mask. The crew remained locked inside; living witnesses could describe me far more accurately than wreckage.

A few minutes before the explosion, I slipped into the cargo container of another transport preparing to depart for one of the distant relays. The blast destroyed two docks, disabled the traffic control system, and forced captains to leave the station immediately. Among a hundred scattering ships, no one would be able to determine exactly where the unscheduled cargo had gone.

Abael Vekt

The volus looked strange even against the background of the Citadel's many species. Short figures in sealed suits, heavy breathing, and a habit of interrupting speech with the hiss of their apparatus created an almost comical impression. One should not be fooled by it, because a weak people would never have built an interstellar state and forced more numerous species to use the currency it had created.

The volus were limited by their small population and by the absence of some technologies possessed by the asari and salarians. That was exactly what I intended to play on, offering them a ship that would not change the Dominion's balance of power, but would give them a chance to move closer to the founders' level. In exchange, they would guide us through the banking procedures and become guarantor for the first trade office.

The negotiations lasted a month and a half and moved through a chain of lawyers, shell consultations, and meetings not reflected in official schedules. Concealing the very fact of the discussions proved harder than agreeing on the price, since the Council would certainly find a new safety regulation prohibiting the deal. The volus used their own premises, elcor arbiters, and documents divided into dozens of appendices so that no outsider could see the entire contract.

We were transferring one previous-generation cruiser, while the clearing house opened a commercial account for the Dominion, registered a representative office, and guaranteed the first operations in the credit network. Ownership of the hull transferred completely, but production documentation, program code, and intellectual property remained ours. The volus could disassemble the ship, study it, and create their own solutions, but they did not receive the legal right to copy Dominion designs.

There were no special secrets aboard the cruiser anyway. Its systems were not inferior to salarian ones, but each could be reproduced by a civilization with a sufficient industrial base. From the beginning, the Dominion had built ships so that the loss of a single hull in battle, or its possible sale, would not reveal production methods, active ciphers, and critical technologies.

The deal benefited both sides. The volus received a technological breakthrough and an opportunity to profit from resale, while we became a participant in the economy without a decade of waiting and without the humiliating donation to the Council. A month and a half after the negotiations began, the contract was signed, and one old cruiser opened a path for the Dominion that several thousand tons of element zero could not.

Neilis T'Saar, External Surveillance Service of the Asari Republics

Edar Nolis was a convenient source precisely because he did not consider himself a traitor. He served as an ordinary clerk in the diplomatic mission, compiled schedules, carried documents between departments, and had access to many small pieces of information, each of which had no value by itself. He disliked the work, but he loved telling others how important the papers passing through his hands were.

Nolis often visited asari salons, where he willingly boasted of acquaintance with members of the delegation and his supposedly special position under Abael Vekt. He did not need large sums of money or the promise of new citizenship. An expensive drink, an attentive listener, and a few compliments to his insight were enough.

Neilis felt no hatred toward him. Nolis was too small, vain, and predictable for that. Sometimes he even evoked pity when he proudly brought another useless detail and waited for praise, as though he had performed a real intelligence feat.

Pity, however, did not interfere with the work. Nolis voluntarily traded the trust of his compatriots for a feeling of his own importance, which meant he had chosen the role offered to him. Neilis merely made sure he received enough attention and did not start asking himself why beautiful asari had suddenly become interested in the life of an ordinary clerk.

It was through him that the service learned of the cruiser sale to the volus. For the asari republics, the danger lay not in one ship, but in the precedent created. The Dominion was entering the credit system through a species that held no seat on the Council, while the volus were gaining technology comparable to salarian systems.

Nolis did not understand the significance of the information he had brought. He was more pleased that he had seen the ship's name, heard lawyers' conversations, and could convince his acquaintances that he had personally participated in preparing the contract. In reality, Abael Vekt probably barely remembered his name, and that was exactly what Nolis tried to compensate for with his stories.

It was decided to destroy the cruiser after the transfer and leave evidence that the aiterri themselves had planted the device, unwilling to surrender the technology to the buyer. Nolis provided the testing schedule, the list of contractors, and temporary codes used by mission employees. He was told that a secret review of the deal was being conducted and that his help protected the interests of the Citadel.

He believed it without serious doubt. That version allowed him to see himself not as a recruited clerk, but as a responsible sapient who had noticed suspicious activity by his own superiors. Perhaps Nolis even imagined that after the investigation he would be invited into official service and his abilities finally recognized.

The volus discovered the device before the engines were started. Their security service noticed a discrepancy in the cruiser's technical indicators, sealed the berth, and began checking everyone who had access to the internal compartments. The batarian contractor disappeared, the intermediaries destroyed their communication channels, and Nolis changed from a convenient source into a living witness.

Officially, they were going to invite him to an additional conversation. Nolis received a message from an asari acquaintance asking him to meet in one of the Presidium establishments he visited often enough not to suspect a trap. On the way, the local order service was to stop him under the pretext of checking his documents.

Members of external surveillance were stationed nearby in advance, but in the official records they appeared as ordinary Presidium visitors. In Nolis's own bag lay an illegal shock weapon, purchased a few weeks earlier through a batarian trader. The clerk had acquired it on his own initiative, wanting to feel more important and dangerous than he truly was, but the service knew about the purchase and decided to make use of that weakness.

When two order officers called his name, Nolis first stopped and tried to smile. He was told he needed to come with them to clarify the circumstances of a financial operation. After those words, he realized it might concern the information he had passed on, and all his imaginary courage vanished.

Nolis began making excuses, though he had not yet been accused of anything. Then he stepped back, collided with a passing asari, and tried to break free when one of the officers took him by the arm. Security demanded that he calm down, but the clerk no longer heard the words and saw only inevitable arrest ahead of him.

He ran across the alley, knocking over a small cafe table. The order officers repeatedly ordered him to stop, while the Presidium cameras dutifully recorded the chase. Everything looked exactly as it was supposed to look: a frightened suspect, lawful demands from security, and a gradually growing threat to bystanders.

At the fork, Nolis reached into his bag. Perhaps he wanted to throw the shock weapon away, or perhaps he truly tried to use it. For the official report it did not matter, because the officers saw the weapon and opened fire.

Nolis fell in the middle of the alley, still trying for several seconds to understand why no one was hurrying to help him. The medical team arrived quickly, but by then it was already impossible to save him. The nearest camera recording clearly showed the prohibited weapon in his hand, the attempted flight, and the officers' actions, which fully complied with regulations.

Officially, a tragic accident had occurred. A diplomatic mission clerk suspected of financial violations had panicked during detention, resisted, and created a threat to Presidium visitors. The order service expressed regret, the administration promised an internal review, and the executors received short leaves until the formal procedures were complete.

Abael Vekt

I was summoned to the closed chamber of the interspecies trade arbitration four days after the device was discovered. The volus demanded confirmation that the contract remained valid, the Presidium administration was considering freezing our account, and asari representatives claimed the bomb might have been part of a hidden self-destruction system. An elcor was chosen as presiding arbiter, since only his slowness could keep the sides from drowning the facts in political phrasing.

The origin of some components, the traitor's access to documents, and his death during detention spoke against the Dominion. I did not deny that Edar Nolis had served in the mission and had passed information to a third party. Instead of excuses, the chamber received records of his meetings, payments, conversations, and a list of the information he had provided to asari intermediaries over several weeks.

There was no direct link to state intelligence in the materials. The intermediaries had used false names and one-time accounts, while the only person capable of giving testimony was already dead. I separately noted that the results of our investigation had been passed to the volus embassy, and that unfortunately the true organizer of the sabotage could not be established.

The access logs became the primary evidence. After the cruiser was transferred, no Dominion employee had gone aboard without escort, and the device appeared seventeen days later, when the ship already belonged to the clearing house. During that period, only volus specialists, an elcor registrar, and the batarian contractor who vanished immediately after the sabotage was uncovered had worked in the technical compartments.

The chamber ruled that there was no evidence of Dominion involvement, the contract remained valid, and economic access was not subject to freezing. A separate investigation was transferred to the Citadel administration, where it would surely drown among commissions and competing interests. The volus received the right to complete registration of our representative office, and soon resold the cruiser to a salarian consortium for a sum many times greater than the original price.

In six months, the Dominion lost one obsolete cruiser, a useless traitor, and officially lost an employee abducted by batarian pirates. In exchange, we gained access to the credit system, an alliance with a volus clearing house, and an agent dissolved among the Citadel worlds. Opening a bank account turned out to be harder than winning a battle, but the consequences of this victory promised to be far more significant.

---

Aellarin

The enormous rachni wave we faced during the return of the Citadel diplomatic mission frightened all of us in earnest. Many times I convinced myself that, had that armada attacked only the Dominion, we still would have managed to stop it. Our fleets were strong enough, our defensive plans accounted for such scenarios, and our shipyards could replace part of the losses.

But the price of such a victory would have increased many times over. Without asari ships, the enemy would have been able to concentrate all its fire on our battle groups, and the destruction of two monitors would have been only the beginning. We would have won, but afterward one new rachni wave might have thrown the Dominion back by several decades.

Sometimes I asked myself whether we should have completely separated our relay network from the rest of the galaxy. Destroy a few passages, seal the remaining routes, and hide inside our own clusters. Even under the most unfavorable development of events, the Rachni War would have passed us by.

We could have calmly settled two hundred and fifty available worlds, fortified every system, and continued measured development. Let the rest of the galaxy first burn in the war with the rachni, then collide with krogan aggression, and centuries later receive the geth uprising. Meanwhile the Dominion would perfect independent interstellar flight and return to the galactic arena only when it no longer needed the relays.

In another situation, I would have done exactly that. A thousand years of peaceful development can turn a strong state into a true superpower. But I had only about two thousand years left before the Reapers arrived, and I had no intention of giving half that time away for the sake of safety.

The Dominion needed the technologies of other species. It needed galactic markets, production standards, medicines, programs, materials, and the experience of civilizations that had reached the stars long before us. Isolation would have protected the present, but at the same time stolen our future.

We had to pay for the chance to develop faster. Thousands of crews had to hold the borders, dozens of shipyards had to constantly replace losses, and colonies had to send ever more shipments of resources to the front. No one had promised that the path to saving civilization would be safe.

Still, in case of a real catastrophe, the main relays had already been prepared for destruction. Charges, autonomous observation stations, and ships were placed around them, with crews who knew that if the defense collapsed, they would have to cut the Dominion's inner territories off from the rest of the network. It was a last resort, not part of ordinary strategy, but it was better to have the ability to close a door than one day discover that the door did not exist at all.

While Abael Vekt and the other diplomats did their work on the Citadel, the Dominion had no intention of relaxing. We had to tear out with our teeth every advantage the galaxy could provide. The more star clusters we seized and developed by the end of the war, the faster we would be able to grow after it.

According to current calculations, we needed at least another thirty years to fully clear the planets under our control, restore the defenses, and prepare for an offensive. Only after that could we seriously speak of capturing the next cluster. Until then, the Dominion's main weapon remained not the fleet, but the ability to turn liberated systems into its own territory.

Clearing a planet of rachni was not enough. An empty world did not produce ships, maintain garrisons, or help hold the border. True victory began only after cities, orbital stations, energy grids, and a permanent population appeared on its surface.

Colonization proceeded on dozens of worlds at once. First, engineering complexes, mobile reactors, and automated construction lines descended to the surface. Around the first landing sites, temporary settlements grew up, and within a few years they became real cities.

The first buildings were assembled from ready-made sections delivered from developed worlds. Later, local plants began operating, processing stone, metals, and the remnants of rachni structures. In ten years a colony could already supply itself with basic materials, and after a few more years it began returning more resources to the Dominion than it received.

Not every world became an ordinary colony. Each planet was assessed by its position, climate, mineral reserves, and surviving rachni infrastructure. Some became industrial centers, others agricultural worlds, still others military fortresses and supply bases.

Planets where the rachni had managed to create a broad network of underground tunnels without poisoning the atmosphere with toxins were especially valuable. After cleansing, specialists mapped every accessible level, collapsed dangerous areas, and reinforced and adapted the rest for the Dominion's needs. What had once served the hive gradually became part of our defense.

Deep underground, ammunition, fuel, and spare-parts depots were placed. Protected command centers, laboratories, hospitals, and shelters for the population were built there as well. Even loss of orbit was not supposed to mean the immediate fall of a planet.

Some complexes descended several kilometers deep and could withstand a prolonged siege. Cities, spaceports, and industrial districts remained on the surface, but the main military infrastructure was hidden within the depths. The rachni themselves had shown us how difficult it was to destroy an enemy that knew how to use the entire thickness of a planetary crust.

Of course, turning every world into Hivenkor was impossible. There would not be enough aether, equipment, or specialists for that. But even a small network of underground depots allowed a frontier system to continue supply after its orbital stations were destroyed.

Fortified nodes were created around strategic worlds. Each system included repair docks, warehouses, sensor stations, mobile platforms, and a local defense group. Every such node had to support neighboring systems and hold out without help from the metropole for at least several months.

After the last rachni wave, the previous defense scheme no longer satisfied anyone. Earlier, the main forces had been concentrated near relays and the most likely directions of attack. Now we were creating several successive lines so that a breach in one line would not open a road into the Dominion's depths.

Reserve units, repair detachments, and crews for auxiliary ships were formed on cleared worlds. They could not replace the metropolitan fleet, but they freed battle groups from guarding convoys, stations, and secondary routes. Each new world gradually reduced the burden on the old systems.

The main limitation turned out to be not territory, and not even raw materials. We lacked the population capable of developing the space we had gained. A planet could be captured in a few months, but building cities, factories, and administrations required millions of citizens and decades.

The ectogenesis facilities worked almost without interruption. Great and minor Houses received quotas for new colonies if they could prove they would provide future citizens with housing, education, and work. The state provided transport, initial equipment, and protection, while the Houses took on the bulk of civilian construction.

Such a system allowed faster development, but strengthened the dependence of individual worlds on the Houses that had founded them. After several generations, the inhabitants of a colony might consider themselves first and foremost subjects of their organization, and only then citizens of the Dominion. The Council saw this threat, but for now it remained an acceptable price for the speed of expansion.

Strategic objects still remained under metropolitan control. Relays, main orbital shipyards, military stations, aether depots, and long-range communication systems were not transferred to the Houses. They could build cities and factories, but they did not receive the right to deny the state fleet access to a system.

Special attention was paid to independent faster-than-light ships. Their production remained expensive and their speed inferior to relays, but even several such vessels in each cluster could preserve contact after the destruction of the main passages. If the network ever had to be divided, the parts of the Dominion must not find themselves completely cut off from one another.

Over the next thirty years, we had to create not merely new colonies. We were building territory capable of surviving the loss of a relay, the destruction of orbital infrastructure, and a prolonged siege. Every cleared world had to become part of the common system, not another point on a beautiful map.

Only after this work was complete could we go on the offensive. A new cluster meant dozens of infected planets, stretched supply lines, and one more front that would have to be held for centuries. Seizing space faster than we could digest it was more dangerous than any retreat.

So the fleet remained on the defensive lines for now, engineering corps went deep into the cleared worlds, and millions of colonists arrived each year in cities that had not existed a year earlier. The war continued, but behind the ships' backs a new civilization was gradually arising.

The war with the rachni had to make us stronger.

Otherwise, all the losses we had suffered had no meaning.