Ethereal Effect. Chapter 29. (Patreon)

Aellarin

For a month now, every news source in the Dominion had spoken of only one thing: an unidentified object approaching Aetris at enormous speed. At first, the real agitation had been limited to the Council of Eternals and the military command. But once the preliminary calculations were confirmed, the news ceased to be a state secret and spread throughout the Dominion.

A giant asteroid, approximately one hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter, was approaching Aetris. It was moving at nearly three hundred kilometers per second and, if its trajectory did not change, would collide with our homeworld in twenty-two years. The mass media quickly gave it a fitting name: the Spawn.

Its size was not the only strange thing about it. Its speed was strange as well. According to astrophysical statistics, the median velocity of interstellar bodies relative to the Aethra system was approximately forty-two kilometers per second. The Spawn was moving more than seven times faster than that, and it was flying almost exactly toward Aetris.

The first theory was an alien attack. The combination of size, speed, and direction looked far too improbable. For several weeks, scientists searched for signs of engines, an aether field, artificial course correction, or mechanisms hidden inside the asteroid, but they found nothing.

The Spawn turned out to be an ordinary celestial body. At least, as ordinary as a stone capable of destroying the birthplace of an entire species could be.

The energy of the impact would be enough to turn the surface of Aetris into a single molten ocean. In the first moments, the crust in the impact zone would vanish, and ejected matter would leave the atmosphere and spread across the entire planet. A significant part of it would fall back as a rain of incandescent debris, heating the surface even on the opposite side of the world.

The shockwave would circle the planet several times. Mountain chains would collapse, cities would disappear, and most of the oceans would almost instantly turn into superheated steam. The atmosphere would fill with dust, molten particles, and toxic vapors from the depths of the crust.

After the initial impact, the next stage of the catastrophe would begin. Evaporated water and the substances thrown into the atmosphere would create a monstrous greenhouse effect, while falling fragments would continue to heat the surface. Even regions not directly destroyed would become uninhabitable within hours.

After a few days, Aetris would no longer be recognizable. The oceans would vanish, the continents would disappear beneath layers of molten rock, and cities and forests would become part of one vast incandescent mass. The planet sacred to our people would turn into a dead stone, slowly cooling in lifeless space.

Perhaps some primitive organisms would survive deep within the crust. Certain bacteria can endure conditions no engineer would believe possible. But for the aiterri, the aruns, the lizards, and the entire civilization we had created, it would make no difference.

The first tens of billions would die directly from the impact, overheating, and the destruction of the atmosphere. Those in deep underground cities and military shelters would last a little longer. Yet without the surface, power grids, food supplies, and cooling systems, even the most protected complexes would gradually become tombs.

Orbital stations would not be a salvation either. Some would be destroyed by ejecta, others by debris, and the rest would be cut off from the main reserves and industrial centers. Even if some ships managed to leave the system, they would carry away only a small fraction of the population.

However enormous our fleets might be, we could not evacuate tens of billions of residents from Aetris. That would require millions of transports, endless fuel reserves, cities on other planets prepared in advance, and decades of continuous relocation. Most of the population simply would not have time to leave the homeworld.

Fortunately, our technology allowed us not to fear even an object ten times larger. We did not need to stop the asteroid completely or instantly compensate for the monstrous inertia of such a massive body. It was enough to change the direction of its motion very slowly.

Several specialized ships would anchor themselves near the Spawn and spend months building up a lateral impulse. Even a slight deviation, created twenty-one years before the projected collision, would eventually carry the object millions of kilometers away from Aetris.

Therefore, the asteroid itself hardly frightened us. What worried us far more was how long it could have remained unnoticed if our observation system had been even slightly weaker. Had the Spawn been discovered only a few months before impact, even the Dominion would have had to make a colossal effort to save the planet.

Such early detection became possible thanks to the defense system of the metropole, which continued to grow stronger every year. Aetris, just as it had been many thousands of years ago, remained the most important world of our species. We had created hundreds of colonies, subjugated new systems, and built Hivecore, but the true center of the Dominion was here.

If we lost Aetris, then with a probability of at least ninety-five percent, the aiterri would eventually disappear as a unified species. Individual colonies and groups would continue to exist, perhaps for several more millennia. But without the metropole, the Council of Eternals, the old universities, the main archives, and the largest industrial chains, they would gradually dissolve among other peoples or perish in new wars.

Of course, that assumption did not account for the Reapers. If they destroyed all advanced life in the galaxy, then the difference between five thousand years and a single century would become purely academic.

Year after year, through the efforts of our entire state, the Aethra system continued to turn into a fortress. The greater part of the military budget went to the war with the rachni, the construction of ships, and the cleansing of infested worlds. Yet even in the hardest years, the Council never stopped financing the defense of the metropole.

That defense was not built around one enormous ship, however impressive it might be. At present, there was only one God of War-class monitor in the system: a three-kilometer vessel that served as the headquarters of all military forces in Aethra and as a symbol of the Dominion's power. Its armament would be sufficient to destroy a full enemy fleet, but sending such a ship into battle without its proper escort would be madness.

No ship wins a war alone. Even the most powerful monitor needed scouts, interceptors, escort cruisers, repair ships, and transports. Tactical victory was achieved not by the size of a single hull, but through the coordinated actions of many ships of different purposes.

Palpatine's Empire, for example, should have built not one Death Star and then several more variations of it, but ten thousand Star Destroyers, each carrying a hundred cyclonic torpedoes. That would have served it far better. But apparently, the ability to pour resources into giant vulnerable symbols was a mandatory trait of all galactic empires.

Our early-warning system already exceeded the God of War in total cost. More than ten thousand observation stations operated in interplanetary space, on distant orbits, and in the cloud of small bodies. Many of them were simple automated platforms, but together they formed a continuous sensor network.

Some stations tracked gravitational disturbances, others searched for aether fields, and still others monitored ordinary electromagnetic radiation. Information flowed into several independent centers so that the destruction of one node would not blind the entire system. It was one of the distant stations that detected the Spawn while it was still an almost invisible point among the stars.

The system was guarded by a considerable fleet that included ships found nowhere else in the galaxy. The metropole had always served as a proving ground for the newest technologies, because only here were there enough resources, specialists, and safety systems. Among such ships was a prototype armed with a true magnetohydrodynamic cannon.

Inside its chamber, a molten mixture of iron, uranium, and tungsten was suspended. An aether field prevented the substance from touching the walls of the installation, while a system of magnetic circuits shaped the melt into a dense elongated projectile. Then it entered a huge toroidal accelerator and gained more energy with each orbit.

After acceleration, the projectile was expelled from the weapon at a significant fraction of light speed. The target was struck not only by monstrous kinetic energy, but also by the heating produced at the moment of impact. Even if armor survived the initial impulse, the melt and the ejected matter would continue to devastate the internal compartments.

The main difficulty lay not in the idea itself. Theoretical work on such weapons had existed for many years. The problem was the toroidal accelerator: the faster the projectile moved, the more energy was required to hold it on a closed trajectory.

The solution came from the principle discovered during the creation of the independent FTL drive. Our scientists had learned to combine electromagnetic and gravitational fields with local curvature of space. For the projectile itself, the path inside the accelerator seemed almost like a straight line, even though from the outside it continued to move within a toroidal chamber.

It was still impossible to feed energy into the molten projectile indefinitely. The fields gradually lost stability, and the slightest error threatened to destroy not only the weapon, but the carrier ship as well. Even so, the current results made the technology extremely promising, and new test ships with more powerful energy systems were already under construction in the shipyards.

Perhaps it was precisely thanks to this technology that we finally understood the unusual shape of asari ships. Their hulls might conceal similar acceleration circuits, only instead of molten matter the asari probably used ordinary tungsten projectiles.

The development of such technologies required an enormous number of enterprises, laboratories, and qualified specialists. The center of orbital industry remained the Cradle, the first aiterri station, built back in the era when my son Asmund the Great was still alive and ruled the planet. Over the centuries, it had grown into a multi-level city with a permanent population of about one million citizens.

The station had been moved to the geostationary orbit of Aetris and linked to a fixed point on the surface by a vast orbital elevator. It was named the Pillar of Ascension. Lofty, as almost everything among the aiterri was, but at least this time the name did not mention Aethra.

Over time, I had begun to compare the aiterri talent for naming things with Batman's skill in the same field. The Flame of Aethra, the Eyes of Aethra, Dawn, Sunrise, Eclipse - literally everything was connected to our sun or to religious imagery. All that remained was to wait for the Aethramobile, the Aethraplane, and the combat Aethrarang...

In addition to the Cradle, inhabited stations orbited almost every planet in the system. The exception was Pyrra, located too close to the star and subjected to extreme heating and radiation. Only automated complexes and research probes designed for short service lives operated near it.

A gigantic aether-mining facility had been expanding in the asteroid belt for several centuries. Its core was the Corestone, a huge asteroid whose rock contained colossal reserves of element zero. It was from here that the Dominion obtained almost half of all processed aether.

In the same belt were dozens of smaller mining complexes owned by private companies. They had been created by the Great Houses, which were permitted to engage only in extraction and primary processing of raw materials. All volumes were recorded by state services, and any attempt to conceal even a few tons of aether was considered a crime against the Dominion's security.

A special scientific station orbited Moros, housing the Institute of Advanced Virology. Officially, it studied viruses, bacteria, parasites, and other organisms found in every corner of the state. Such research was too dangerous to conduct on Aetris, so even legal laboratories had been moved beyond the home planet.

Unofficial work was conducted much farther away. At a distance of roughly one light-month from Aethra stood several secret stations not marked on any civilian map. In the event of an accident, they could be destroyed without risking infection of inhabited worlds.

Dozens of other institutes, shipyards, stations, and design bureaus required hundreds of thousands of specialists in every field of science. Their training was handled by thousands of universities, which millions of Mortals and Blessed attempted to enter every year.

Among all educational institutions, three stood out in particular. The Higher University of Valinor was located in the capital and trained specialists in almost every field of science and administration. The Technical Academy of Vel-Tarin stood in the planet's largest scientific city and remained the center of fundamental physics, energy systems, and materials science.

The third was the University of Military Shipbuilding. It was located directly on an orbital station beside the Institute of Advanced Shipbuilding, so students could participate in real projects even before completing their education. A significant share of the newest ships began precisely as ideas voiced in its laboratories and lecture halls.

The graduates of these three institutions advanced aiterri science almost as far as the specialists of all other universities combined. That did not mean the other educational institutions were useless. Major discoveries simply rarely spread evenly across a civilization.

All this colossal infrastructure - stations, fleets, universities, mines, laboratories, and cities - existed not merely to protect one world. It had to give the Dominion the ability to develop faster than any potential enemy. Every new ship, every scientist, and every ton of aether brought us closer to the only goal that mattered.

The Dominion had to take its rightful place in the galaxy.

While scientists developed new technologies, politicians - first and foremost the Council of Eternals - searched for a way to ensure that by the end of the war with the rachni, the Dominion would approach the level of the main states of Citadel Space: the Asari Republics and the Salarian Union. The task was almost impossible. Even if the war continued for another two hundred years, technological parity alone would not be enough.

In certain fields, we were already not inferior to the salarians, and in some areas we surpassed them. But behind the asari and salarians stood the resources of thousands of settled worlds and a market that connected dozens of states. Enormous volumes of trade accelerated industrial development, allowed them to maintain many independent scientific schools, and turned even a narrow technology into a commodity that could quickly find use throughout the galaxy.

The Dominion had nothing like that yet. We had a powerful fleet, a rapidly growing population, and dozens of colonies, but we remained a state compressed between the home system and eight clusters that still had to be taken from the rachni. A broad band of infested space separated us from the nearest relatively safe Citadel systems.

Abael Vect was already working to ensure that the asari and salarians lost as much strength as possible in the war. His task was not the defeat of Citadel Space, because a rachni victory benefited no one. He had to prolong the war, prevent the Council's founders from emerging from it too strong, and at the same time secure the Dominion access to their markets and technologies.

From within Dominion territory, nothing more could be done for now. We could not strike at the economies of the asari and salarians, could not interfere in the politics of their republics and clans, and did not have enough ships to influence the entire galactic war. All that remained was to grow our own strength extensively, turning population, territory, and resources into future industry.

It was for this reason that the Council of Eternals approved a new colonization project. It was not supposed to bring benefit in the coming decades and most likely would not pay for itself even within my current lifetime. But in five hundred years, the Dominion could receive an additional power, grown beyond the relay network and inaccessible to direct Citadel control.

Thanks to our allies, we possessed a sufficiently detailed map of the explored part of the galaxy. Most of it consisted of data from salarian scouts, asari expeditions, and the trade routes of younger species. On that map, the Dominion lay northwest of the future Attican Traverse, if one oriented oneself relative to the center of the Milky Way.

Below and east of our territories lay rachni space, and beyond it began the routes of the Citadel. But almost nothing was known about what lay farther from the galactic center, above our holdings on the conventional map. Unopened relays led there, and the Council now forbade sending exploration groups through them.

The agreement banning the activation of unknown relays had already been signed. From my knowledge of canon, I understood that after the war ended, that ban would not be lifted. On the contrary, it would become one of the main principles of Citadel security. Any species tied to its economy would be forced to obey this rule, or at least pretend to obey it.

However, the agreement concerned relays specifically. It said nothing about independent interstellar travel to systems that were not connected to the known network at all.

The first expeditionary group consisted of ten of the newest FTL ships. They were built in complete secrecy, with orders distributed among several shipyards so that no Great House could see the entire project. Officially, the vessels were listed as prototypes of long-range transports and research ships intended to study the space between Aethra and the nearest relay.

Their true mission was different. The group was to move at least two unknown star clusters away from the Dominion, find a suitable planet, and found an independent state there. Communication with the metropole would be maintained, but the colony's very existence was not to appear either in open registries or on maps accessible to Citadel diplomats.

In five hundred years, the new power was to settle most of one cluster, create its own industry, and begin construction of an independent fleet. In the event of war with the Citadel, the krogan, or the Reapers, it could become a reserve center of civilization. Even the destruction of the metropole would not mean the complete disappearance of the aiterri.

The risk of the new state breaking away was obvious. In five hundred years, its inhabitants would no longer see Aetris as their homeworld, or the Dominion as the state of which they had once been a part. To them, the metropole would become a distant legend sending orders from another part of the galaxy.

But we did not intend to leave the colony completely isolated. The Dominion would receive reports, send emissaries, control the development of key technologies, and embed its own security structures into the local system from the very beginning. Even if the new state became formally independent, we would know more about it than its own citizens did.

An Eternal was to stand at the head of the colony. He would remember life in the Dominion, understand the reasons for creating the new state, and possess enough time to guide it through the first centuries of development. After other Eternals appeared, power could be divided among them, but the main line of subordination to the metropole had to be preserved.

Of course, even immortality did not guarantee loyalty. An Eternal might decide that the power he had created no longer needed the Dominion, or begin to regard himself as its true god. However, the Council knew very well how to deal with those who forgot the limits of their own authority, and colonial rulers were to understand that punishment could come even after several centuries.

The expedition's route was calculated to take nearly a decade. During that time, the ten ships had to cover roughly three hundred light-years, survey several systems, and find a Class A world. Then they would have to deploy reactors, production complexes, ectogenesis installations, and begin growing the first generation of colonists.

Most of the population would not be transported from Aetris. The ships could not carry millions of citizens along with industrial equipment and supplies. Instead, they carried genetic banks, tens of thousands of embryos, automated upbringing centers, and a small group of adult specialists who were to become the teachers of the new society.

The first generation of children would grow up already on the new planet. They would be raised to love the Dominion and take pride in the mission they were carrying out, but at the same time they would be prepared for life in a state that could not count on regular help for decades. They had to become engineers, doctors, builders, pilots, and soldiers before they became ordinary citizens.

The choice of planet was especially important. For several centuries, the Dominion had used a unified world-classification system that allowed a planet's colonization suitability and strategic value to be described briefly. The first letter indicated the general category of the planet.

Class A included worlds on which aiterri could live almost without additional protection. They had a suitable atmosphere, acceptable temperature, liquid water, and a biosphere that did not present a constant threat. Even such planets required quarantine and adaptation, but a full city could be built directly on the surface.

Class B included habitable worlds with serious regional problems. On one planet, most of the surface might be covered in ice; on another, heat, high gravity, or unstable weather might dominate. Life remained possible, but cities had to be placed in particular climate zones or protected by additional infrastructure.

Class C worlds could be colonized only with sealed cities, complex life-support systems, and constant imports of certain resources. This group included planets with unbreathable atmospheres, shortages of water, weak magnetic fields, or excessive radiation. Mining, scientific, and military settlements were built there, but large civilian centers were rarely created.

Class D designated worlds whose settlement was technically possible but economically almost pointless. A permanent population there could exist only inside underground complexes or fully isolated stations. Such planets were colonized for unique resources, strategic position, or the need to create a base in the system.

The final category, Class F, included objects on which no stable colony could be created even with modern technology. Extreme pressure, oceans of molten substances, destructive radiation, or constant geological instability made construction too dangerous. Only automated stations designed for limited service lives operated on such worlds.

A standard cluster usually contained twenty to thirty planets accessible through an internal relay network. In a fortunate case, five of them belonged to Class A, about ten to Class B, and the rest were distributed among Classes C, D, and F. But poor clusters also existed, where the only suitable world became the center of the entire local civilization.

A planet's full code contained several additional designations. After the main category came the presence of a relay: zero meant its absence, R meant an ordinary relay, and RS meant a major hub connected to intercluster transitions. The next digit reflected the real suitability of the biosphere, and the last one indicated the element-zero content of the planet's interior.

The lower the numerical value, the better the characteristic was considered. Aetris had the classification A-0-2-3. It was a beautiful world without its own relay, with a sufficiently safe biosphere - although widespread megafauna slightly lowered its rating - and good reserves of aether.

The homeworld of the lizards, Eirena in the Eos system, had the code A-RS-5-9. The planet was habitable and located near a cluster relay, but the local biosphere required serious caution, while its own element-zero reserves were extremely poor. That was why its development had long depended on Dominion supplies.

An interesting pattern was that near major cluster relays, in roughly ninety-five percent of cases, there was a Class A or Class B world. Such a frequent coincidence was difficult to explain by chance. Either the creators of the network placed relays near suitable systems, or they altered the planets themselves before building the hubs.

Aside from worlds connected by relays, every cluster contained other suitable systems. Sometimes they had Class A and Class B planets that no sapient species had ever visited because ordinary ships could not reach them in an acceptable time. Such worlds were of particular interest to the new colonization project.

Settling them remained monstrously expensive. A ship capable of independently crossing interstellar space cost approximately ten times more than a relay vessel of the same size. If one accounted for low speed, voyage duration, and the number of trips required, cargo delivery became twenty-five or thirty times more expensive.

Even the discovery of new principles of FTL movement had not solved the problem completely. Independent ships had become faster and more reliable, but they still could not match the ancient network, which could move fleets between systems in moments. Therefore, almost everywhere the Dominion preferred to settle worlds near relays, where each transport could make dozens of runs in the time required for one independent voyage.

The exception remained the home cluster. Aetris was located approximately four light-years from the nearest relay, so an independent cargo fleet was a vital necessity for the metropole. Without it, the home system would be cut off from the rest of the Dominion, and the delivery of resources, population, and military equipment would depend on too few expensive ships.

That was why the shipyards of Aethra almost never stood idle. They built not only warships, but also heavy freighters capable of carrying reactors, production lines, station sections, and millions of tons of raw materials. For distant colonization, such ships were more important than cruisers, because without a cargo fleet even a conquered planet remained an empty point on a map.

Only the home cluster possessed enough industrial power to pay attention to habitable worlds outside the relay network. For other territories, such a project would mean exhausting the economy for the sake of a single colony. The metropole, however, could afford to build independent transports not only for profit, but for strategic security.

The secret expedition became the first true use of that capability. Ten ships carried everything needed to create a state where there were no roads, no stations, and not even names for the stars. If the project succeeded, then in five hundred years the Dominion would possess an entire cluster about which Citadel Space would know nothing.

If the expedition perished, the galaxy would not know that either.

For ten ships and several thousand specialists, it was a monstrous wager. For a state preparing for the coming of the Reapers, it was merely one more attempt to buy the future.