The Citadel - Human embassy

His subordinates admired Fleet Admiral Steven Hackett for being an almost immutable bulwark, whose early reputation as a stolid, steel-nerved and shrewd command officer had grown to legendary proportions in the wake of the near-impossible victory over the Reapers. He had never expected his interim leadership of most of the civilized races in the galaxy to last past the battle for Earth, but he had had no choice but to accept continuing to play that role upon being proposed by none other than the Turian Hierarchy, and voted into it by his own people and the Asari Republics.

Early on in his career, the young Buenos Aires native had learned that when people looked up to you for decisions it paid to seem always determined and confident, even when sometimes you had next to no clue about what to do. Fear and doubt were contagious, the more dangerous the further up the command chain. He had not expected that reality to translate so seamlessly into government life, and that was a good thing, for privately he was a man past exhaustion. His stewardship of Citadel space had been expected to last until new councillors were appointed. A whole year had passed and Council governments had infuriatingly dawdled on the issue.

On this, Hackett was partly victim to his own success. He had drawn upon the advice of experts of all races, appointing a volus financist as chief economic advisor, enlisting a turian general and a krogan chieftain to serve as military counselors, recruiting a career asari diplomat to help normalizing relations between races and relying on reports from the Shadow Broker to complement the Alliance's own intelligence gathering agencies. At the same time, he had taken pains not to abuse the prerogatives invested upon him, recognizing the Spectres' independence and loyalty only to a constituted Council, which obviously he was not. It had not been a smooth ride -many issues that had been overlooked in light of the urgent threat posed by the Reapers had surfaced now-, but he had, in his own eyes, been moderately successful.

That the rest of the Council races recognized that by taking well past their time to appoint his replacements rightly angered him. He had never wanted to be a president, for that he actually was, despite his uniform, decorations and sidearm. He had actually taken up to wearing a sidearm to remind people of the fact that he was a soldier, not a public service officer, no matter how strongly the galaxy seemed to strive to put him on that place. No matter how well he had adapted to having no one to turn to, to being the ultimate decision maker. It was not a role he wanted. How was it that Shepard said? Spectres executed policy, they did not formulate it. He could empathize with the sentiment. Smart.

And the VI was about to remind him of all this in a brief few instants. "Admiral?"

"Yes, Avina?"

"Barla Von is here for his appointment."

"Send him in."

The door slid open noiselessly and the dwarf-like alien walked in. "Good morning... Admiral," the volus greeted, his voice punctuated by the hissing of his atmospheric suit.

"Good morning, Von. You must have some news, I assume."

"Yes, well..." A hiss. "News would be a way to describe it."

Someone else would have sighed, closed his eyes, expressed his chagrin in some way or another. Hackett did not. His career had been built on hearing bad news and responding to them. "The salarians?"

One thing that never ceased to amuse the human officer was how some body language was universal, in this case, a nod, though Von's seemed exaggerated and slow. No doubt the suit impaired his motions some. "Dalatrass Talron's deputation arrived... last night, as you know. They conveyed that... the bulk of the dalatrasses opposes the terms of the loan... negotiated for the reconstruction of Altakiril. They were to meet... their turian counterparts today."

His face gave nothing away, but Hackett cursed to himself. Upon choosing to cure the genophage, Shepard had earned the war effort the unflinching loyalty of the finest shock troops he had had the chance to see in battle. The krogans were equally admirable and dread-inspiring. Whenever deployed against the horrors of the Reapers, they had never broken, growing ever fiercer in the face of overwhelming numbers -truly overwhelming numbers, the kind that turned entire army corps into carrion, not the kind that gave room for heroes to be created-, with even small squads turning large engagements around all by themselves. The turians themselves had testified that engagements that had saved millions of lives had been won because of their old enemies.

But he had also earned mankind the undying enmity of an enormously powerful and dynamic race, most of whose assets had survived the Reaper War without serious damage. Their fleets were now the largest and most powerful in the galaxy, with the exception of the quarian-geth combine. They had the largest currency reserves available anywhere. Their scientific ingenuity was almost unmatched. They had resisted his designation as interim sole Councillor, only to be forced to grudgingly accept it on the face of unified opposition from their Council counterparts. On the freshly resumed game for galactic dominance they had all the winning cards - and had started to play them, one by one. With the treasuries of most other races depleted by a war effort they had almost entirely avoided to take part on, granting many loans with plenty of strings attached was an opening move that spoke of an extensively thought strategy and heralded further complications.

His mind went, unbidden, to his freshman years on the Academy. Even then he had grasped the value of history as a source of data on patterns that repeated themselves. He was reliving his lessons on the aftermath of World War Two, when the United States had financed an extensive reconstruction of Western Europe. The Marshall plan had been conceived, primarily, to halt the spread of advancing communism, though later on it became clear that implementing it had avoided an aftermath similar to that of WWI. Then, the crushing penalties inflicted upon a losing Germany -compounded with the catastrophic economic collapse of 1929- had fueled resentment and extremism resulting in nazism, causing in turn the most devastating conflict on pre-starflight human history.

The situation was not exactly extrapolable, but it was too depressingly similar. The salarians had now taken the place of the post-WWI Entente powers and the post-WWII United States. And so far they seemed poised to make the same mistakes the British-French-Russian combine had made, advanced space-faring race or not. Only the current -and growing- rift between the political class and the senior ranks of their military and science corps made the picture less grim.

Hackett was aware of the dangers inherent to reducing such a scenario to a simple comparison. Over the past year he had went over the position and motivation of the dalatrasses several times. Their antagonism stemmed from the way they viewed the krogans, and he had to salute their long memory. Learning from the mistakes of past generations was an inability humanity struggled with as a whole even today. That a race with slightly over a quarter of the average lifespan of his own wanted to avoid repeating their own errors was beyond reproach, and one way to interpret their currently advantageous position was to describe it as optimal to put into place as many barriers as they could to curb the consequences of Shepard's choice.

Their concern was shared by many others who could not decide, at this point, what the mistake had been in this case - to unshackle the krogans or to distrust the krogans. He was not one of them, but it would take half a century for anybody to be in place to appraise the results.

He had refused to blame his former subordinate for this. Any competent military officer knew that second-guessing battlefield and wartime choices was the luxury of survivors.

"This is not the first time they do it, don't they... Even if that's a turian-salarian affair..."

"...it will probably end up at your doorstep," Von completed.

"Any indications as to what they will demand?"

"They would not part with any clues on... that regard. If I could hazard a guess..."

The human shook his head. "This again? Reneging on our promises to the krogan now will turn them into what they hate them for." On his behalf, Shepard had informed the Urdnot clan, the leading political force in Tuchanka, that colonization rights could be granted only by a full-fledged Council, that so important a decision taken by an interim governor could be challenged on favoritism grounds. To appease their protests he had committed the backing of the Systems Alliance for their petition in writing, had it countersigned by their senior military and civilian authorities, and presented the document to them as proof of goodwill. Even if Wrex had accepted it, that had drawn some fire, as would draw fire again now:

"One of your advisors spoke this word... she said it was vintage. Realpolitik?"

He was right, of course. The will of the dalatrasses could not be counterweighted by krogan loyalty alone. "Here's another word for you, Von. Blackmail."

"Ah, yes, I know the term. Very correct, too. Have you... entertained the notion that they could be taking... their time to name a Councillor because of this?"

"It has crossed my mind, but sacrificing one of the most coveted political posts in the galaxy only to satisfy their paranoia is too much. Using the issue of reconstruction funding for political posturing is inadmissible in any case. Avina," he commanded the VI, "call a meeting of the ambassadors for all the Council races at the earliest convenience."

"At once, Admiral," the voice replied.

Von tilted his head slightly sideways. "Simply bullying the salarians into compliance... is not a very harmonious way of settling the issue, Admiral."

"They must be made aware of the dangers implicit on withholding money used to make people's lives wholesome again." A frown. "But you're correct." And these are merely speakers, not deciders. The only thing I'm going to hear from them are preplanned arguments. He would have to consult with his intelligence organs for some insight on what he could use to drive the point home. That meant the Alliance's own Intelligence Bureau and the Shadow Broker. "We won't advance on this here, just the two of us. What else was on the list?"

The volus caught the signal and let the issue rest. "There is a petition from the Board of Citadel Businessmen..."


Delta 9 relay

"This is the cruiser Rathek. You are entering restricted space. Power down your engines and state your intent."

The salarian navigator picked up the call. "This is the Citadel frigate Victory. We are here on Council business. Requesting permission to approach."

A few instants later came the reply: "Victory, you are cleared for docking on bay two. Transferring you to docking control."

"Acknowledged."

Javik stood on the bridge of his ship, arms crossed over his chest. His four eyes were impassively glued on the LADAR hologram as he studied the quarian-geth forces arrayed around the icon denoting the dormant relay. One cruiser, six frigates, twice that number of escorts and over a hundred fighters. All of the vessels were of geth make, most likely retrofitted to provide life support and amenities for their organic crews. That was quite the show of force. Only the pirate queen T'Loak could muster strength enough to challenge it and he had been informed she was working in tandem with the quarian-geth combine.

And even if treachery on her part was not a possibility to dismiss, the prothean had no reason to doubt her. He had followed her dealings with his old commander, and on occasion had found himself entertaining the notion of how different things could be if their roles were swapped - the brutally ruthless and pragmatic asari in the stead of the sometimes insufferably idealistic human. He had found more in common with her philosophy. The point was moot now, in any case; facts could not be argued with.

His ship surged forward, quickly eating away at the distance to the geth cruiser, and to the dormant relay behind it. The Victory had made her maiden flight some scarce three months before. It was an unique ship in many ways. First and foremost, it flew the Citadel's flag, not belonging to one of the navies under its banner. Second, it was a scaled-down copy of the Normandy, closer in size to the original SR1 vessel that had met its destiny at the hands of the Collectors. Third, it was a testbed for Prothean technologies, most of which had been gleaned from artifacts stored in the Mars and Ilos archives; an example of this was that the Victory was armed with prototype particle beam cannons -similar in principle to the particle rifle that had been retrieved from his own life support pod at Eden Prime-, as opposed to the usual mass accelerators, or the Thanix cannons that were quickly becoming the primary armament of frontline ships of all Council races.

Fourth, and last, the Victory was a reward. Javik had had little attachment for any species in the galaxy, being slow to overcome his prejudices on their primitive development. But, to an extent, he had learned to respect them, backwards as they were, and fought loyally and well, with the cold-blooded rage that could only stem from being the last survivor of a proud and mighty species that had once ruled the stars. And, on triumph, he had nothing to return to, and Shepard had recognized this, while also taking note of his desire to see the sights a galaxy he had contributed to save had to offer.

Thus had the N7 officer pushed plans for this ship through the Citadel government, relying on the vast network of contacts and resources laboriously spun over the course of three years to produce the necessary funds, a feat all the more impressive on a galaxy where every credit had to go for repairing the damage the Reapers had caused. The work that had been put on his command was immediately evident to Javik upon shaking hands with his commander. Go, Shepard had said. This is for you.

There were, inevitably, some strings attached, but Javik did not mind those. He was someone to act, and the mundane life of an average citizen -which he could never be in any case- would have bored him quickly.

"You believe he would expect us?" he inquired of his executive officer. He was a batarian, of name Orbak. Most of his crew he had picked himself. He knew them better than they themselves did, owing to his ability to read people's memories with naught but a touch. They had all fought bitterly against the Reapers, losing friends, family and even body parts in the process. And, like himself, none of them had anywhere to return to. They belonged to the ship as much as the ship was their home.

The four-eyed humanoid shook his head. "We came right out of nowhere. Omega did not pick us up. No way he could have had an advance warning."

The prothean turned to his yeoman. "Alert our guest. Tell her to be ready." Most surely she already is.

"Yes sir," the asari acknowledged him.

"Sir, did you notice they did not ask for aseptic protocols?" Orbak noted.

Javik bowed his head. "The geth are helping them on that stead."


"The Victory?" Val'Akar wanted confirmation. He knew of his captain and his legend.

"ID is positive," his intelligence chief replied. "It's a SR1 intelligence frigate. Second ship of her class, after the Normandy."

They watched the vessel approach their cruiser, a deceptively tiny and fragile craft next to the bulk of the geth ship. He turned towards the door. "Legion, you have the bridge. I'm welcoming our guests." He exchanged glances with his navigation and gunnery officers. They both nodded imperceptibly at his unspoken command: keep an eye on it.

"Akar-commander," the synthetic agreed.

The exit hatches were close to the bridge. A squad of armed geth was standing in attendance as a token escort as he waited for the doors to open.

When they finally did, the captain of the docking ship came into view. "Ah, captain," Javik saluted. "Thank you for receiving us without warning." He offered a hand.

Val'Akar shook it. He knew his helmet would obscure whatever gesture escaped his rigid control, but he was amazed nonetheless at seeing a living, breathing prothean. A testimony of a bygone era. "It's, actually, a pleasure to welcome you aboard my ship," he replied, with a courteousness that would have done him good as a politician - except that it was true.

Javik gestured at his companion. "This is Professor Nefara Cirron, university of Serrice. She has come to take a first look at the relay."

The quarian shook hands with her, as well. "I've read your work, professor." Nefara Cirron was a scientist married to her passion, and that passion was archaeotech. She had published what little her government had allowed her on scientific journals, some twenty-two articles over a span of seventy years. That most of her work was still heavily guarded by the Asari matriarchy was not a secret either, and it had to be good: her available material was important read for anyone wishing to work with prothean relics.

Cirron smiled. "That's something one always wants to hear."

The quarian guided them over to the officers' ward room over the ship, the geth in escort. Javik was not interested. He had been inside a geth dreadnought a year before. "Ms. Cirron, how do you find working side to side with a living relic?"

A short laugh. "I'm no longer blind with elation. Javik can be quite cool when he wants to." Which means he is most of the time, she thought but did not add. Not that she blamed him, being as he was a galactic celebrity of sorts.

"How come you were so quick to arrive here?"

"The good doctor was close by... relatively speaking, that is. And the Victory is very fast."

"So I hear. One of our number flew with commander Shepard on the original SR1."

Javik nodded. "Your admiral Zorah is an old comrade of arms of mine." Val'Akar had to know that.

"Oh?" The quarian pretended to be startled.

The prothean's eyes did not change. "Along with commander Shepard, we stormed the geth dreadnought that was tearing your fleet to pieces back on Rannoch." Watching the Normandy's captain evict Han'Gerrel for ordering fire on the ship while they still were aboard had been immensely satisfying.

"Ah, yes, I remember now. A regrettable impulse, that of Admiral Gerrel. Shepard's reaction was well deserved."

"What became of him, if I may ask?"

"He retired shortly after the battle for Earth." The -arguably- selfless attitude of the geth after the war, compounded with the information about geth history Tali'Zorah had ordered distributed, had triggered an uncomfortable soul-searching among the quarians as a whole. "Many decisions he took and some of his views made him rather... unpopular."

Javik had digested that information as well. "He had the best of reasons." The prothean believed that wholeheartedly. The Reaper invasion had found his own species in the midst of a conflict with a synthetic race.

Val'Akar did not know that, of course. "You believe so?"

"Our own experience with synthetics was a bad one, captain." He had reflected on those ancient days so many times now that the memories came to mind unbidden. "But they struck first. It is not your case." And even so, had I been you, I would have destroyed them to their last. He took care to conceal that thought from his face.

The quarian exhaled slowly. "It was poorly handled, that's true."

Word had been passed quickly over the ship: the Prothean is here. That did not mean everyone was going to drop what they were doing, but those who were on the officers' lounge welcomed the visitors with a greeting and went about their business - while at the same time keeping their eyes glued on Javik. He had grown used to that attention, and what had once been something uncomfortable now he straight-out ignored.

"What kind of foods can you eat?" Val'Akar asked as they sat on a table. "I don't want to poison you by mistake."

Javik allowed himself a rare smile. "I can accept a drink of yours, captain. You need not concern yourself on the issue."

"That's a relief." He turned to Cirron apologetically. "You'll have to excuse us, ma'am. We have no levo-protein foods to speak of aboard."

Nefara smiled in thanks. "Don't worry, I can go for a few hours without food."

Val'Akar sent the orderly away for drinks. "How can the quarian be of service?" He asked formally.

"For starters, we could use every pict-capture you've made of the relay," the asari took charge. "Then, little else, other than escort. The Victory has enough computation power for our needs."

"It is not our intention to activate it by mistake," Javik noted. "The good professor's plans are to interface our ship's computers with the relay's and gather information from its systems. With some luck we can ascertain where it leads based on data from internal hardware."

"We do not anticipate that it's going to take long," she added. "The Reapers built them to make it easy for other races to learn how to operate them."

Making them all that easier to manipulate, both Javik and Val'Akar thought. "Very well," the quarian nodded. "The pictures I can give you right away. I would prefer to be reinforced before setting up the link with the relay. We expect to have more ships here within the next 20 standard hours."

Javik bowed his head in agreement. "Your caution is commendable."


Within an hour, Javik and Cirron were back on the Victory. The quarians had outdone themselves keeping the most of their ship's secrets from them, even if Val'Akar and Javik knew that the only new equipment was the extensive life support gear. But it had not escaped to Cirron -she was, on top of a leading archaeotechnology expert, on the Shadow Broker's payroll- that the geth cruiser had had its sensors retrofitted on the field for enhanced planet-scanning. She would notify her sponsor on that account. Perhaps there were resources worth the expense of exploring and exploiting on nearby worlds. A very minor detail if compared to the importance of the enigma that was her supposed reason for being there, but valuable nonetheless.

She had left the prothean -and the many mysteries he surely kept to himself, to her grief- to tend to the business of running his ship and learning whatever his subordinates could tell him of the quarian force that they had not learned on their own, and returned to her quarters. For years she had painstakingly documented every second of her explorations of prothean ruins or work on mass relays, with the intended goal of revisiting any point of her studies by simply inserting the right module on her VI interface.

Mass relays were split into two distinct categories. Every navigator knew this by heart: primary relays allowed for long-distance travel between only two points, secondary relays could send a ship to any other node within a shorter range. The longest recorded jump between two nodes was 14,392 ly long. The difference between both types of relay was imperceptible to the naked eye. Few people knew that it was not the mass of the eezo core that determined whether a relay was primary or secondary. Each core harbored enough potential energy to shoot a dreadnought between galaxies and then some without breaking a sweat. The limitation, it had been believed, resided in the hardware tasked with interrogating the would-be corridor for obstructions and adjusting to compensate. Someone -not her- had calculated the processing power required to complete that task. The staggering values that had resulted could not be corroborated; disassembling a mass relay to take a peek at its internal workings was impracticable for a long list of reasons, not the least of which its resilience.

After decades of literally inching along -again for the best of reasons-, direct research on mass relays had gleaned a few insights on those mysteries. By their very nature, the devices were impervious to measurement via sensors. They were literally stone-cold dead, not emitting anything other than visible-spectrum light. The controversial experiments undertaken by one Dr. Akil Carinii on the Kappa Iota relay had revealed an entire system of control put into place by the protheans -so it was thought then-, which had been given the none too original name of Dark Switches. Their discovery had been almost accidental, clumsy as their manipulation of the relay's controls had been as they tried to have a probe sent through to the Turix star. The fallout of their results having been tainted by faulty data storage had discredited most of her resulting theories and discouraged official agencies from sponsoring further studies. Cirron's own sponsors had thought otherwise and tasked her to put Carinii's work to test. She had consciously chosen not to dwell on the -so obvious as to defy understanding- dangers of the assignment, but rather to be in awe for a while. How powerful the Shadow Broker had to be to make absolutely sure she could do her work on that same relay without fear of discovery?

Calling the results 'astonishing' did them no justice. In fact, little did the galaxy suspect of the potential of the relays, too fearful to toy with forces almost arcane in scope. The first such conclusion had been a confirmation of a theory claiming that longer jumps demanded focusing a relay's processing power on a single route, which did preclude having nodes with the range of primaries and the flexibility of secondaries. That much Carinii had intuited. That the performance of a node's hardware could be configured -and thus, increased or decreased across extremely broad ranges-, he had not. Its range could then be increased to distances the scope of which challenged imagination, its only real condition being that a relay were on the other side of the route to handle the outgoing craft. The only way to explain this was to suppose that the true capabilities of a given node's hardware were several orders of magnitude greater than the demands placed on it by simple tunneling between nodes... Simple, in this case, being enough computing power to handle an entire asari core world's requirements for a decade.

Properly reprogramming the things was a small quirk around which there was absolutely no way. There were only so many relays to go by, all critically important. (Besides, it probably was for the better. Altering the relay network was playing God with the fabric of galactic society.) And for all her work, she still did not know of a way to tell where a relay was targeted towards without it being turned on and synced with its pair.

Nefara Cirron did know, however, how to turn on a dormant relay. The key was on the extensive logs she had so carefully built.

She knew not that Javik had, with as brief a gesture as shaking her hand, learned of all that as well.