Citadel Stories, Book 0 "Warm ghosts"
Chapter 21: The world and people in it
Sic transit
"Talk to me. Enough with the sad face, already."
"It's too quiet. Over two months now! If people are around, I can forget."
"You had some time with Hackett, Supernan. Sixty years!"
"On and off. Mostly off, inside a hibernation pod. But yes. That's the problem."
"You can't stop thinking of everyone who's gone?"
"Not that. I just wish he could see this. The glory of an island universe. He dreamed of it, when he was young. Well, not this one. Triangulum was more of a challenge."
"He lived to see the expedition go. And you still have us."
Hannah Shepard took a deep breath. Felicia was doing her damnedest to cheer her up, and she was so good at that. She notoriously wouldn't stop till her target's mood improved, which could be annoying.
"Uh huh." Hannah forced herself to lift her chin, and smile."At least there's the kids. Fun to be around. And, at least I got to say good-bye. I'm trying to stay positive, okay?"
"There's a good Grand-mom."
But right then, a klaxon sounded. Felicia nearly jumped out of her skin, "Eek!"
"They're back!" Hannah jumped off the couch and ran for the elevator.
Of the world, but not in it
At relay 489 Overlord's panorama lounge filled with something other than void. A minute later, Normandy came through as well. At first neither crew perceived much; vision reported only a blurry pointillist expanse.
"Doesn't look like much, Shepard." Cortez was on duty. "We came so far for this?"
Lifetimes gone, yeah. Others of the old guard there assembled nodded; still frank and earnest in their older age, remembering bright images rendered by mirrors. Cortez tried to concentrate on the portal approach.
Finding the asteroidal hollow bubble didn't take long; drift only sixty kilometres.
"First let's dock with Two. It's opening. Let's take it slow through the iris, Steve."
"Let Joker get used to the clearance?"
"Yeah. Can't have EDI's support all the time. Give him a break."
It took over an hour to pass through and dock. Shepard hugged his mom who demanded that he come to the panorama window before mission debrief.
The teams followed.
Pale Glory
"Just wait, Vega. You'll see what we came for. It's just that your retinas are not yet dark-adapted. Pictures from old-style light-bucket telescopes give you the wrong idea."
"I know, okay? Modern holos are time exposures too."
"They all display exaggerated saturation and intensity. Everyone has time to kill. Give it some, your eyes will even see color near the centre."
A few minutes crawled by; Shepard began to hear a muted chorus, breaths in-drawn, even from the Lawson resting a hand on his shoulder, levering herself up for a better view.
"Man, that central bulge is so bright now." Riley's voice, somewhere in the gloom. Murmurs grew. The Milky Way's counterweight within the local group revealed ghostly galactic arms to patient eyes, sheer veils shrouding an incandescent center.
"That's where we're headed next, boys and girls. Feels like I could almost touch it."
"Gorgeous. It's still forty thousand light years off though, cheerleader."
Miri sat down again, declaring: "I know. That's the point." Jack crossed her arms over the back of Shepard's seat, leaned over their shoulders, and purred in a perfect Lawson shell-like ear:
"Still eight more years princess. Proper time."
Miri grinned up at her tormentor-in-chief: "One more sleep. I can do that."
"Hah." Shepard's wry laugh echoed. "Sleep later, maybe. First we have to advance the chain again, remember, and we have to show Joker and EDI their duties."
By now Hannah was up to speed on how Wrex finally passed on, a month previously. "Gods. Wrex set a record again. Yet another funeral. Damn."
"I miss them all," murmured Oriana. Very very quietly, but Jack heard.
"Me too. You do realize we can't rock up to every funeral, Shep?"
"The only one we have to attend is our own. But we owed that wake to Bakara."
"She's right though, son. It consumed many weeks transit time." (Jack nodded.)
Miri sighed. "How long since Garrus?"
"Three hundred and twenty years," noted Liara. "We'd laid direct relay thirty-one."
"Penultimate relay 489, on-line. We move the instant we hear–"
Blackbird, the asteroid's VI, interrupted: "Captain, QEC hail from Peacemaker, turian registry. Ship's complement is now fully awake and argon purge is complete."
"Very well. We are go for the final relay. Mission clock start, we have eighty hours."
Their last cold-sleep transit before Andromeda was noticed, if only by sensors. Not by aliens; not in proper time, either. Noticed, nonetheless.
Inside job
Tevos' personal assistant, flustered and blue in the face, burst in a day after she returned to the Citadel, to warn her that the turian councilor had demanded an immediate meeting. Less than ten minutes later; Tomarctus had come charging over from the turian embassy precinct in a state of high agitation.
She received the turian councilor in her office, engaged a secure bubble. Breathing heavily, Tomarctus opened the conversation: "Did you know about this?!"
"About what?" Her completely genuine air of puzzlement set him back on his heels:
"You haven't heard?"
"Haven't heard what?"
For answer, Tomarctus palmed on the wall video screen.
Fifth Star network should have been showing a quarian sitcom – and it was. Cursing, he selected the Alliance Nexus News channel; it showed a somewhat breathless announcement whose nature wasn't immediately clear, and a handheld camera view of the Palaven skyline at dusk. Tevos turned to Tomarctus, still puzzled:
"Wait," he said grimly. The turian commentary wasn't being picked up by her autotranslator, but she had some court turian and realized merely from the breathless and excited tone of the comments that something big was afoot. "There!" He pointed at a part of the grainy skyline image:
"I don't see–" But then she did. She hadn't immediately recognized the Primarchate cemetery, because the biggest part of the roofline had changed– "Vakarian's tomb!"
"Yes," said Tomarctus, still breathing hard, and ground out an accusation: "Peacemaker lifted off, punched out of the system a half hour ago! This is your doing!"
Stunned, then angry, Tevos said something intensely undiplomatic, adding:
"Shouldn't you be investigating the tomb overseers? I fail to see why–"
"Your merc, whatshername, Lawson? She's responsible!"
"For stealing Peacemaker? Miri slinks into the most heavily monitored airspace there is, to perform such an act of piracy or vandalism? Nonsense. Look to yourselves."
This stunned the turian, but he rallied: "The military? You think turians did it?"
"Something got in that shouldn't, but check the graves commission. Or the ship maintainers. Not even Shepard could have done that undetected. If he could, Councilor, I suggest the Hierarchy needs to look closely at its military competence! No. Wait."
On reflection, Tevos mused: "Who has command authority for the ship AI?"
The turian blinked. "Its last pilot. His commander. Above them, fleet, to primarch."
"Understood. I don't think Peacemaker was stolen, Tomarctus."
"No-one in the military would authorize this!"
"I see. Has anyone actually checked Vakarian's coffin lately? Or, ever?"
Light cone * +3652d
Standing before the radiance of Messier 31, the N7 commanding could almost believe he was facing the Milky way, were it not for the less emphatically barred spiral. He briefly lost himself in Andromeda's magnificence, then shook himself alert, stowed the tags:
"We're ready for transit, then?"
"Yes, Pathfinder. But I have the count on hold. There is an anomaly for your review."
"Show me." The head-up display drew a circle a little above the galactic center, perhaps a third of a galactic radius above and to the side. The N7 was not familiar with the threat icons; a truncated cone trailed by a bright flickering point:
"What's the witch's hat? And the asterisk?"
"The cone represents the wavefront of a RICH sensor array detection event, representing a reverse Cherenkov trace."
"A what?"
"A shock wave appearing as a cone of light. Result of a pointlike charge going much faster than light through the interstellar medium. Rare."
"If you say so. I've sure never seen a symbol like that on the threat board before."
"I mean the shock wave, not the symbol, although that too is part of a library of HUD icons, one that's scarcely ever used. The symbol was inserted in the HUD codes half a millenium ago."
"Good god. And no-one's seen this happen since? The icon's not been used again?"
"Just occasionally around the time of the Reaper war. I speculate that the underlying technology was considered so destabilizing that it was suppressed by Council authority. At that time, probably involving Spectre sanction."
The N7 reflected that "Spectre sanction" five hundred years ago meant somebody probably died.
"There must be something uncomfortable about this esoteric bit of physics."
His own (human) civilization once experienced rapid technical advances within a fantastically short space of time, but ever since the Reaper and First Contact wars that pace had slowed dramatically, accompanied by controversial deaths and a lot of disappeared geniuses. Now humanity was just like every other 'civilized' race, really. Annoying, he muttered.
N7s traditionally had never been happy with stagnation. It could lead to being vulnerable. The N7 wondered, fleetingly but not for the first time, what civilization would look like given free rein; without sanctions eliminating "destabilizing" tech.
He personally felt it was time to find out.
Next chapter is the final in this Citadel story.
Sunday, June 19, 2016