Mass Effect. Chapter 38 (Patreon)

Interlude. Matriarch Eniara, First Matriarch of the Senate of the Republics

There were only thirty minutes left before the Senate session began when the doors to my office swung open and Kassana walked in, without the customary apology for distracting the First Matriarch from affairs of state. An old friend could afford that. So could the representative of Thessia's largest industrial conglomerate.

"Kassana, your timing is terrible," I said without looking up from the draft resolution. "The session is about to begin, and I still need to read the latest amendments."

"You never have time for your best friend, Eniara. Ever since you became First Matriarch, you're either busy with the Republics or with your bank. Sometimes I think the only way to get an audience with you is to ask for a loan."

I finally looked up. Kassana had already settled into the chair opposite me and was studying the documents spread across my desk with an expression of perfect innocence.

"Don't tell me you came just to see me. I know you too well."

"That's why you don't have any friends."

"I have you. That's enough to keep me from getting complacent. Get to the point. What does your conglomerate want this time? Permission to mine element zero on an inhabited planet? I'm warning you now: it'll be expensive."

"No, no," she cut in. "This time I didn't come for money. I want to talk about the prestige of our species."

For several seconds I simply stared at her, waiting for her to continue. Kassana was not smiling.

"Even you've started talking about that? I didn't think the chatter among young maidens had reached Thessia's industrial councils."

There was no real argument against it. After the Rachni War, the asari needed new proof that we still remained the galaxy's foremost peacemakers and diplomats. Not another speech about millennia of wisdom, but an act that everyone would see.

Once, the age of our civilization alone had been enough to make others listen before we even opened our mouths. Now every Citadel species could point to a success story of its own, and the old reverence was fading.

The salarians had been the first to find the krogan and bring into the war those who saved the galaxy from the rachni. A great achievement, if one forgot that the rachni themselves had acquired element zero technology thanks to a salarian expedition. The Union could repeat the word "accident" as many times as it liked, but after hundreds of devastated worlds it no longer sounded convincing. The salarians could hardly claim the title of the galaxy's most responsible mentors.

In three centuries, the quarians had never stopped keeping to themselves. Their machines were bought everywhere - the reliability of quarian equipment made even the price and endless service conditions forgivable - but the quarians defended their markets with such stubbornness that one might think every foreign product carried an infection. They could be an example to engineers, but certainly not to diplomats.

The volus had long since learned how to speak to any people in the galaxy. One simply had to name the right sum. The elcor and hanar did not have enough influence to seriously compete for leadership. And the batarians ought to give up the slave trade before explaining to everyone else just how peaceful their Hegemony was.

The Dominion was the only real rival left.

The Aiterri had somehow managed to build good relations with almost everyone, even when there had been no obvious reason to do so. Most of the Dominion's trade with the galaxy passed through our territory and salarian space, reliably leaving transit duties on both sides. They preferred to borrow from the volus, turning their banks into financially interested supporters of Dominion growth. The batarians supplied them with enormous volumes of cheap goods and in return gained access to a market where, until recently, no one had expected to see them.

The story of several Houses that had sold their own citizens to batarian nobles for entertainment was particularly revealing. The Aiterri themselves had exposed the scandal. The guilty Houses were destroyed, their property divided, and somehow the old trade connections did not disappear with them. The contracts simply passed to those whose hands were officially considered clean.

Sometimes I thought it had all happened by accident. Sometimes I thought the Dominion had allowed the criminals to do the dirty work and then disposed of them at the most convenient moment. Both explanations suited the Aiterri equally well.

They had even found an approach to the quarians: invested in their expanding shipbuilding industry and secured the opening of a quarian orbital branch above one of their colonies. The quarians received orders and safe access to a new market. The Dominion received technology and a partner that now had no desire to quarrel with it.

Most importantly, the Aiterri had a story that needed no embellishment. They had held back the rachni almost alone for a century and a half, and before that they had saved two peoples and accepted them into their state. To the rest of the galaxy, the Dominion looked like a dependable elder brother who came to help when things became frightening.

There was no point competing with that image through speeches alone. Judging by the satisfied look on Kassana's face, she had reached the same conclusion and had already found a solution that would undoubtedly promise her conglomerate enormous profits.

"And we have an excellent way out," she continued, waiting until I set the draft resolution aside. "What could remind the galaxy of our principles better than the arrival of a new people in civilized space? The Aiterri still hold up the Aruns and the Lizards as examples. They not only survived a century and a half of war, they saved two species, accepted them into their state, and became elder brothers to them. Why can't we do the same?"

"If a new people capable of interstellar travel had appeared in known space, I would have learned about it before your industrial council."

"Capable of travel - yes."

I slowly pushed the documents aside.

"Kassana, contact with a species that has not yet discovered element zero technology is forbidden under the Treaty of Suen."

"I remember."

"Then what exactly do you want from me?"

She leaned across the desk and placed a thin datapad in front of me.

"What if we take the loan for uplifting this species from your bank?"

A predatory smile appeared on her face. I found myself answering with one of my own.

"What did you say this species was called?"

"Vorcha."

I picked up the datapad and sent my secretary a short message: add one more item to the agenda. There were only seven minutes left before the session began.

***

Aellarin

Truth be told, with every new reincarnation, returning to power became more difficult.

Secret power was not much of a problem. I had left behind enough orders, fallback channels, and capable agents to restore my influence even after centuries of absence. Fifty years, a hundred at worst, and the main levers of Dominion control would once again be in my hands. Besides, I had a general idea of how the near future was supposed to unfold and knew where the major problems were likely to come from.

Public power was another matter entirely.

When there had been few Eternals, it was enough for me to demonstrate my strength and appear beside the right rulers at the right moment. Now the Dominion had plenty of genuine Eternals, and the requirements for the highest offices - requirements I had helped make stricter myself - worked perfectly against me. A candidate had to be at least three hundred years old, demonstrate the strength and skills of an experienced Eternal, and complete two hundred years of actual military service. After that, they merely earned the right to compete for a seat, not the seat itself.

Ostilio Xavier, my new incarnation, was eight years old. Even if I began serving tomorrow, I could not qualify until after my three-hundredth birthday. By then, the boy from the famous family would be very old, assuming he had not died.

Of course, I could use old connections and force through my return much earlier. But a miracle like that would be noticed by more than the Aiterri. Citadel Space would take a great interest in the child of famous parents who suddenly gained access to the Dominion's highest levels of power. Instead of governing the state, I would spend the next few decades explaining who I was, where I had come from, and why others followed me so obediently.

"What are you thinking about, sweetheart?"

I looked at Deadella Xavier, sitting beside me - my new mother, one of the Citadel's most famous actresses and the wife of Rolland Xavier, whose victories in speeder racing were discussed almost more often than her films.

"My political career," I replied, sighing as though I had already managed to become disappointed with my life.

Mother slowly raised an eyebrow. Apparently I had once again stepped too far outside the role of an eight-year-old.

"And about how I want to grow up already," I added, now with ordinary childish resentment. "Then no one will make me drag myself to these stupid red carpets."

"Now, now, dear Ostilio!" She gave me an exaggerated frown. "We do not 'drag ourselves.' Where did you even pick up that awful expression?"

"From Dad."

"I should have known. We're presenting a new film. And a premiere in the Grand Hall of the Pleiades is something I've worked toward my entire life. The whole Presidium will be there."

"That's exactly why there'll be too many cameras."

"You love your mother, don't you?" Deadella moved closer and put a hand on my shoulder. "You're not going to leave me alone to be torn apart by the paparazzi, are you?"

She looked at me with such hope that one might think she truly could not walk down a carpet without the protection of her eight-year-old son. Over the course of her career, Deadella had played so many tragic heroines that I lasted less than five seconds before giving in to her ridiculous provocation.

"Of course I won't."

"I knew I raised a noble man."

"Are we almost there?"

"We're already here. And don't forget to smile, my joy. Although I hardly need to remind you. Sometimes even I can't understand who you got that sensible streak from."

I managed not to laugh.

The aerolimo turned smoothly and stopped at the beginning of the purple carpet. The door lifted, and light from the cameras, music, and the blended roar of voices immediately flooded inside. Deadella stepped out first, froze for one brief instant before the crowd, and held out her hand to me.

She could turn any movement into part of a performance. By the time we reached the entrance, Mother had managed to greet spectators on both sides of the barrier, stopped twice for photographs, and not once allowed the crowd to delay us longer than necessary. I smiled, waved with my free hand, and carefully played the part of a child who had not yet grown tired of all this.

Right at the entrance, a famous asari host intercepted us. She congratulated Deadella on the premiere, waited until the cameras turned toward us, and immediately began the interview.

"Deadella, what did you see in this role when you first read the script?"

"The homecoming scene. My character spends seven years saving other worlds, and when she finally returns home, she realizes her daughter has learned to live without her. I finished the script and called the director immediately."

Mother squeezed my hand for a second, and I did not immediately understand whether it was part of the answer or whether she had genuinely remembered something of her own.

"From what I've heard, this was the most difficult role of your career?"

"Yes. There are almost no words in it, and there's nowhere to hide behind a beautiful monologue. After filming, I called my husband and told him I would never argue with him about work again."

"And how long did that promise last?"

"Until the next morning."

People around us laughed. Deadella waited for the laughter to die down, then continued without prompting from the host.

"But tonight, the film isn't the only thing that matters to me. We've decided to donate part of the box-office revenue to helping the vorcha. The first expeditions have already shown the conditions they live in. If our work can help even a few of their children receive medical care and education, this premiere will mean far more to me than any box-office total."

Only several thousand years of experience and hundreds of battles kept me from covering my face with my hand.

A month earlier, after barely making sense of my returned memories and catching up on the latest news, I had laughed almost to the point of hysteria. The asari had decided to uplift a new species, turn it into their protectorate, and prove their moral superiority to the entire galaxy.

And they had chosen the vorcha.

As a political move, it was brilliant. The military and economic weight of the Asari Republics was more than enough to secure an exception to Citadel laws forbidding the transfer of technology to pre-spaceflight civilizations.

Officially, no one would call the vorcha a dependent people. They would be given protection, schools, medicine, ships, and access to work beyond their homeworld. They would owe their ascent into space to the asari, and from the first day their economy would be integrated into the republics' own.

If the project succeeded, the gains would be enormous. Vorcha matured quickly, reproduced at a monstrous rate, and could adapt their own bodies to conditions that required expensive equipment for other species. Within a few generations - and their generations passed almost instantly by asari standards - the Republics would gain millions of new workers. Then tens of millions. Asari production capacity would grow so much that every other power would have to rethink the familiar balance of strength.

The problem was that these were vorcha...

In the game, they had usually been portrayed as barely sapient cannon fodder: aggressive, filthy, and incapable of thinking beyond the next fight. Real vorcha were a sapient species; otherwise no uplift would have made sense. But this whole undertaking hardly looked like the beginning of an inspiring story: their average lifespan was around twenty years, they had no unified government, and their clans constantly fought on an overcrowded, devastated world.

In short, the asari had chosen themselves space cockroaches that reproduced extremely fast and thought very little.

I wondered whether the salarians were not interfering because they saw no value in the vorcha. Or whether they were already preparing another biological weapon in case the project succeeded.

I immediately pulled myself up short. In my previous life, a theory had circulated among fans of the game that the salarians had created a targeted virus not only against the krogan but against the quarians as well. There had been almost no evidence for it. And the Union, for all its rulers' fondness for covert operations, could not possibly be that insane. If such a program were exposed, the entire galaxy would unite against the salarians. After the Rachni War, no one would wait for another biological nightmare to escape from a laboratory.

"My son Ostilio cares deeply about the fate of the vorcha too," Deadella said.

I looked at her.

She answered with a serene smile and gently nudged me forward. The host had already lowered herself onto one knee so our faces were at the same height, while one camera after another turned toward me.

"Is that true, Ostilio?" she asked. "What would you like to say to everyone watching us right now?"

So my turn to embarrass myself had come.

I raised my head, chose the nearest camera, and looked directly into the lens. If I was going to do this, I might as well do it without self-pity.

"Save the vorcha!"

Applause broke out around us. Deadella proudly wrapped an arm around my shoulders, the host declared that no one should remain indifferent, and I finally understood: with a reputation like this, politics was no longer an option.

***

Thirty Years Later

Just as I had suspected, returning to public power in the Dominion during this life had not worked out. My own fame was a serious obstacle, but the main problem turned out to be the Xavier name.

Once, this Middle House had been considered one of the most successful. It had earned a substantial part of its fortune beyond the Dominion, quickly finding its footing in Citadel Space. Real estate, transport, banking assets, industry, entertainment - by the time I was born, the Xavier name was known far beyond the Aiterri colonies. Unfortunately, there was another side to that success, one the family's own histories preferred not to mention.

The Xaviers had been among the Houses that sold their own citizens to batarian nobility. As long as only a few people disappeared, the crimes could be concealed, but eventually the truth surfaced. The Dominion reacted with very little interest in excuses.

Most of those responsible managed to flee into Citadel Space. Formally they were outside Dominion jurisdiction and probably believed their fortunes, connections, and expensive lawyers would protect them. Some truly were protected, but for years the Dominion pursued extraditions, gathered evidence, froze assets, and returned fugitives to Aetris one by one. Some died first, some disappeared among the batarians, but most eventually stood trial.

The House itself did not disappear. Some companies were confiscated, some passed to creditors, and several lines of business collapsed after their managers were arrested. But many assets were abroad and belonged to independent entities that had broken no laws. The Dominion could not strip them of property with a single decree, and after the former owners were convicted, someone still had to inherit the remaining shares.

That heir was my mother.

Deadella Xavier had fallen out with her father so badly long before the scandal that she had almost completely severed ties with the House. She acted in films, spent her own money, appeared at premieres, married a racer, and did practically anything except involve herself in the family business. Because of that, Deadella became the only major heir whom investigators could not connect to the crimes.

The quarrel the family had considered a disgrace for years gave her control over what had recently been valued in the trillions. Mother had never wanted to run the House, but she had no intention of refusing the inheritance either. Alongside her, I received my own share.

No one forbade us from returning to Aetris. Neither Mother nor I had committed any crimes, and Dominion law recognized no collective responsibility. We could buy a house there, open a business, study, trade, and live for as long as we wanted. Only a serious political career was something I would have to forget, and a military one almost certainly as well.

Worse still, not every doubt about me came down to my surname. I really had grown up in Citadel Space. On Aetris, children were taught from an early age about their House, the state, service, and responsibility to their species. My childhood had been spent among actors, racers, asari, salarians, journalists, and corporate owners. For a Dominion statesman, that was a strange biography even if one ignored who my grandfather had been.

I had to find another path.

I had no intention of repeating my parents' lives. Mother was still more interested in films than board meetings. Father believed that managing a fortune required nothing more than hiring competent people who enjoyed the work and then not getting in their way. Judging by the family's income, both approaches had some merit, but I quickly grew bored with simply watching.

By the time I was twenty, I had finally managed to restore contact with Silvana. The wait was not because the old channels had failed to account for my reincarnation. That was exactly what they had been created for. The problem was that the eight-year-old son of celebrities was almost never without security or cameras, and after the scandal the family's contacts were watched especially closely. Any attempt to reach the right intermediaries might have attracted outside attention before my message ever reached the Order.

And once I gained access to corporate systems and could act without the family security service knowing, another difficulty appeared. The verification procedures I had devised in previous lives did not allow a stranger to simply announce himself as Aellarin's latest incarnation. I had to go through the entire chain of confirmation and prove to the Inquisition and the other organizations under my control that I knew things Ostilio Xavier could not possibly know.

After that, reports from agents, Inquisition intelligence, and connections the Xavier House's own managers knew nothing about were once again at my disposal. They helped me work out which executives were trying to preserve the family fortune and which were preparing to carry off its remains with them. Within a few years, most of the surviving assets were already working the way I needed them to, and I had the funds for projects of my own. One of those projects was cooperation with krogan clans developing the systems allocated to them after the war.

Officially, the krogan were considered the saviors of the galaxy. They were invited to celebrations, speeches were made in their honor, and museums opened entire halls dedicated to the assault on Suen. In practice, after the victory they were left with one dreadnought, several hundred warships, and an enormous population they could not even fully feed on their own, let alone transport between their own worlds.

Over the following century the situation changed, but the dependence remained. The krogan built mines, stations, and their first shipyards, yet they still had to buy almost every sophisticated component. What they lacked most acutely were pharmaceutical industries, equipment for new colonies, and ordinary transport ships: all the things that brought no glory but allowed a state to exist without someone else's permission.

The krogan market had long since been divided among Citadel corporations. They sold finished goods, charged separately for servicing them, and were in no hurry to cultivate future competitors. A local manufacturer's attempt to enter the same market usually ended before the first production run: the krogan lacked trained specialists, domestic technological chains, and cheap credit, while a foreign company could sell at a loss for several years simply to strangle the new rival. Prices would rise again afterward.

I was not satisfied with that arrangement. I had no intention of turning the krogan into grateful Dominion dependents, but permanent dependence of an entire species on asari and salarian suppliers did nothing useful for the galaxy either.

Through several corporations under my control, I signed agreements with clans that were seriously trying to develop their worlds. We did not limit ourselves to deliveries of finished equipment. The krogan received production lines, documentation, and blueprints adapted to local materials. Our specialists trained the first local personnel and helped create enterprises that could be repaired without constantly calling in a foreign engineer. I hid the most important agreements behind chains of intermediaries: competitors did not need to understand why identically organized factories had appeared almost simultaneously in several clan territories.

In return, the clans provided raw materials, long-term contracts, and personnel for tasks whose details they did not need to know. The last item was never difficult for the krogan. Their population was growing faster than their industry, and not every young warrior wanted to spend decades building roads on a new colony. Many preferred service beyond clan territory, especially if they were paid well and promised a real fight. Through intermediaries, some of those fighters entered the organization Kelara Vayne had begun creating during the Dominion's first diplomatic mission to the Citadel.

The pirate free-for-all I remembered from the old history did not yet exist. No major group could land on someone else's colony, plunder it, and disappear before the fleet arrived without consequences.

But after the war, the boundaries of settled space expanded rapidly. Trade routes multiplied faster than patrols. New stations appeared in places where permanent monitoring had not yet been established, and weapons left over from the rachni were spreading into private hands. At an illegal shipyard, a civilian transport could easily be converted into an auxiliary warship.

At the same time, the Citadel was already seeing proposals to ban weapons aboard civilian vessels. Supporters of the ban argued that after the destruction of the rachni there was no longer any need for them, ignoring the fact that criminals had no intention of surrendering their guns. If the resolution was ever adopted, all it would do was leave merchant crews defenseless against those who were already buying weapons without permission.

The krogan added another problem to the mixture. There were more and more of them, and there was not enough work worthy of a warrior for everyone. Mercenary work allowed a young krogan to leave an overcrowded clan world, make a fortune, and return with stories people would listen to around the communal table. For now, most such mercenaries served governments and major companies. But there was far less distance between guarding someone else's cargo and taking it than the owners of merchant fleets would have preferred.

Attacks were still rare and uneven. In one cluster ships went for years without escorts; in the neighboring one, private vessels had begun disappearing every few months. The number of disappearances was rising especially quickly near the borders of the Hegemony, where vast new territories combined with weak control and a local habit of solving every problem through family ties, bribes, or violence.

I could not stop that process. Piracy did not arise because batarians were somehow born worse than asari or salarians. It was created by poorly guarded routes, corrupt officials, accessible weapons, thousands of bankrupt crews, and a government that had little incentive to protect a young frontier. One could destroy a dozen gangs, but new ones would take their place.

So I decided that my agents should take the lead in this part of the future. The Inquisition was not supposed to engage in slave trading or attack random passenger ships. What we needed was an organization capable of subordinating minor gangs, cutting them off from markets, and directing them against those we would have had to destroy anyway. Such an arrangement could hardly be called lawful or just. But if the criminal world was inevitably going to grow, I preferred to know who was making the decisions inside it.

Kelara laid the foundations of that system. Centuries earlier, she had possessed nothing but a captured ship, loyalty to the Dominion, and the cover identity of an asari survivor of a mass effect core accident. The legend explained her altered voice, her refusal to undergo medical examinations, and the gray sealed suit Kelara never removed even in front of her closest allies. Behind the armor, no one could see her skin, ears, or any other traits that might reveal an Aiterri.

By the time of my new life, the Gray had become one of the most influential figures in the criminal underworld of an entire cluster. It contained twelve inhabited planets and several dozen mining worlds, but even that scale did not make her all-powerful. She had to bargain with batarian officials, port owners, smugglers, and mercenary captains, any of whom would have sold her out for the right price. In two hundred years, no one had managed to offer them more than they stood to lose if the Gray fell.

A small army had grown around the Gray. Krogan assault troops served alongside asari biotics, batarian crews, and mercenaries of several other species. The best fighters in her guard wore sealed gray suits as well. Outsiders did not know which of them truly commanded an operation and sometimes could not even say with confidence whether the Gray herself was present at a meeting.

Kelara proved to be a powerful Blessed, but not an Eternal. She lived for two hundred and fifty years and managed to hand her affairs over to another Inquisition agent. By then, the identity of the Gray had almost separated from its creator. The new leader wore the same suit and appeared among identically dressed guards.

When I was first told how Kelara had solved the succession problem, I could not help laughing. One of my organizations had independently reinvented an Alpha Legion trick. All that remained was to wait for the day some agent removed their helmet and solemnly declared, "I am Alpharius."

After restoring contact, I began sending to the Gray those krogan supplied by allied clans. Along with fighters, the network received mechanics, pilots, and access to clan ports. Sometimes the assistance looked even simpler: one of my corporation's new ships would set out on business toward the right cluster with unusually weak protection, and information about its route would accidentally reach the right captain. The crews of such vessels knew in advance when to stop resisting. I had no intention of losing trained specialists merely for the sake of appearances.

By my hundredth year, the Gray's fleet had grown large enough that her subordinates began crushing groups in neighboring Hegemony clusters. The local bosses did not like that. Some united against the outsiders, others sold out their allies in exchange for the right to keep their routes, and still others tried to negotiate with every side at once. A long war began in which criminal fleets hunted one another above all else.

For the Hegemony itself, what was happening remained a disaster. But the number of attacks beyond its borders grew far more slowly than it otherwise might have. I had not rid the galaxy of pirates, but I had managed to make a significant share of them spend their strength fighting their own war.

The next hub was meant to be Omega. For now, it was merely an ancient Prothean station in a system of little interest to any state. Asari researchers had abandoned it about a century earlier, after which the structure passed to one of the Republics' corporations. The company tried to rent out space, service the occasional mining expedition, and at least partly offset the cost of maintaining the enormous station.

I could not buy Omega outright. Even my fortune would not have been enough to make such a purchase without damaging the rest of my business and attracting the attention of every major intelligence service. Through several companies, however, I managed to obtain a third of the docks and part of the internal sections. That was enough to control repairs, place warehouses, and gradually bring abandoned areas back into usable condition.

The work was planned over two or three centuries. Once pirate fleets began threatening colonies, Omega would be large and convenient enough to become the center of a struggle. By then, the station was supposed to be seized by the organization Kelara had created and which remained under Inquisition control.

I did not even expect to destroy piracy or change the batarians' mentality itself. Once, I had spent several lifetimes trying to eradicate the worst habits of my own species and had still achieved far from everything. There was no way to persuade batarian nobility through speeches alone to abandon the system on which their wealth and power rested. As long as they had no desire to change, my agents focused on what they actually could influence.