Ethereal Effect. Chapter 31. (Patreon)

Two hundred and eighty-nine years was an age that, for an ordinary Aiterri, would already be an achievement in itself. Judging by my own experience and by the data of the Dominion's best physicians, I could still count on a fairly long life. My heart worked normally, my internal organs were not yet preparing to fail, my brain showed no signs of serious degradation, and modern drugs allowed me to ignore most age-related problems. If one looked only at the results of the examinations, I had absolutely nothing to complain about.

Except I knew far too well how it would all end. In about fifty years, my body would begin to fail so quickly that I would have to spend most of my time either in my own bed or under medical supervision. For a while longer, doctors would be able to keep my organs functioning, replace what could be replaced, and pour more and more new drugs into me, but sooner or later the moment would come when I would not even be able to lift my head from the pillow on my own. After that, all that would remain would be to wait for death and hope that the next rebirth did not make me wait too long.

I had not feared death itself for a very long time. Over the course of my existence, I had gone through it enough times to perceive the death of a body more as a deeply unpleasant transitional period than as the end of my existence. What irritated me far more was the fact that, despite all our achievements, I was still forced to go through it. Centuries had passed, the Dominion had transformed from several scattered states into a vast spacefaring power, our scientists had learned to do things that in the days of my first birth would have seemed like gifts from Aethra, and yet the problem of aging had not gone anywhere.

Of course, it would be wrong to say that we had learned nothing about extending life. The life expectancy of an ordinary Aiterri had increased very noticeably over the past centuries, and many causes of death that had once been considered natural companions of old age were now simply another medical problem. But it was one thing to prevent an organism from dying before its allotted time, and quite another to move the biological limit itself. In that second matter, we were doing much worse.

Research into the issue had long since divided into two huge branches. The first dealt with ordinary medicine: artificial organs, prosthetics, drugs, disease control, early diagnostics, and preserving the functionality of an aging body. In the two hundred and eighty-nine years of my current life, the Dominion had made such an enormous leap in this area that even I sometimes found it difficult to remember the times when all of this had been considered impossible. For that matter, we had already been actively using medi-gel for about a century, even though in the history I knew, humanity was supposed to create it only almost two thousand years later.

Its appearance had changed a great deal all by itself. What had once been considered a severe injury requiring months of treatment could now often be corrected directly on the battlefield, and mortality from wounds kept falling as new formulas improved. Most dangerous infections had either been eradicated long ago or learned to be suppressed before the first serious symptoms appeared, and genetic diseases were increasingly detected before a child was even born. Among the Blessed, mortality from disease was gradually approaching a statistical error, because their bodies could deal with almost every threat far better even without the help of medicine.

That was precisely what led to the emergence of the second vast field of research. The stronger an Aiterri was in the Gift, the better his body worked, the faster he recovered, and the longer he tended to live. Among weak Blessed, the difference from Mortals was noticeable; among strong ones, it became enormous; and the Eternals made a mockery of our ideas about normal physiology altogether. That was why the idea that strengthening the Gift could also solve the problem of aging had appeared among scientists long before my current birth.

In practice, everything turned out to be much more complicated. The stronger a Blessed was to begin with, the harder it became to increase his abilities by even a few percent. Sometimes a barely noticeable result required decades of work, enormous research complexes, and expenses so great that even the Great Houses began asking whether it was really worth it. With the Eternals, everything was even worse: most methods that worked perfectly on weak Blessed either had almost no effect on them or produced results so unpredictable that no one dared apply them without lengthy trials.

Still, it would have been unfair to say that this direction had brought no benefit. We achieved especially significant results not in strengthening already existing Blessed, but in increasing the probability of their birth. Absolutely everyone was interested in this: the state, the Great and minor Houses, ordinary families, and the scientists themselves. There could never be too many Blessed.

For a Great House, the birth of a gifted child meant a very real increase in strength and influence. Enormous resources began to be invested in such a child almost from the first years of life, because over the next few centuries those investments paid off many times over. A Blessed could become the head of enterprises, a military commander, chief of a security service, an engineer, a physician, a scientist, or an administrator, and his experience would accumulate over hundreds of years. Where an ordinary specialist had to seek a successor after a few decades, a strong Blessed could work in the same field for two centuries in a row.

That was why some of the Dominion's oldest specialists had long since become national treasures in their own right. There were engineers who had participated in the construction of the first major orbital shipyards and now directed the design of ships from an entirely different generation. There were doctors who had begun their careers long before medi-gel appeared and had personally witnessed almost the entire history of modern medicine. To lose such a Blessed meant losing not just one sapient being, but several centuries of continuous experience that could never be fully transferred into any archive.

For a family of Mortals, the birth of a Blessed meant no less, only on a different level. Such a child almost guaranteed good education, state support programs, and access to opportunities unavailable to most Mortals. Along with him, the entire family began to rise: new connections appeared, the parents' work changed, the education level of the next children increased, and after a couple of generations almost no one remembered the family's former position. Sociologists had even calculated that after the birth of a Blessed, the total family budget in most cases increased fairly quickly by at least two times.

It was no surprise that the appearance of Saelina Neitron's drug complex caused a true frenzy. Her group managed to increase the probability of a Blessed being born to a pair of Mortals from roughly one percent to one and a half, and to some outsiders the difference might have seemed laughable. Only half a percent. In reality, however, it was a fifty-percent increase in the chance, and if one multiplied that by billions of Aiterri and several generations, the result became enormous.

Now every Mortal woman who had reached maturity had the right to receive one injection of the Neitron complex free of charge once every two months. On Aetris and the old worlds, this had long since ceased to be a problem: it was enough to register at the nearest medical center, undergo a standard examination, and spend a few hours of one's time. In the colonies, however, the situation differed greatly from planet to planet. In some places, the drug was available in almost the same quantities as on Aetris; in others, the waiting list stretched for months, especially if the colony was far from the major transport routes.

The reason was banal: we still could not produce the drug just anywhere. One stage of its synthesis required a special mass installation that was manufactured by only a few enterprises on Aetris, while the construction of similar facilities on colonial worlds was proceeding more slowly than we would have liked. The Council of Eternals had been allocating additional funds for many years, the Great Houses were opening their own factories, and the state subsidized the delivery of the drug even to the most remote settlements, but the problem had not yet been fully solved. At our rate of colonization, demand still grew faster than production.

This, however, had not harmed Saelina Neitron's fame in the slightest. Over the past fifty-plus years, her name had become so firmly associated with the drug that it had almost become a common noun, something the scientist herself was not at all pleased about. Ordinary Aiterri said "to get Neitron," "to sign up for Neitron," or "to take a Neitron course," even though the official name of the complex was completely different. Several times she even tried to correct this habit through the state medical services, but fighting the language of tens of billions of sapient beings turned out to be noticeably harder than fighting infertility.

All of this was wonderful. With each generation, there were more Blessed, average life expectancy grew, and the Dominion received more and more beings capable of working and accumulating experience for centuries. But neither the Neitron complex nor hundreds of other studies solved my personal problem. Even if, in a thousand years, half of all Aiterri became Blessed, I would still have to change one aging body after another.

There was still hope in other species. Here, naturally, the asari were of the greatest interest, because their organism was bound to element zero from birth as tightly as was possible for most known species. I also hoped that at least part of the answer was hidden somewhere inside their cells, but I did not place great expectations on it.

The reason was simple: we still did not understand even our own Eternals. Their bodies contained so much Aether that, according to some models, they should not have developed normally at all. At a certain stage, the growth of the Gift should have begun to destroy the organism faster than it could recover, but for some reason that did not happen. Eternals were born, matured, grew even stronger, and calmly lived for centuries, as though the laws that worked perfectly for every other Aiterri simply did not apply to them.

Attempts to create an Eternal artificially were in an even more miserable state. Over the past centuries, we had tried everything that seemed even remotely reasonable: genetic programs, embryo exposure, drugs, changing the developmental conditions of the Blessed, attempts to artificially stimulate Aether structures. There were many results, and some even found use in other areas of medicine, but we had not come a single step closer to the appearance of a new Eternal. The most unpleasant part was that the scientists did not even understand which specific mechanism they were supposed to be looking for.

But I knew a civilization that most certainly knew how to strengthen the abilities of already existing biotics. Not by a few percent and not at the cost of decades of therapy, but so strongly that the result became practically a new creature. Of course, in the future I knew, many did this: biotic implants were created, interfaces were improved, new drugs and training methods appeared. But compared to the Reapers, all of it looked like children's toys.

For millions of years, the Reapers had transformed living beings into specialized combat forms. Husks were only the most famous example: a once-sapient creature was reconstructed with their technologies, lost most of what made it a person, and became an obedient weapon. It had always been unpleasant for me even to think about how effective such an army could be in a real war. Millions of fighters who needed neither morale, nor convictions, nor a normal command system if their master could directly impose his will upon them.

After encountering the rachni, that thought became even more unpleasant. We had seen for ourselves how dangerous an army could be when millions of beings acted not as separate soldiers, but as parts of one vast organism. A Queen did not have to explain the overall plan of an operation to every lesser rachni and hope that the subordinate understood the order correctly. It was enough for her to direct her Song, and the entire colony would begin to act in coordination.

If the Reapers' control over their creations worked even remotely according to a similar principle, fighting such an army would be monstrously difficult. Even destroying tens of thousands of creatures meant nothing if new ones could quickly be processed in their place. They did not have to fear death, argue with commanders, lose morale after defeat, or refuse to go where they were guaranteed to be killed. For a state accustomed to valuing every Blessed and counting losses even among Mortals, such an opponent was especially unpleasant.

But that was not what interested me most. The very existence of husks and other Reaper forms showed how deeply their technologies could restructure a living organism. Some of those changes directly affected biotic abilities. The clearest example was the banshees: creatures the Reapers created from certain asari, turning them into biotics of such strength that some of their abilities looked powerful even by our standards.

Their movement interested me in particular. From the outside, it resembled a short spatial jump: a banshee vanished in one place and appeared almost immediately in another, covering the distance so quickly that an ordinary observer barely had time to understand what had happened. Similar techniques existed among the Aiterri, but they were considered one of the highest expressions of mastery and required a Blessed to possess both enormous strength and incredible control.

That meant the Reapers somehow took an already existing organism and forced it to do what our Blessed needed centuries of training and natural talent to accomplish. Perhaps the price of such restructuring was monstrous, and almost nothing remained of the original personality, but the fact itself was more important. It meant there was a way to radically raise the limit of a living being's capabilities. And if a way existed, it could one day be understood.

That thought lodged itself so firmly in my head that for several days I seriously considered beginning the search for Reaper technologies. Two thousand years before the Harvest, there were surely traces of previous cycles left in the galaxy: abandoned objects, ancient devices, or at least fragments of constructs that none of the current races had yet found.

Then common sense finally defeated curiosity. I knew far too little about how exactly the Reapers watched the galaxy between Harvests, what systems they left active, and what might attract their attention. Even if direct contact did not lead to an earlier start of the Harvest, a much more unpleasant possibility remained: indoctrination. I had no intention of one day discovering that an agent I had sent had been diligently reporting on his findings for several years, while all that time he had been working for someone other than the Dominion.

Especially since there was an example nearby that we still could not fully explain. The rachni Queens continued to speak of the Great Mother, and we still did not know what exactly was hidden behind that name. The theory that it was a Reaper looked increasingly convincing, but there was no conclusive evidence. We did not even understand the mechanism through which the Great Mother could influence many Queens at once despite the enormous distances between them.

So the idea of searching for the Reapers went to the same place where many other dangerous projects had gone over the centuries: into the archive, marked for later review. Perhaps in five hundred years, our technologies and knowledge would allow us to approach the problem more safely. Perhaps in a thousand, I would laugh at the fact that I had once considered such an expedition dangerous. But for now, I was not going to risk the entire Dominion for the chance to obtain a few interesting technologies.

And yet fear of the Reapers was far from the strongest of my fears. I understood perfectly well that a catastrophe awaited the galaxy in two thousand years, but two thousand years was such an enormous span that I simply could not perceive it as inevitable death. In that time, states could appear and disappear, technologies could change beyond recognition, and populations could grow by orders of magnitude. If the Dominion maintained even its current rate of development, then by the time of the Harvest it would be so different from the present that making precise forecasts now was almost meaningless.

In the worst case, I could still try to ensure the survival of part of our people. Hide colonies, build autonomous shelters, scatter the Aiterri across unknown systems, prepare worlds beyond the usual routes, or come up with something else. As long as even one Aiterri remained in the universe, I would have a chance to be born again. That was why my own death had never frightened me as much as it might have frightened any other sapient being.

Something else frightened me.

I could live forever.

Not a thousand years, like the Eternals. Not several thousand, if medicine one day made another enormous leap. Theoretically, I could continue to be reborn for millions of years, as long as my species existed and as long as some truly universal cataclysm did not destroy every last Aiterri.

From the history I knew, I knew of beings whose ages were measured in millions of years. But neither the Leviathans nor, even more so, the Reapers inspired in me any desire to someday sit down beside them and discuss the eras we had survived. Upon meeting such a being, my first thought would more likely be a desire to lock it in the most secure laboratory possible and hand it over to the scientists together with the Inquisition's interrogators. Let them take it apart molecule by molecule, ask questions, and find out how it had managed to live for so long.

I saw no companion for eternity among them.

Which meant that, if my assumptions were correct, a rather unpleasant prospect awaited me. I would meet Aiterri, grow used to them, consider them part of my life, and then watch them grow old and die. After them would come others, then the next ones, then another generation, and so it would continue again and again until I myself lost count of the centuries.

I already knew how hard that was. The most painful loss was Asmund, with whom I had lived for about fifteen hundred years. When your own son remains beside you for so long, you gradually stop even allowing the thought that one day he might be gone. He becomes as constant a part of the world as Aetris, the Dominion, or the stars overhead, and then, at some point, only memories remain.

And it would certainly happen again. In six or seven centuries, I would have to lose Silvana if, by then, we had still not found a way to extend her life. Someday Emberlis would be gone, then someone else among the few I currently truly considered close. After them would come new friends, comrades, children, and descendants, who would also one day grow old while I prepared for my next rebirth.

Perhaps that was what had changed me most over the past centuries. I increasingly caught myself thinking that things which had once seemed monstrous now felt only like unpleasant necessities. If the price of an experiment was measured in dozens of lives, I did not ask whether we had the right to conduct it, but how important the result would be. If the answer promised benefits centuries later, the decision was usually made fairly quickly.

The Dominion's secret laboratories had been conducting research on sapient representatives of almost every species we could reach for more than a century. It had all begun with the crew of the salarian reconnaissance ship that first discovered our territory. Those salarians had long since died, although the data obtained from them continued to be used to this day.

The absence of new prisoners had also long since ceased to be a serious problem. Salarians reproduced through eggs, samples of which we had managed to preserve, so the research complexes gained the ability to raise new generations on their own. Some of those salarians were born, matured, and died inside closed facilities, never seeing a single planet of their own Union. To our scientists, they were, first and foremost, convenient material for long-term studies of another species.

And, of course, the matter was not limited to salarians. I preferred not to think unnecessarily about the number of test subjects among Mortals, Lizards, and Aruns, especially when it came to projects that continued for decades. Some programs required observation across several generations, others tested the effects of certain drugs on thousands of beings, and still others were so specialized that almost no one used their results afterward. But sometimes even side discoveries completely justified decades of work.

That was how the full methodology for increasing the number of biotics among the Aruns appeared. We still called gifted representatives of other species only half-Blessed, because their abilities differed noticeably from the Aetheric capabilities of the Aiterri, although the term had long since taken root and was used even in official documents. Initially, no one had set the researchers the task of helping the Aruns at all; the needed result turned out to be a by-product of an entirely different program.

Later, we transferred the methodology to the Protectorate almost free of charge. If, of course, one considered the cleansing of an entire planet from rachni to be free. The Aruns gained the ability to significantly increase the number of their own biotics, the Dominion rid itself of another infected world, and our laboratories received additional data on how the same approach worked on different species.

Once, I would probably have spent a long time thinking about how right it was to use sapient beings in such a way at all. Now such questions arose less and less often. I could still forbid meaningless cruelty, punish a researcher for violating protocol, or close a project if the risk clearly did not match the possible benefit. But the thought that a thousand beings would have to be sacrificed for the sake of a result had long since stopped costing me sleep.

With each century, another change took place, one I noticed much more clearly and liked much less. It became harder and harder for me to perceive the life of an ordinary Mortal as equal to the life of a strong Blessed. Intellectually, I understood perfectly well that before me stood the same kind of person, with desires, loved ones, and plans of his own, but somewhere inside, a simple thought kept appearing: in a century and a half, he would be gone anyway. For me, that century and a half had long since stopped seeming like a long time.

Strong Blessed, Eternals, and the few Mortals I knew personally increasingly evoked special feelings. I became especially attached to gifted children easily, because when I looked at them, I could imagine not only the next few decades, but the next three or four centuries. I saw a future commander, scientist, politician, or head of a House with whom I would be able to talk and work for a very long time. With an ordinary child, that feeling appeared less and less often.

The thought was unpleasant, but I was not going to deceive myself. If the interests of one generation came into conflict with what would benefit the Dominion in a thousand years, it became easier and easier for me to sacrifice that generation. Why should I place the short-term comfort of those who would live only a few more decades above the future of beings who had not even been born yet? For a creature forced to think in centuries, such logic gradually became too natural.

I had probably become truly hardened. Perhaps several thousand more years would pass, and the current me would seem to my future self like a naive humanist who worried too much about other people's deaths. That prospect did not especially please me either, but at least I still noticed what was happening and was still capable of asking myself where exactly such an attitude was leading me.

For all that, I had not stopped loving the Aiterri. It was simply that the love itself had gradually changed. Once, for me, the people had consisted primarily of individual beings, each of whom had value of their own; now, more and more often, I saw before me not a specific generation, but a long chain of generations stretching far into the future.

I loved my species almost the way one loves an enormous family. Its individual members would be born and die, replace one another, argue, make mistakes, and sometimes hate me, but the family itself had to continue existing. Because of all the sapient beings in this universe, only the Aiterri could pass through eternity together with me.

***

I had also stopped progressing in strength.

A full medical examination gave us nothing.

They checked me in every available way, compared the results with archival data from past years, searched for changes in brain function, Aether structures, the nervous system, and in general everything our doctors could reach. We found no unknown energies, no strange changes, not even any noticeable deviations from the norm.

Even the rachni Queens could not discover anything interesting in me. Over the years of war, we had studied their "Song" quite well, although we had still not figured out what exactly they meant by that word. A mind? A soul? Some totality of thoughts and emotions that their sensory organs could perceive directly? The Queens themselves explained it so vaguely that our scientists had long since stopped hoping to receive a proper definition from them.

But we knew one thing for certain: the Songs of sapient beings differed from one another.

In some, it was barely distinguishable; in others, it was much stronger; and certain influences could change it over time so much that even the Queens noticed. This was especially visible in test subjects who had been kept for a long time under the influence of a mad artificial intelligence. After a while, their Song became noticeably "louder," although the rachni themselves could not properly explain what exactly had changed or why.

Against that background, my results looked almost like mockery. I had lived for thousands of years, died and been born again more than a hundred times, preserved the memory of my past lives, and possessed an ability whose very existence violated all our known ideas about consciousness. But to the Queens, my Song remained perfectly ordinary. Not weak and not strong - simply normal for an adult Aiterri.

I did not like that at all.

If my immortality was not located in the body, did not manifest in the Song, and left no traces accessible to modern science, then ordinary methods could search for the answer for hundreds of years more. So I decided to approach the problem from a different angle. After all, in all the time of my rebirths, I had never managed to understand even a simpler thing: why my own power had grown exactly the way it had.

I saw no pattern.

Sometimes, after another birth, my abilities increased noticeably; sometimes, they barely changed. It could not be said that everything depended on the body's age, the number of years lived, or the strength of the parents in whose family I appeared. Even the development of the Dominion and the overall level of our knowledge did nothing to explain why, in one life, I became significantly stronger, while in another, growth turned out to be almost invisible.

And then a rather strange theory came to mind.

What if power appeared when I truly needed it?

Not because the organism gradually accumulated Aether, and not because each new body randomly happened to be stronger than the previous one. Perhaps growth occurred after those periods of my life when my existing abilities began to be insufficient. When, in order to achieve a goal, I truly had to give everything, risk everything, endure defeat, and use everything I had.

The theory was extremely dubious, and I understood that perfectly well. I had no proper evidence, and building serious conclusions on memories of events from millennia ago was an ungrateful occupation. The problem was that I had even fewer other explanations. And the more I went through my past lives, the more often I noticed that the most significant jumps in strength had indeed occurred roughly around periods of serious upheaval.

In the last centuries, however, nothing of the sort had happened to me.

I simply had no one to fight seriously. Even the Eternals, whose number had grown to more than four hundred over the past centuries, posed no real threat to me one on one. A few of the strongest could make me strain myself, and if a sufficiently large group was gathered, they might even be able to defeat me, but an ordinary one-on-one fight had long since lost any meaning.

I had pulled too far ahead.

And if my theory was at least partly true, then I truly had no reason to become even stronger. Why give me new abilities if the existing ones were enough to solve practically any problem? If that unknown force which had once made me what I was pursued any goal at all, it could well consider the current me strong enough.

Once, I would have called such reasoning religion. But someone or something had, after all, given me immortality.

So, over time, I simply began to call this unknown force Aethra. Not because I truly considered it the goddess from the old legends, but because I needed at least some name for a phenomenon whose nature we did not understand. Scientists could use long terms like "unidentified external factor" as much as they liked, but in ordinary speech the word "Aethra" was much more convenient.

And now I wanted to test whether Aethra - whoever or whatever she was - was capable of reacting to a serious trial.

A suitable occasion appeared almost immediately.

A month ago, for the first time in the entire war against the rachni, an Eternal had died.

The report itself caused far greater shock in the Dominion than one might expect from the death of a single sapient being in a war where thousands died every day. The times when Eternals seriously tried to kill one another had long since passed. In my current memory, I could not recall a single true duel between two Eternals in which both had initially intended to bring the matter to the death of the opponent, although old chronicles and legends were full of such stories.

Until recently, the only Eternal known to the modern Dominion to have died a violent death had been me.

More precisely, one of my past bodies - that very devil-child.

That was why the new death struck society so hard. Yes, there were already more than four hundred of us, and one death could not seriously change the Dominion's military position. But over the past centuries, the Eternals had become, for most Aiterri, almost a living symbol that there existed beings who could not be killed by ordinary means.

It turned out they could.

Even I was knocked out of my usual state for a while by the news. The one who had died was not a child, not a recently discovered Eternal, and not someone who had spent his life far from war. This Eternal had fought the rachni for more than fifty years, participated in cleansings of infected worlds, descended several times into major hives, and knew perfectly well what awaited him there.

On the surface of a planet, finding a worthy opponent for such a being was almost impossible. A trained Eternal possessed enough strength, speed, and reserves of Aether to single-handedly destroy a unit that would have stopped ordinary Blessed. Even if the enemy managed to collapse tunnels and bury him beneath hundreds of meters of rock, that did not yet mean death. An Eternal could very well survive the collapse, punch a path through the rubble, or wait for a rescue operation.

Apparently, the Queen who destroyed that detachment understood this perfectly well too.

The rachni in general learned quickly from our methods of warfare. This was especially noticeable on old infected worlds, where the same hive had clashed with our scouts and assault units for decades. Every failed cleansing attempt gave the Queen new information, and the next squad would be met by altered tunnels, new firing positions, and traps that had not existed there before.

The longer the rachni remained on a planet, the more dangerous their hive became. Their construction practically never stopped: workers expanded tunnels, reinforced old sections, created new chambers, storage rooms, production spaces, and hidden passages. If colonies were given enough time, a whole system of fortifications gradually appeared beneath the surface, capable of reaching kilometers deep and stretching hundreds of kilometers to the sides.

That was why we had long since learned to estimate the approximate age of a planet's infestation by the scale of its underground construction.

A young hive could still be destroyed with a relatively ordinary assault. Several months or years of rachni presence already forced us to bring in heavy units and specialized equipment. A world on which they had managed to fortify themselves for decades turned into a nightmare of endless tunnels, reinforced chambers, underground production, and traps prepared in advance.

That was precisely why we tried not to delay the cleansing of captured territories. The longer a hive existed, the more lives had to be paid later for every kilometer of advance. We had already managed to fully cleanse most of our old worlds, but with the last frontier clusters everything proved more complicated.

We had captured them about a quarter of a century ago and almost immediately halted further expansion, focusing on strengthening the border. On many planets, however, the rachni remained underground all that time. In some places, they were gradually being pushed out by ordinary troops; in others, operations dragged on because of more important fronts; and some worlds received only minimal forces for holding the surface for years.

Now we had to pay for that slowness.

The assault on each major hive turned into a separate military operation. The rachni had long since learned to use weapons almost as effective as ours, built fortified positions in the most inconvenient places, and understood the advantage of their numbers perfectly. Sending ordinary infantry in and simply advancing tunnel by tunnel was possible, but the cost of such a decision quickly became entirely unacceptable.

This was where the Blessed saved us.

For especially large hives, special assault groups were formed, consisting mostly of experienced Gifted. At the head of such a detachment, they usually placed the strongest Blessed or even an Eternal capable of taking the most dangerous parts of the operation upon himself. Their task was not to destroy all rachni underground - that could take years. They searched for the Queen.

The group would gradually advance through the hive's labyrinth, compose a detailed map of the tunnels, find the main defense nodes, and determine the approximate location of the central chambers. Sometimes this took a month, sometimes two, especially if the colony had existed for several decades. After finding the Queen, the detachment would break through to her and destroy the hive's command center.

After that, everything became much simpler.

The remaining rachni did not disappear and did not turn into harmless animals, but their coordination sharply worsened. Units began to act less coherently, some individuals lost proper control, and the regular army gained the opportunity to gradually cleanse the remaining tunnels. Instead of a single organism, we received a vast number of separate groups, which could already be handled by familiar military methods.

That was exactly the kind of operation the dead Eternal had been conducting.

His detachment had penetrated deep enough into one of the oldest hives of the frontier cluster and, judging by the last messages, had already approached the areas where the Queen might be located. Then contact disappeared. At first, command decided the rachni had simply jammed the signal or that the group had gone too deep beneath the surface, but a few hours later seismic sensors registered an entire series of powerful underground explosions.

The Queen collapsed the tunnels.

Judging by the data from the subsequent scans, dozens of sections were destroyed almost simultaneously, cutting the assault group off from all known routes to the surface at once. Some collapses occurred so deep that hundreds of meters of rock lay above the detachment, and in places almost a kilometer.

But even that was not enough.

We knew this from fragmentary data from surviving sensors and from messages from several fighters with whom contact was briefly restored after the collapse. The detachment had been split into several parts, most of the heavy equipment had been destroyed, and supplies were limited. But the Eternal himself was alive and continued to fight.

Except the Queen had not been counting on killing him with one collapse.

She had simply deprived him of the ability to leave.

After that, the real assault began.

No matter how strong an Eternal was, he still remained a living being. He needed rest, his reserve of strength was not infinite, his weapons needed ammunition, and his body needed at least minimal time to recover. He could destroy a hundred rachni, a thousand, and perhaps far more, but there were millions of individuals underground.

And the Queen could send them wave after wave. She had no reason to hurry.

After several days, the last signals vanished completely.

The operation was declared a failure, the entire detachment dead, and the hive received the highest danger rating. Military command was already preparing a new plan for its destruction, this time with much larger forces and the possible use of heavy weapons directly from the surface.

But I needed this operation for another reason.

If I wanted to test my own theory, I could not have found a better place. One Eternal had already died there, well trained and with fifty years of war against the rachni behind him. The enemy knew our methods, possessed an army of millions, and was inside fortifications it had been building for decades.

For the first time in a very long time, I saw before me a task whose result could not be guaranteed by my strength alone.

That was exactly the kind of trial I had been looking for.

***

And, as it turned out, dying from unnatural causes was banally simple.

It did not even require looking for some especially clever method or deliberately exposing myself to a blow. It was enough to lead the assault on an old deep hive and go at the point of the attack into places where ordinary infantry could not remain for long at all. In the most dangerous sectors, heavy combat suits rarely endured more than a day of continuous fighting, so almost no one weaker than Lizards in super-heavy armor was sent there. The Blessed, meanwhile, were valued above all for their ability to pass through the many kinetic barriers of the rachni and deliver charges behind them that could destroy entire fortified chambers.

The first several hours of the operation went almost too well. We broke through three defensive lines, destroyed several major communication nodes, and captured an enormous underground chamber from which seven tunnels diverged at once. That was where the advancing units were supposed to stop. Taking hundreds of fighters farther forward would only give the Queen too many targets.

So the troops received the order to entrench.

The next full strongpoint lay almost half a kilometer ahead, but those five hundred meters passed through the most fortified part of the hive. The Lizards began deploying heavy installations, sappers mined the side tunnels, and the Blessed prepared to repel the inevitable counterattack. I no longer needed any of that.

I went on alone.

At first, it even seemed that the idea was not all that bad. The rachni reacted far more slowly to one opponent than to a full assault detachment, and in the cramped tunnels numerical superiority mattered almost not at all. I passed the first positions in minutes, changing directions faster than the Queen could transfer new units there.

I conserved my strength as much as I could. I did not use Aether where the hammer or the suit's weapons were enough, did not maintain protection stronger than necessary, and tried to use instantaneous movement as rarely as possible. At first, that was quite sufficient: I broke through the forward kinetic barrier, appeared directly among the defenders of the position, and within a few seconds deprived them of the ability to conduct organized fire.

After two hours, I first realized that I was tired.

The problem was not even the rachni themselves. Killing another soldier was still no great difficulty for me. Far worse was the fact that practically every second of my advance, dozens of projectiles struck my barrier.

The rachni did not throw themselves at me as a mindless crowd. Some held passages behind kinetic shields, others fired from side tunnels, still others took positions farther down the corridor and shot over their own. The moment I broke through one line, the next already opened fire, and the passage behind me that had been cleared was quickly occupied by a new group.

Very soon I understood that the Queen was not trying to stop me at any particular position at all. She was simply spending my strength.

The shooting practically never stopped. Even where I saw not a single rachni, streams of fire continued to pass through the tunnel from distant positions, and prepared embrasures opened in the walls. Several times, the Queen forced me to raise protection on two sides at once, after which heavy forms began striking the barrier with more powerful weapons while ordinary soldiers kept me under fire.

After four hours, I stopped counting hits.

I teleported through another shield, appeared inside a fortified position, and disabled the nearest firing point with a hammer blow. Lightning ran across the head of the weapon, the discharge went farther along the metal structures, and for a few seconds the shooting ahead weakened. I managed to pass about twenty meters before fire opened on me again from two side passages.

The barrier held worse and worse, and every new appeal to the Aether answered with pain. The rachni continued firing almost without pause, gradually compressing the space around me, and it was obvious that I would not last much longer in that state. Retreating through the tunnels they occupied no longer made sense either.

So instead of making another attempt to break forward, I gathered the remaining Aether for a technique I would never use at full power under normal conditions. Space around me distorted for a moment, after which an extremely powerful kinetic impulse spread in every direction.

The nearest rachni fortifications vanished together with the structures supporting them, and the shockwave went farther down the tunnels. One by one, neighboring passages and chambers began to collapse; the cave-ins spread far beyond the part of the hive I could even see. Even after several seconds, new collapses were still rumbling somewhere in the depths.

But the technique's power turned out to be greater than my exhausted body could withstand. At some point, I simply lost control over the Aether, and consciousness disappeared after it.

That was how my next life ended.