Ethereal Effect. Chapter 39 (Patreon)

Interlude. Mairen Tallis, First Viceroy of the Dominion's Distant Colony

It is always gratifying to watch a child you have cared for over three hundred years not only stand firmly on their own feet, but prepare to reach for new stars.

That was exactly what I was thinking as I looked at the first faster-than-light ship built entirely by our colony. From mining the ore to tuning the final Aether cell, everything had been done here. Not a single component had been brought from the Dominion, and we had not had to wait for a single specialist from Aetris. In a few months, the ship was to leave the system, become the flagship of a new exploration fleet, and begin the next stage of our expansion.

A hundred years before the expedition began, when I had only just decided to join His Inquisition, I was told the truth about Aellarin and the purpose for which he had created the Dominion. Back then, I dreamed that within my own lifetime mighty Aiterri fleets would meet the Reapers in open battle and prove to the entire galaxy that only the children of Aethra were worthy to rule it.

I was young even by the standards of the Blessed, and for an Eternal, barely more than a child. It seemed to me that a few centuries were enough to solve any problem. All we had to do was gather the best scientists, give them the resources they needed, and stay out of their way. Each new generation of ships would be stronger than the last, every discovery would bring us closer to the enemy, and one day the Dominion would create a weapon capable of destroying Reapers as easily as our ancestors had destroyed wooden fortresses.

Then we found the rachni.

The war forced science to advance faster than it had during even the boldest decades before it. We needed new reactors, engines, communications systems, medicines, and weapons. A mistake that would have been debated for years in peacetime could become a lost ship or a dead city within days at the front. The Dominion paid for progress in blood, but by the time we encountered Citadel Space, we could already rival the ancient powers in certain fields, even though they had been using mass relays and the Prothean legacy for nearly a thousand years.

That only made my disappointment greater.

No, the civilizations of the Citadel had not stood still. Their ships were getting faster, their reactors more powerful, their weapons more accurate. The Rachni War forced the asari and salarians to invest enormous resources in research, while quarian engineers knew how to refine long-established solutions to a degree of reliability we still had to learn. But all of them continued along roads laid down before them. Having inherited Aether technology and the mass relays, they improved individual devices while making almost no attempt to change the very foundation of their power.

The pace of research was already beginning to slow. If that trend continued, even two thousand years from now the galaxy would meet the Harvest with faster ships, stronger armor, and the same mass relays built by the Reapers themselves.

Aellarin had warned us that no single discovery would guarantee victory. The Reapers had accumulated the knowledge of exterminated species across countless cycles, and he estimated their numbers at more than two hundred thousand ships. According to calculations made before our departure, reliably destroying even one such enemy would have required the Dominion to assemble almost its entire fleet of that era. Even a successful victory would have left us defenseless against the next one.

But without independent faster-than-light travel, victory was impossible in principle. A species tied to the mass relays accepted in advance the rules of war written by its enemy. The Reapers needed only to seize the network's nodes, cut systems off from one another, and destroy them one by one. Ships that did not need the ancient roads did not make our weapons stronger, but they allowed us to scatter colonies, preserve industry beyond the boundaries of known maps, and one day strike from a direction the enemy did not expect.

That was why, three hundred years ago, He assembled our expedition. While the Dominion remained in full view of the Citadel, another Aiterri state was to grow far beyond its borders - strong enough to survive the destruction of the mother country and free enough not to submit to laws written by others.

The political decision had been made long before launch. Selecting specialists, preparing genetic banks, manufacturing equipment, and compiling archives took decades, but departure was delayed primarily because of the drives. The Single Monocrystalline Aether Core made interstellar travel possible, yet the severe limitations of the old technology made the expedition almost pointless.

At the center of every such ship was an enormous Aether monocrystal. It took years to grow in special chambers and was then surrounded by a stabilization system that cost several times more than an ordinary hull. The larger the ship became, the harder it was to maintain a uniform field throughout the crystal. Beyond three hundred meters, errors increased so rapidly that further increases in size were simply impossible with the technology of the time.

With the old technology, we would have needed at least fifty expedition ships instead of ten. They would have had to carry the same reactors, factories, ectogenesis units, and construction machinery, distributed among smaller hulls. The journey would have taken almost twenty years instead of ten, which meant adding more living compartments, agricultural modules, and emergency reserves to the equipment.

And throughout all that time, each monocrystal remained a single point of failure. Damage to a compensator or loss of field stability at faster-than-light speed left no chance to save the crew. The ship regained its mass where space itself would not allow that mass to exist, after which not even wreckage remained. We could have sent the colony aboard the old ships, but then far too much would have depended on whether several dozen unique crystals could withstand twenty years of continuous operation.

So we waited until the engineers brought the Continuum Chorus to a reliable state.

In the new system, conventional resonators first created a weak distortion of the required shape. Small Aether cells merely amplified the prepared field, joining hundreds of separate regions into a single spatial envelope. They worked in concert but did not depend on a single crystal: a damaged cell could be shut down and its load redistributed among its neighbors. The ship lost speed and sometimes had to drop out of FTL, but it no longer vanished because of a single malfunction.

Our fleet consisted of ten ships, each nearly five hundred meters long. Wide drive channels ran through the middle of their hulls, surrounded by resonators, phase sensors, and Aether cells, so their external dimensions were deceptive. A substantial portion of the internal volume was occupied by reactors, energy-storage banks, cooling systems, and the Chorus itself. Even so, those ships could carry incomparably more cargo than vessels built around the Single Core.

Each ship carried a crew of about three hundred Aiterri. For a hull that large, the crew seemed almost negligible, but we had not been sent to build a city during the voyage. Several thousand specialists were expected to spend nearly ten years in transit, land on an unknown planet, and prepare it for those who would be born beneath another sun.

Among us were pilots, power engineers, physicians, geneticists, agronomists, geologists, metallurgists, builders, and engineers from dozens of disciplines. Teachers and caregivers traveled with them, without whom tens of thousands of future children might have received knowledge but would never have become a people. The military protected the expedition, while members of the Inquisition ensured that the original mission was carried out.

The main supplies were distributed among the ships so that the loss of a single vessel would not destroy the entire program. Each carried its own reactors, medical complex, workshops, agricultural modules, and part of the genetic bank. Especially important samples were stored in several independent chambers aboard different ships. Even if half the fleet were lost, the survivors would retain the ability to found a settlement, although after such a catastrophe the original plan would have had to be abandoned.

Tens of thousands of embryos occupied surprisingly little space compared with the equipment required to raise them into the first generation. They were transported in cryogenic storage units with independent power supplies and passive emergency cooling systems. Nearby were banks of reproductive cells, genetic samples, and medical archives that would preserve population diversity even if some of the embryos were lost.

We carried ectogenesis units, equipment for hospitals, future nurseries and schools, educational materials, and disassembled residential structures. The children were to be raised by Aiterri selected and trained specifically for that work. They would also become the first generation's connection to a homeland their charges would never see.

Industry took up far more space. The cargo holds contained geological survey equipment, mining machines, smelting complexes, chemical reactors, machine tools, and production lines. We were not merely supposed to manufacture finished parts from old blueprints, but to build the equipment on which the next generation would create factories of its own. That was why, alongside ordinary workshops, we transported metrology laboratories, clean rooms for electronics, and the tools required to manufacture new tools.

Separate compartments held prefabricated power plants, energy storage units, cable networks, and fuel reserves. We took as much processed Aether as safety regulations allowed: until local deposits were discovered, every lost drive cell reduced an irreplaceable reserve. Finding a habitable planet was not enough. Without sources of element zero, the new state would remain forever dependent on cargo brought from Aetris.

The expedition could not live on canned food alone for ten years, so the ships carried hydroponic farms and closed-loop water and air recycling systems. Stocks of seeds, algae, fungi, and useful microorganisms were stored separately from the active agricultural circuits. If the unknown biosphere proved incompatible with our life, all food for the first cities would have to be grown beneath sealed domes.

We carried construction machinery, planetary rovers, landing shuttles, orbital tugs, satellites, and modules for the first stations. The colony ships themselves were not designed to land. After arrival, they were to remain in orbit and serve as warehouses, power plants, workshops, and the final means of abandoning a badly chosen world.

Weapons took up space as well, though far less than industrial equipment. The expedition had the means to defend its ships, future cities, and orbital facilities, but it did not carry an army intended to conquer another state. If we discovered an advanced sapient species on the chosen planet, we were to find another world instead. After all, even with all our technology, what could only three thousand Aiterri do against the armies of an entire planet?

Naturally, we would have returned to that inhabited world in a century or two, once our population had grown, but for the time being the expedition simply lacked the strength. And, frankly, the possibility of finding an advanced species was extremely unlikely.

That was exactly how it turned out. We encountered no advanced civilization along our route, but in the ninth year of the search we discovered Illaran - an uninhabited A-0-1-8-class planet.

After ten years spent among metal, plastic, and artificial light, it seemed like the paradise Aethra had promised us. Ocean covered two thirds of the surface, while the planet's only continent stretched across most of the Northern Hemisphere, from near-polar glaciers to humid equatorial forests. Thousands of islands lay in the ocean around it, and several mountain ranges divided the continent's interior into green river valleys, high plateaus, and dry plains. Life existed almost everywhere, but the scouts who descended by shuttle found no large predators capable of treating Aiterri as prey.

The Southern Hemisphere was almost entirely ocean. There was no continent there to obstruct the water, so a powerful circumpolar current flowed freely around the entire planet. It mixed cold deep water with warm surface layers and supported such an abundance of living organisms that in the first recordings parts of the ocean appeared darker from endless concentrations of plankton. Schools of small floating creatures followed them, while still deeper moved enormous beings comparable in size to small space shuttles.

By our classification, Illaran could hardly have been better. The one in the penultimate position indicated a safe biosphere, while the absence of a mass relay made the system invisible to anyone without independent FTL. Only the final digit spoiled the perfection of our new home: the eight indicated an extremely low concentration of Aether in the planet's crust.

At the time, that problem seemed distant. We still had the reserve we had brought with us, and beneath our feet was a world where we could breathe without masks, drink purified local water, and grow plants brought from Aetris beneath the open sky. Under the expedition charter, the entire planet passed into my possession. Yet within the first few days it stopped being merely property to me. Illaran became my home and, I hoped, the home of many generations of my children.

We chose the first landing site in the temperate zone, on a broad elevated plateau between two rivers and sufficiently far from the sea. Siar, Illaran's large moon, raised powerful tides, and we had too little observation of the local coasts to entrust our only settlement to them. Later, we built dozens of port cities and learned to predict even the highest tides in advance, but there was no reason to take that risk in the first year.

The colony ships themselves remained in orbit. Landing five-hundred-meter hulls would have required enormous expenditure and might have ended with the loss of vessels we could not replace. After unloading, some ships were mothballed, with their reactors and most internal systems preserved. The others continued operating: supporting orbital stations, carrying cargo through the system, and providing security.

We were far from known routes, but it would have been foolish to consider ourselves unreachable. The Citadel states already possessed ships of their own capable of moving slowly beyond the mass relay network, and there could also be species in the galaxy unknown to either us or them. If an unknown fleet entered the system, the mothballed ships were to be recommissioned, while those on active duty bought the planet time.

The first fifty years after landing were the hardest and probably the most important in Illaran's entire history. Three thousand colonists had to do more than build power plants, hospitals, farms, and factories. We had to raise fifty thousand children.

Ectogenesis allowed us to produce as many healthy infants as the equipment and trained medical teams could support. But birth was the easiest part of the task. A child had to be fed, treated, and educated. They had to be told about Aetris, a world they had never seen, taught how the Dominion was organized, and given an answer to the inevitable question of why their homeland was a planet three hundred light-years away from the rest of the Aiterri.

Even for the sake of speed, we did not abandon the old rule: no adult should be responsible for more than three children who still required constant care. So new cohorts were created in sequence. While physicians prepared the next wave, caregivers looked after the previous one, and builders expanded residential districts, schools, and hospitals. Every adult whose specialty allowed them to step away from production spent part of their time with the children. During the first decades, even pilots and soldiers taught classes, supervised younger groups, or accompanied them to training camps.

Gradually, those we had raised ourselves began to join us. The first Aiterri born on Illaran became physicians, engineers, and teachers while the last colonists from Aetris still retained the habit of thinking of them as children. They took on most of the next wave. Without them, the three thousand founders would never have been enough, no matter how many ectogenesis units we had brought.

In the first fifty years, we raised fifty thousand children. Thirty years later, our population exceeded one million: the older cohorts had grown enough to take responsibility for the next wave, while many of the founders were still working beside them. Most inhabitants were still children or very young Aiterri, so the number looked more impressive than our actual capabilities. For every experienced specialist there were dozens of students, and every complex factory depended on a few master technicians for whom replacements had not yet been trained. Even so, by then the colony could continue growing without reserves of finished embryos from Aetris.

The old ectogenesis units reached the end of their service lives at almost the same time. We had dismantled some of them in advance, studied the wear on every component, and built production lines of our own, so the program did not have to stop. The new capsules had shorter service lives than the originals and required more maintenance, but we could manufacture them by the hundreds and then by the thousands. For the first time, the colony's population was limited not by expedition reserves, but by how many physicians, caregivers, homes, and food supplies we could prepare for the next generation.

Even those imperfect units, however, had only been possible because of Aether.

We began searching for it immediately after arrival. Geological equipment surveyed Illaran, while exploration ships checked the planets, moons, and largest bodies in the asteroid belts one after another. Element zero was present almost everywhere, but its concentration in the rock was so low that refining it required more energy and consumables than we could afford.

The complexes brought from Aetris had been designed for rich ore. Each ship carried only one such unit: an enormous laboratory capable of separating element zero from impurities and refining it to the required purity. With poor ore, it could operate for years to produce enough material for only a few cells. Industrial processing of local resources required gravitational separators on an entirely different scale, but building those required the very Aether we lacked.

For more than ten years, we consumed an irreplaceable reserve and watched it slowly diminish. A complete survey of the asteroid belts was out of the question: even with automated probes, it would have taken centuries. We had to select the most promising bodies, send expeditions to them, and keep receiving nearly identical reports.

The ore we needed was finally found on one of the moons of a gas giant. The first samples showed an Aether concentration high enough that operating our refining units finally made sense. We transferred all ten complexes there and built a mine, a residential station, and storage facilities. Output remained low, but for the first time since leaving Aetris, our reserve began to grow instead of shrink.

Aether was needed for more than ships. Without it, we could not build the gravitational separators capable of processing Illaran's poor ore, and without those separators we would remain forever dependent on a single rich deposit. It was used in precision machine tools, where a working field held components to nanometer accuracy, in medical equipment, and in the new ectogenesis units. Every sector needed the resource to expand itself, so I personally allocated the first batches.

First we built new refining lines. Then came the machine tools and measurement systems needed to maintain them. Only after that did the shipyards, hospitals, and other industries receive Aether. For several decades, the colony's development was determined not by the amount of metal, energy, or labor available, but by how many grams of refined element zero we could obtain each year.

Once we overcame that limitation, Illaran began changing much faster. Settlements appeared along rivers and near deposits, then were joined by roads and high-speed transport lines. Ports rose along the coasts, designed around Siar and the local currents. We crossed mountain ranges, reached the equatorial forests, founded cities on the shores of the inland sea, and learned to make use of the riches of the southern ocean.

During the first decades, the colony could survive only under a strict planned economy. My small council decided how much steel a new city would receive, who would be allocated a reactor, and which specialists would be sent to the next mine. A mistake in distribution could leave a hospital without equipment or shut down the only factory producing a necessary component. But as the population grew, the system increasingly became an obstacle. The center could no longer decide which workshop needed another machine tool or how many cargo vehicles a city on the far side of the continent required.

So I permitted free trade, private enterprises, and the creation of new Houses. The founders of the most influential among them were Blessed who had arrived with me. They were allowed to gather followers around themselves, invest their property in their own industries, and take responsibility for the development of entire cities. The market quickly filled Illaran with goods the planning council had never had enough attention for: comfortable clothing, household appliances, entertainment, and thousands of small things without which one can survive, but for which one wants to live.

With wealth came the desire to test the limits of my authority.

Several Houses began expanding their private guards, concealing fighters among corporate security personnel. At first they divided contracts and deposits through intermediaries, then moved on to attacks against warehouses and transports. It ended in a firefight near a suborbital port. One force tried to seize a landing area, another opened fire, and a cargo shuttle that was already gaining altitude was caught in the exchange. The craft crashed outside the city with its crew and passengers aboard.

The heads of both Houses insisted they had never ordered anyone to fire on the shuttle. That may have been true. But they were the ones who had created armies, armed them, and sent them to fight for private profit. I found everyone who had taken part in the decision to attack guilty. I personally beheaded the leaders of both Houses. Afterward, the permitted size of House guards was reduced, heavy weapons were placed under the viceroy's control, and any House that attempted to conceal a fighter or combat vehicle forfeited its property and status.

Order cannot be maintained through executions alone. I did not allow a handful of Houses to bring entire industries under their control; I broke up holdings that grew too large and helped new minor Houses emerge, Houses that depended more on my laws than on their older rivals. On Aetris, a few Great Houses could turn an economic dispute into a civil war. On Illaran, none of them possessed enough troops, factories, or allies for open rebellion.

Besides, every inhabitant knew that the Dominion stood behind us. Contact with it was rare, and ships from the Dominion came only once, bringing essential precision equipment, but the colony had never disappeared from its maps. If the entire world decided to renounce its mission, the Council of Eternals would not hesitate to send hundreds of FTL ships to reclaim it - or, if reclamation proved impossible, to destroy it.

The final argument was my personal guard. It consisted of the strongest Gifted born beneath Illaran's sun, whose position bound them not to any House but directly to me. Alongside them grew a security service that monitored military production, House nobility, and compliance with my laws. Thanks to them, the conflict at the suborbital port remained the only case in which rivalry between the new Houses escalated into an actual war.

Three hundred years after the landing, more than one hundred and fifty million Aiterri lived on Illaran. Our cities stood in every habitable region of the continent, permanent stations operated on the system's moons and planets, and industrial complexes produced new ectogenesis units faster than we could prepare homes and caregivers for the children. Over the next two centuries, I intended to raise the population to two billion.

But to me, the true proof of the colony's maturity was not its population. It was the ship beyond the glass.

Reproducing the Continuum Chorus technology proved far more difficult than building an individual reactor or copying a hull. It required enormous shipyards, zone refining of element zero, and chambers for the controlled growth of hundreds of identical monocrystals. It required phase sensors, ultra-precise electronics, materials capable of enduring variable fields for years, and exceptionally complex chemistry for producing the components.

Every one of those industries depended on several others. We could not produce the required electronics without clean rooms and precision machine tools, the machine tools without metrology laboratories, or the laboratories without a chemical industry of our own. An economy of one hundred and fifty million inhabitants was too small to support that entire chain effortlessly. We had to spend years training specialists for industries that offered almost no practical benefit until the ship was actually built.

And yet we succeeded.

The new exploration vessel was almost an exact copy of the ships that had brought the first colonists. In a few months, it was to leave the system and test the Chorus on a prolonged independent voyage. After the trials, it would lead an expedition to a living world ten light-years from Illaran. We had been studying that route for half a century: the expedition's old ships had mapped the neighboring system, left automated stations behind, and confirmed that the new world was suitable for settlement.

A single exploration vessel was not enough to found a colony. Over the next five years, we had to complete the escort ships, prepare the equipment, and select the future settlers. After that, Illaran would send an expedition of its own to another star - just like the one the Dominion had sent three hundred years before.

I looked at the ship and felt the kind of pride parents must feel when they look at a child who has grown up. Once, we had brought everything needed for a new civilization to this world. Now the world we had created was preparing to do the same.