Mass Effect. Chapter 35. (Patreon)

Aellarin

Over three and a half thousand years, I had grown used to one simple fact: if something truly important happened in my state, sooner or later I found out about it. Not necessarily at once. Sometimes the information came through the Council, sometimes through the Inquisition, sometimes through the Houses, and anything that passed through none of the official channels was usually found by the Shadows. I had long since stopped running every factory or deciding where the next residential district should be built, but if something seriously threatened the Dominion or my plans, I could almost always find a way to intervene.

Don't like what some House is doing? Send in Council auditors. Suspect forbidden research? Bring in the Inquisition. A conspiracy is taking shape? The Shadows will find out who is involved, and then we can decide whether a conversation will be enough or military force will be required. Even the Council of Eternals, which formally did not answer to me, consisted of people half of whom I had known for centuries, taught personally, or at the very least understood well enough.

That did not mean the Dominion obediently carried out every whim of mine. A state like that would have collapsed long ago. But I knew its rules, knew the people who used those rules, and, in the worst case, could change the rules themselves.

Now, beyond the border, a world was beginning where none of that worked anymore.

If some asari Matron decided that another treaty with the Dominion was not in her interest, I could not simply send an inquisitor to her. If a salarian company stole a technology, I could not just freeze its accounts, arrest its management, and hand the enterprise over to a more cooperative owner. Or rather, I could try. But then it would no longer be called domestic policy. It would be called an international scandal, economic sanctions, or, if I tried hard enough, war.

Even the Shadows, beyond the Dominion, changed from an instrument of governance into ordinary intelligence. They could learn who had reached an agreement with whom, who had been bribed, which official was selling information, and which researcher was too fond of gambling. They could influence, blackmail, buy the people we needed, and arrange accidents if things became desperate enough. But they could no longer rely on the entire state machine around them ultimately serving the same purpose.

And, far more unpleasantly, all of that worked both ways.

I had no doubt that along with merchants, diplomats, and scientists, specialists whose real employers would never appear in any documents would come to the Dominion. The asari would look for dissatisfied people among the Houses. The salarians would study our research centers, military industry, and system of government. Someone would inevitably begin funding convenient journalists, university programs, cultural societies, or simply promising young Aiterri, sincerely believing they were helping them become more modern and proper members of galactic society.

That last part irritated me most of all.

Not because I considered such methods unacceptable. It would have been ridiculous to object to foreign interference after my own Shadows had spent millennia doing roughly the same thing. It was simply that the targets of such work had once been other Houses, states, and peoples of Aetris. Now the target was us.

My own position outside the Dominion also looked far less comfortable than it did at home. To most Aiterri, Aellarin was part of religion, history, and the state itself. To an asari or salarian, the legend of a being who had been reincarnating for thousands of years, changing bodies, retaining his memories, and influencing the development of an entire civilization for centuries would sound very different.

At best, they would want to understand how it worked. At worst, they would want to find out whether I could be killed permanently.

And sooner or later there would certainly be enough people willing to test the second possibility. Not because everyone around us would necessarily be a villain. The very existence of a sapient being who did not age in the normal sense, outlived governments, and could pursue the same political course for centuries was itself a threat to any neighboring state. In the salarians' place, I would think exactly the same way.

So I would not increase the number of Aiterri who knew the truth about me unless there was an urgent need.

None of those problems changed the main point, however: we could no longer remain behind a closed border.

I remembered perfectly well how much effort it had taken for the Dominion to reach its current level on its own. How many decades we had spent developing technologies the asari had already been using for centuries. How many resources we had poured into creating things that had long been mass-produced in Citadel Space. Isolation protected our secrets, but at the same time forced us to reinvent the wheel every single time.

And I did not have the time.

There were still millennia before the Reapers, but considering the scale of the preparations required for a war against them, that was not actually very much. I needed foreign science, foreign markets, foreign industry, and, no less importantly, foreign competition. The asari, salarians, and everyone else needed to look at the Dominion and understand that if they stopped moving, their neighbor would pull ahead. In exactly the same way, my Houses needed to see civilizations that were centuries ahead of us in certain fields.

I did not need to subjugate the Citadel. But I needed a rival beside us that could not be ignored.

That was why the Dominion's entry into Citadel Space had never been regarded by the Council as a transfer under foreign authority. We accepted common rules where they were necessary for trade, navigation, and diplomacy, but remained a separate state with our own laws, army, borders, and foreign policy. Associated membership suited that almost perfectly: close enough to make use of the system, but not close enough for the Council to start dictating our internal affairs.

Naturally, a position like that could not be achieved in a few months after the end of the war.

Preparations had begun thirty-four years earlier, when Abael Vect left for the Citadel with the Dominion's first permanent mission. Even then, the war with the rachni would have to end someday, and the question that would inevitably follow was simple: what came next? Closing the relay and pretending the rest of the galaxy did not exist again was impossible. Opening the borders without preparation would have been even more foolish.

That was why Vect's main work all these years had not really been day-to-day diplomacy. He had been preparing the rules of the future peace.

Over thirty-four years, hundreds of major agreements and thousands of additional protocols, annexes, and separate treaties had passed through his mission. Transit through foreign systems. Customs regulations. Insurance for ships and cargo. Liability for accidents near mass relays. Procedures for rescuing crews. Recognition of documents and licenses. Dominion companies operating abroad and foreign companies operating on our territory. Patents, banking, taxation, sanitary requirements, rules for hiring local workers, and dozens of other necessary things.

Naturally, Vect did not act independently. Every major concession first passed through the Council of Eternals, the relevant government agencies, and representatives of the Houses it affected. Sometimes reaching agreement inside the Dominion took longer than negotiating with the Citadel. Especially when foreign companies were to be given access to our markets: every Great House suddenly remembered national security in exactly the industry where it held the largest share.

And I did not like everything Vect had achieved. I was especially concerned by the growing closeness between our species and the asari. They had very quickly realized how easily two species so similar in appearance and both biotically gifted could find common ground, and they took advantage of it whenever possible. Joint research programs, cultural projects, diplomatic training, dozens of personal ties between members of our mission and asari officials - over three decades, there had become too many of them to consider each one separately.

It was a potential problem. But denying the result would have been foolish. While I fought the rachni, his people had built an entire system that now allowed us to open the borders not from scratch, but simply by activating mechanisms that had already been prepared. Banks knew how to process payments. Ports knew which documents to require. Insurers knew how to assess our ships. Governments knew who was responsible for Dominion citizens on their territory. Even the first commercial routes had been calculated before our troops broke through the fortified cluster.

All we had to do was start using them. Though access to someone else's system had to be paid for with more than credits.

Associated membership meant that we committed ourselves to following some Citadel rules at home. Most were harmless or even useful. Some were irritating. And one requirement struck directly at a technology without which the Dominion in its current form might never have existed at all.

The mass ectogenesis program had to be shut down. Under the laws of Citadel Space, the cloning of sapient beings was prohibited, and our attempts to explain the difference between a clone and a child grown in an artificial womb did not particularly interest foreign lawyers. What mattered to them was not the origin of the genome, but the state's ability to create millions of new citizens on its own initiative. Once the Dominion joined as an associated member, we could no longer continue the program openly.

Nor did we try to hide it before accession. Previously, any information leaving the Dominion had passed through several levels of review and been presented in the way most favorable to us. Official materials described the Blessed, their longevity, abilities, and role in the state in great detail, while the origins of most Mortals were mentioned only in passing. Now that sort of caution could only postpone an inevitable scandal, so we handed the Council information about the program ourselves, before foreign intelligence could put the same documents on the table with far less flattering commentary.

Our explanation was simple. Mass ectogenesis had not been created to produce endless armies, nor because the Council of Eternals had decided to play gods. We had begun using it because of the rachni, when the choice had been between rapid population growth and a slow defeat in the war. It was a convenient justification, but in this case it almost completely matched the truth.

Before negotiations began, military analysts prepared an estimate that even I did not like. Around sixty billion Aiterri now lived in the Dominion. Without the ectogenesis program, there would have been no more than ten to twelve billion of us, with most of the population still concentrated on Aetris and a handful of the oldest colonies. Our home system lay outside the mass relay network, so moving even one billion beings would have required turning a significant part of the civilian fleet into passenger transports for years. Instead of reactors, machine tools, construction complexes, and equipment for new worlds, ships would have carried people who would still have had to build cities almost from scratch after arrival.

Ectogenesis solved the problem much more simply. Artificial wombs, genetic material, doctors, and caregivers were delivered to a new planet - a relatively small group of adult settlers - and within a single generation the world had a population capable of sustaining its own industry. Without those inhabitants, we would not have had the present number of mines, power plants, and shipyards; without the shipyards, no enormous fleet; and without the fleet, no dozens of systems under our control. An empty colony with a few thousand engineers could be ours on a map, but the first serious rachni strike would turn it into a hostile hive. It was the tens of billions of Aiterri grown through ectogenesis that had given the Dominion the ability not merely to occupy planets, but to truly turn them into our territory.

That was why I considered the greatest technology my species had created over the past few centuries to be neither independent faster-than-light travel nor new types of weapons. Ectogenesis had given us more than any single ship. It had given the Dominion a population, and that population had built everything else.

And yet we agreed to shut it down. The war had entered a stage where the old colonies could already grow naturally, and the need for new billions of citizens was no longer a matter of immediate survival. Every cycle already begun would be completed, after which state orders for mass ectogenesis would cease and the equipment would either be transferred to medical institutions or mothballed. No one intended to destroy the archives, the scientific schools, or the facilities themselves: we were giving up the use of the technology, but we had no intention of forgetting how it worked.

Especially since, over centuries of existence, ectogenesis had pulled almost the whole of Dominion medicine forward with it. To grow a child safely outside the mother's body, our doctors had been forced to learn how to control tissue development, metabolism, immunity, and the nervous system. Those studies had led to artificial organs, methods for repairing severe injuries, and dozens of drugs that were now considered routine. One of them was medi-gel, the first Dominion product that almost the entire galaxy actually wanted.

We had been using it for around a century and had long since stopped seeing anything exceptional in it. Medi-gel sealed wounds, stopped bleeding, protected tissue from the outside environment, and allowed the injured to be transported to a proper hospital. It did not bring the dead back to life or regrow lost limbs, but for the crew of a damaged ship or soldiers on a battlefield, that was more than enough. After the first trials, asari and salarian doctors demanded new shipments before the previous ones had even run out.

We revealed the existence of the drug at the same time as the data on ectogenesis, but no one was giving up this technology. Over thirty-four years, Vect's mission had managed to register, under Citadel law, the formulas of the main varieties of medi-gel, the equipment used on production lines, storage methods, and several hundred individual production processes. Anything that could not be protected by patent remained a trade secret. As a result, anyone had the right to sell medi-gel, but only the Dominion and companies holding one of our licenses had the right to manufacture it. So far, we had issued no licenses.

Securing that arrangement had required several concessions. The main supply routes passed through salarian and asari systems directly to the Citadel, even though there was no technical need for them to do so. The salarians received transit duties, several asari republics received traffic through their ports and distribution warehouses, and the Citadel administration received control over approving the drug for the common market. Delivering it directly to customers would have been faster and cheaper, but then too many parties to the agreement would have gained nothing from our trade. And Vect considered an agreement from which no one except the seller and buyer made money to be extremely unreliable.

The certification system was a separate achievement. Every batch of medi-gel was first officially delivered to a designated Citadel system, where it received the documents required for further sale. In practice, most inspections had already been carried out inside the Dominion. Our doctors performed the analysis, our laboratories confirmed the quality, and then a Citadel representative added a signature and collected the fee for issuing the certificate.

Then came insurance, transit charges, storage in asari warehouses, re-registration of the shipment, and several more absolutely essential procedures whose purpose changed depending on whom I asked. By the time medi-gel reached a hospital, its price could be almost two hundred times the factory production cost. Apparently, a drug delivered directly from the Dominion was extremely dangerous, while after passing through two foreign systems, seven agencies, and several private companies, it became significantly safer.

Vect advised me not to argue, and this time I agreed with him. An asari republic earning money from every one of our transports began caring about the safety of the route almost as much as we did. Salarian organizations living off transit suddenly became supporters of stable relations with the Dominion, and Citadel officials issuing certificates had little desire to ban a product on which the work of their own departments depended. We were paying for more than the right to enter the market. We were also buying the vested interest of everyone who might otherwise try to drive us out of it.

Demand still grew faster than the price. Even before the borders officially opened, the Dominion had signed long-term contracts with the governments of every state in Citadel Space. These were no longer trial batches for individual hospitals, but permanent supplies for armies, rescue services, industrial companies, and colonial administrations. Even our new factories could not produce as much as foreign buyers were willing to order.

A separate merchant fleet had to be created for transport, using the necessary ships purchased from the asari republics. By the time the borders opened, those ships were already traveling between the Dominion and Citadel Space in entire convoys, surrounded by numerous escort vessels.

And then the first passenger services appeared on the same routes. Within days of the borders opening, it became clear that we had prepared far better to deal with cargo than with our own citizens.

Abael Vect

For the first time in several decades, I returned to my homeworld and, at the same time, the capital of the Dominion - Aetris. The Dominion's first permanent mission to the Citadel, which I had headed thirty-four years ago, would soon come to an end. The next day I was to address the Council of Eternals, present my final report, and lay down the authority granted to me during the war. Before that, however, Sylvana Altis had decided to speak with me in private.

"I have read the main body of the report and reviewed the conclusions of every agency involved in your work. I believe your original task can be considered complete."

"Formally, without question, Lady Sylvana. We were preparing the Dominion for the opening of the borders, and almost all the necessary mechanisms are now in operation. But the first weeks have shown that we underestimated some of the consequences. Especially those whose scale could not be assessed before regular civilian traffic actually began."

Sylvana set the report aside and turned the terminal lying on the table slightly toward herself. Over the past few days, several dozen summaries had arrived there from the transport authority, the consular service, and representatives of the Great Houses.

"Let's begin with the most obvious issue. How many citizens are actually planning to travel into Citadel Space?"

"Around seven million preliminary applications were submitted in the first two weeks. That does not mean every applicant will immediately buy a ticket, but carriers have just over six million confirmed seats for the coming year. Some Houses have already bought out passenger sections on ships that have not even been completed yet. If demand remains at even half its current level, the queue will stretch for several years."

"So we underestimated not our transport capacity, but the sheer desire to travel abroad. I expected strong interest, but not this strong. Who makes up most of the applicants?"

"Tourists are the most visible because they are the ones targeted by advertising, but for now they account for less than a third. Most seats have already been taken by House employees, trade representatives, engineers, lawyers, and interpreters. Several hundred thousand more applications have come from students, researchers, and independent specialists. Ordinary tourism will become the main burden later, once the first people return and tell everyone that the trip is genuinely possible and relatively safe."

Sylvana opened another table. There were almost no unfamiliar names among the registered organizations: the first to enter foreign markets were the same Houses that controlled industry, transport, and trade inside the Dominion. Some had managed to open offices in asari systems on the very day the restrictions were officially lifted.

"They prepared better than our own agencies. According to these figures, some companies started hiring local employees before the negotiations were even finished."

"Many of them had been preparing for more than ten years. They created their own departments of Citadel law, trained interpreters, collected price data, and searched for partners in advance through our mission. Several Houses bought warehouses and berths in asari shipyards through affiliated companies, and the first preliminary contracts were signed while the final offensive was still underway. They did not rush into the unknown when the borders opened. They entered a market they had been studying for years."

"I expected nothing less from the Great Houses. What interests me more is why ordinary citizens followed them so quickly. High salaries explain the interest of specialists, but not millions of applications."

"For most of them, the Citadel had existed only on screens. They had seen foreign cities, followed the war, and read the accounts of the few people who worked abroad. Now all of that has suddenly become not a distant part of the galaxy, but somewhere you can buy a ticket to. Besides, the Houses are already selling the journey not as a trip between states, but as a chance to see a world whose scale dwarfed the entire Dominion."

Sylvana spent several seconds studying the advertising materials attached to the report. One House offered a month-long journey with visits to the Citadel and two asari republics, another promised an introduction to the volus trade worlds, and a third had already opened registration for tours of the sites of the largest battles of the Rachni War. None of the programs had enough ships yet, but the money being taken from customers was entirely real.

"The interest itself does not concern me. The problems will begin when our citizens realize that their status means nothing abroad. A member of a Great House accustomed to guards and deference will be nothing more than a foreigner on the Citadel, and a powerful Blessed will not gain the right to use the Gift every time local laws seem inconvenient."

"That is exactly what we already have to explain to the first delegations. There have been no serious incidents so far, but two Houses tried to land personal guards with heavy weapons on an asari station, and one Blessed intervened in a fight using the Gift. No one was killed, but he was detained, and the consulate spent several days proving that he had not intended to attack station personnel. In every case, the problem came not from malice, but from the habit of treating Dominion norms as natural for the entire galaxy."

"Good. Our first lessons cost us little. We should not rely on luck in the future. What measures do you propose without turning the opening of the borders into a new system of prohibitions?"

"For the first few years, passenger traffic should be limited to agreed routes. Large vessels should submit passenger lists in advance, carry a consular officer aboard, and call only at systems where we already have agreements protecting our citizens. Before a first journey, every passenger should be required to complete a short course on local law and obtain insurance. At the same time, I do not recommend requiring separate Council permission simply to leave the Dominion."

Sylvana looked up from the terminal. The proposal ran counter to the position of the military and part of domestic intelligence, both of which wanted to allow only organized groups and pre-screened specialists to travel abroad. I knew about those demands, so I stopped and waited for her question.

"Why do you consider a permit system more dangerous than free travel? In the first few years, it would make screening passengers much easier and reduce the number of incidents."

"The restrictions would fall hardest on independent specialists and ordinary citizens, who would have to use the services of those same Houses. In a few years, the largest carriers would end up controlling not only access to the foreign market, but a citizen's very right to see it."

"A reasonable argument. The Council will not issue a permit for every journey, but routes will remain restricted during the first stage. Unregistered expeditions and civilian ships deviating from approved routes will still require separate authorization."

"That will be enough. Registration will let us know where a citizen is and which consulate is responsible for them without turning travel into a privilege. In addition, it should be established in advance that House titles grant their holders no special status in the eyes of foreign authorities. The sooner that is written down explicitly, the less time my successors will spend explaining the obvious."

Sylvana added a note to the draft decision. A separate document would also have to be prepared for security personnel: personal weapons could remain within the limits already agreed upon, but armed House units would have to stay aboard escort ships. Private armies had begun growing again after the war, and the Council had no intention of exporting the old rivalry onto asari territory.

"That leaves transport. At present, almost every available seat belongs to a handful of Great Houses, and open tickets are already being resold for three times their original price. The Council is not going to build a state tourist fleet, but I have no intention of handing them the entire route either."

"We can require every carrier to leave a share of seats for open sale under predetermined rules. In addition, for the next few years we will have to lease passenger ships from the asari until our own shipyards complete the new orders. It is not the best solution for Dominion independence, but it will let us increase route capacity several times over as early as next year."

"The asari again. Most of the merchant fleet was built by them, the first tourist routes run through their systems, and now we are going to lease passenger ships from them as well. I am not suggesting that we abandon cooperation, but the dependence is becoming too noticeable."

"If we refuse their help now, we will lose several years and still return to the same negotiations. It is better to develop routes through salarian and volus systems in parallel than to artificially weaken the only direction already producing results."

Sylvana did not argue. Not every member of the Council liked the growing closeness with the asari, but it was impossible to build foreign policy on fear of outside influence alone. The Dominion was opening its borders precisely because it wanted access to things it could not quickly create on its own.

"Very well. Prepare proposals on additional routes and the share of seats reserved for open sale. They will be considered together with your report. Now another question: how extensively are our agencies making use of the new flow?"

Sylvana turned several pages and stopped at the appendix on foreign intelligence operations.

"The first operational teams have already been embedded in trade missions, consulates, and transport companies. I specifically prohibited any use of force without direct authorization from the Dominion. Right now, we need sources, connections, and an understanding of foreign societies - not disappearances that leave diplomats inventing explanations afterward."

She quickly reviewed the list of teams already deployed and returned to the beginning of the section.

"Correct. Outside our borders, even a minor unauthorized initiative can destroy an agreement that took years to prepare. Intelligence should accompany the opening, not control it."

I made a brief note in my own copy of the report.

"I will make sure that requirement is included in the mission's new instructions. Though it will be impossible to separate diplomacy, trade, and intelligence completely. Other states are in the same position and will exploit the same opportunities, so all we can do is work more carefully than they do."

The conversation continued for almost another two hours. We discussed funding for consulates, interpreter training, rules for foreign companies hiring Dominion citizens, and the first tax disputes. Most of the questions did not require an immediate decision, but within a few years each of them could develop into a crisis of its own.

At last, Sylvana closed the final document and moved the terminal aside.

"Tomorrow the Council will hear your report and formally conclude the Dominion's first permanent mission to the Citadel. You have carried out the assignment you received thirty-four years ago and achieved considerably more than we expected at the beginning. On behalf of the Council, I thank you and everyone who worked with you."

I inclined my head slightly in acknowledgment.

"Thank you, Lady Sylvana. The mission lost many of its people over the years, but the system they created will continue to function without them. For a diplomat, that is probably the best result one can hope for."

Sylvana closed the final report and picked up the folder containing the draft of a new appointment.

"You will not remain on Aetris for long, however. The Council intends to offer you a new mandate and send you back to the Citadel as head of the permanent representation of the associated Dominion. This time, instead of preparing for the opening of the borders, you will have to deal with its consequences."

I did not answer immediately. I had spent a long time outside the Dominion and had hoped to live on Aetris for at least a few months. Still, I was not surprised.

"I expected the Council to reach that decision. A few months of rest would have been pleasant, but handing the work over to a new diplomat now really would be premature. In three weeks, I can return to the Citadel and accept the new mandate."

"No one will disturb you for three weeks. After that, there will be enough work for several decades. I think none of us will try to set an end date in advance this time."

The next day, the Council of Eternals unanimously accepted my report and formally declared the mission complete. Three weeks later, I left Aetris once again and departed for the Citadel. This time not as the diplomat preparing the Dominion for a future opening of its borders, but as the head of its permanent representation in the galactic community.

My first task was over. The second, apparently, might take the rest of my life...