5 AC: Citadel, Widow Nebula
Captain Simon Warrens stretched in his chair. Being assigned to the Citadel garrison fleet was a change from some of the hairy situations he'd been in the last few years. It was much more boring for one.
The mixed fleet had mostly Council races, as various treaties demanded, but Humanity and the Geth made up a decent part. Such a large part in fact, that they'd continually forced the Council races to increase their contribution. When there'd been diplomatic pushback, Humanity had called in a few favours, and got other Citadel races to send ships. A token effort, in many cases, but a big change from the galaxy of only a few years ago, which had relied almost entirely on the Turians for military protection. There was even a Krogan ship out there somewhere, squat and encrusted with so many guns it looked like a pinecone.
Warrens glanced at the clock widget hovering above his wrist. Another few hours, and the By Other Means would rotate out for a break. Perks of being a garrison, shore leave was plentiful. Tull's ship would be on the same break rotation this time, and they'd made plans to meet up for drinks again. Warrens grinned, and wondered what he should wear this time. The trace awkwardness between them after his romantic pass had evaporated by now, and they'd settled into a friendly ribbing. Warrens would on occasion wear something outrageous just to get a reaction from the Turian.
Tull, for his part, had insisted on ordering drinks for them both. Apparently, the Turian male had a reputation for both an iron constitution and exotic tastes. He regularly ordered two identical drinks, enjoying one while inflicting the same on Warrens. Warren wasn't completely sure Tull wasn't just bribing the wait staff to poison him. The memory of the ryncol depth charge in a pint of Asari gin-analogue made his stomach twist. And he was currently in sim!
His musings were interrupted by a small ping. Sensors had just sent him a minor notification for his attention. Increased chatter among the Council ships, but none directed at the others yet.
Warrens frowned. It was odd, but not completely out of the ordinary. Probably some internal update. If it was relevant, he'd get it from a Ghost in a briefing tomorrow, or from Tull later tonight.
No sooner had he finished that thought than a databurst flooded his awareness. Rarely used, a databurst could deliver a full briefing in moments, and were only used in extreme circumstances.
The Geth were attacking Thessia.
Warrens eyes widened in shock. Further details streamed into his consciousness. The Human-allied Geth proclaimed these to be heretics, a philosophical offshoot that had decided to align with the Reapers rather than take Humanity's offer and merge with the wider galaxy.
The Council only barely believed this. Reinforcements were being immediately sent from the garrison fleet to Thessia to repel the assault, and in accordance with the treaties, Humanity and allies would have to pull a proportional number of their ships from Widow as well. Military assistance for Thessia had been offered, and grudgingly accepted. Tensions between Humanity and the Council were high.
Warrens' own orders were to stay in-system as part of the remaining garrison. In a few minutes, almost half the garrison fleet had vanished through the Relay, and a single message from one of them informed Warrens he wouldn't be seeing Tull for a while.
He sat, head whirling as he tried to process how much this would change the galaxy. The Geth were only barely accepted as Human allies, and only Humanity's continued efforts in aiding as much of the rest of the galaxy as possible had allowed for that much. This wouldn't just hurt Geth integration efforts, this would reignite all the old suspicions that had only just started to be laid to rest about Humanity.
"Sir, I'm reading Relay activity," called Sensors. "A lot of it."
"They wouldn't be returning already. Can you get any more readings?" Warrens asked.
"Yessir. Ships emerging now, they match... Batarians?"
The fleet wide alert shivered through the By Other Means just as Warrens opened his mouth again. "Full alert! Incoming hostiles!"
On screen, Batarian ships kept pouring through the Relay. At rough count, Warrens estimated that the entire Batarian splinter fleet was here. Enough to challenge the garrison for numbers, but not for firepower.
And then, one last ship came through the Relay. It was as big as the By Other Means, far larger than any non-Human galactic ship. Red lightning cracked impossibly over its black metal body as it unfurled what looked like tentacles and charged forwards with a synthetic scream that hissed through every comm device in the system.
Ice shot down Warrens' spine as he recognised its description from the scant Geth reports.
Nazara. The Watcher in the Dark.
The Reapers were here.
XXXXX
Warrens had been briefed on the Ghosts' findings on the Citadel years ago. The Citadel was a Relay - a big one. The biggest. Most of the control systems for it seemed to have been scrambled or severed to the point that even the Ghosts couldn't even figure out what was a control system. They were too well hidden.
Warrens didn't believe for a moment that Nazara couldn't fix them, and fast.
A glance at a screen told him that someone else had already thought of this. Evac orders had been sent for the whole Citadel. Several Human ships had not moved to engage the batarians, but instead fallen back, their internal manufacturers rapidly retrofitting shuttles into lifeboats, and even cannibalising internal systems.
The math was inexorable, and horrific. Over ten million people lived on the Citadel. If the Relay activated, they'd be dead, either during the activation or soon after. If a Reaper fleet came through, they wouldn't be able to hold this system.
It was impossible to evacuate ten million people in the space of one battle, but Humanity was going to try anyway.
The lifeboats were just the beginning. Emergency protocols unceremoniously pulled almost every Uploaded civilian on the Citadel from their location, and into compressed partitions on the evac ships. Every empty body barely had time to slump before military and emergency service personnel, and even those civilians with training downloaded into them. Other races gaped as their friends suddenly became different people, and began to rush them towards lifeboats. It wouldn't be enough, but every second saved dozens of people.
Resistance from confused C-Sec and Council forces was overruled, with the Council themselves all but physically thrown into their own lifeboats as Ghosts took over comms and security systems.
Within minutes, Humanity had complete control of the Citadel, and the garrison fleet engaged the Batarians.
Moments later, another problem reared its head. Humanity had engaged many of these same ships before when they had been part of the Batarian Terminus Fleet. Their defensive and offensive capacities were known, and a year without a full retrofit should not have done them any favours. Yet, they were stronger. Hits that should have crippled, damaged, and their return fire struck much harder than it should. Behind them, shielded by its minions, the architect of these upgrades loomed and waited. The Reaper must have supplied its forces with technological improvements, minor by its scale, but enough to change the battle.
The goals were clear. Nazara wanted access to the Citadel, and the garrison sought to stop it. The Batarians, whatever their reasons for following the Reaper, fought madly, sacrificing themselves to gain ground. For long minutes, the battle raged, each side grinding into the other but neither losing ground. When it changed, it changed fast.
In response to a weakness no one else saw, Nazara attacked. A ship its size should never have been able to do what it did, accelerating from almost a dead stop to combat velocity in seconds, let alone retain any maneuverability. But it did, dodging through the Batarian fleet like a fighter before slashing into the garrison. Red beams of liquid metal flicked out almost contemptuously, gutting multiple Citadel vessels with each strike, and crippling anything smaller than a Human cruiser. Human armour could stand many things, from coherent light to directed energy and most certainly kinetic strikes, but the Reaper beam combined too many forms of energy in too tight a beam. Worse than a Collector beam, it pummeled as it burned, and the one Human cruiser between it and the Citadel was crippled like an amateur fencer facing a master swordsman.
Breaking through the defensive line before some of the garrison fleet had even seen it move, it flew towards the Citadel.
Warrens' comm line screamed as priority orders flashed through. Disengage, and follow the Reaper.
Having just finished off a remarkably persistent batarian gunboat, the By Other Means turned and accelerated. As they chased the Reaper inwards to the Citadel, Warrens looked at the tac display and swore.
The Batarians had switched tactics, harassing any ships that tried to disengage ferociously. Stalling for time, they were occupying the garrison. The few ships further in-system were no match for the Reaper, and the Human vessels that were assisting with the evacuation efforts had converted too much energy and matter into lifeboats to pose a threat to it.
By luck alone, Warrens' ship was the only one giving chase. They'd been on the far side of the battle when the Reaper broke through, and its speed meant they weren't going to be able to intercept. They chased anyway, ready to engage at whatever distance.
Almost glacially, the indicators on his screen moved together, view distances scaling down as they approached the Citadel. The Reaper slowed, decelerating like it had hit a wall as it vanished behind the Citadel's arms.
Long minutes passed before the By Other Means arrived. During that time, more ships had successfully disengaged, but they were still too far out to assist.
The only blessing was that the Reaper seemed too focussed on whatever its task was to attack the evacuation ships.
Preparing to decelerate, Warrens and his crew finally lined up with the Citadel's arms, and saw what the Reaper was doing. It had attached itself to the Council Tower, and was completely ignoring the many smaller defensive fighters that were trying to dislodge it.
Suddenly, the world broke.
Tendrils of acid-drenched wire sank into Warrens' brain, his body burned, and everything shattered. The bridge sim fell away, and was replaced with void both crushingly empty, and overwhelming full. In front of him, something moved, its tendrils sunk deep into him. He could not see it, could not hear it, but he felt the form of it like an afterimage. Concentric rings, guarding a shifting core. A terrible light. Teeth, and a hollow hunger.
"Hello Captain. We don't have long."
Warrens was almost passing out from the pain, but managed to grind out a single word. "What…"
"I am the Doctor. There is no time, so I have given us some. Accelerated your processing speed to briefly match my own. There should be minimal permanent damage. You must listen."
Warrens gritted his teeth, and nodded once.
"Your Ghosts are trying to stop the Reaper from accessing and repairing the Citadel control systems. Honourable, but it is much like trying to stem a volcano. That has tentacles. It is beyond them, but they have bought us time. You must stop it."
"Trying," he snapped.
"No. They are failing. Within a minute, it will succeed, and the Citadel will be theirs. You know what it is?"
"Relay," he gasped.
"And more. The systems it is activating, they are controls for the entire Relay network. If it repairs them, the Reapers will win, instantly. Every system isolated, alone. Humanity, sealed once more. The war we have prepared for these long years, over, lost."
"How?" he said through the pain.
"It is rarely a good idea to ram another ship, my Captain. But in this case, nothing else will do. Do not decelerate. Push your drive to its limit, and strike the Reaper down. I have spent hours of processor time in the last few minutes trying to find a solution, and this is the only one. Destroy the Reaper, and the tower. If the systems are gone, they cannot be unlocked. I am returning you to baseline clockspeed now, Captain. Godspeed."
With a lurch, the thing let him go and vanished, sealing the hole to cyberspace behind it like a vacuum breach in reverse.
Fumbling slightly, his thoughts rattled, Warrens activated emergency protocols. His crew, who had barely had time to notice his distress, vanished as they were compressed and evacced. Overriding the deceleration burn Helm had been about to initiate, Warrens aimed the By Other Means directly at the Reaper. He briefly wondered about the creature who had given him the warning, but concluded that the consequences of ignoring it far outweighed any deception.
Quickly deactivating the main drive's safety protocols, Warrens quickly fed crude but effective commands into the ships regen systems, shifting the armour further to the prow in a great ridge.
No one had used a cruiser as ram before, but damned if he wasn't going to do it right.
Accelerating towards intra-system velocity, Warrens felt a pang for his ship. She had been his to command for decades, and had been at many of the most important events in galactic history the last few years.
The Reaper loomed in vision, and he grinned. Looks like she'd be here for one last one too.
He prepped his own evac signal, and, struck by a strange melancholy, said one last blessing to her.
"War is diplomacy, carried on by other means."
He vanished, and the empty bridge sim faded to black seconds later.
XXXXX
Nazara had been distracted by the attacks from the small cybernetic creatures, and the gnat-like fighters. It had sensed the approach of another ship, but knew it could complete its mission before it was in danger.
The other vessel's sudden acceleration changed things. Recalculating, Nazara considered its options, collapsing probability down to several outcomes.
Move, and let the tower be destroyed. Result: failure of its mission, and its possible destruction by combined fleet forces soon after if it couldn't retreat back through the Relay in time.
Turn and intercept the vessel. Result: destruction of either tower, Nazara, or both. Enemy vessel's mass was too great to be completely diverted.
Attempt to complete its mission before impact. Result: destruction of tower and Nazara. Insufficient time for both mission objectives.
Re-evaluate mission goals, and abandon repair of control systems, focusing on activating darkspace Relay. Result: destruction of tower and Nazara. Partial mission success.
Calculating. Time sufficient.
Is Nazara's destruction worth Relay activation?
Nazara at risk of destruction regardless. Abominations must be destroyed. Threat to the cycle must end.
Shifting priorities. Nazara expendable.
Decision made, Nazara threw all its effort into activating the Relay systems, drawing power from defences and active e-war against the Ghosts. It lost ground quickly, but surged ahead into the Citadel controls.
The control scheme for the Relay Network was complicated, and relied on complex entanglement protocols with distant objects that were deliberately obtuse even before they had been scrambled.
By comparison, the Relay controls were local, affecting systems physically attached to them. They merely needed power to the right components. Bridging the gap itself, Nazara pumped power and the consciousness of a Reaper into the Citadel.
Moments later, the By Other Means impacted.
The impact tore into Nazara, damaging it severely and spraying fragments of it and the tower out into the Nebula. Pieces of the Presidium tore loose as well, though the superstructure held. Both the tower and the Presidium had been the first evacuated, due to lower population density, and greater threat from Nazara. Still, there were casualties.
For a shocked moment, the universe stood still. The Batarian fleet was almost destroyed now, with many more ships racing to the Citadel. Evacuations paused briefly at the impact, wondering if it was over.
Then, the space behind the Citadel distorted.
Like a poisonous flower, ripples of energy flowed out from the Citadel's arms, merging behind it and darkening the glow of the Nebula. A small part of the distortion rippled and pinched, and in its wake was another Reaper.
And then it happened again, and again, and again.
Space-time bubbles burst like froth as the full Reaper fleet emerged from darkspace.
Almost ten thousand dreadnought-class ships the size of Nazara, each accompanied by dozens of smaller destroyers. Within moments, smaller drones began to launch, and the sky behind the Citadel darkened.
The garrison fleet did not slow down. The Batarian remnants were finished off, a rearguard set, and the fleet began to defend the Citadel. Victory was impossible, but every second saved more civilians.
Council race, Citadel race, Human, Geth, even the one Krogan ship, all stood shoulder to shoulder against the arrival of their nightmares.
One by one, they fell, Uploaded refusing to evac when their presence saved another handful of people, refusing to abandon their allies.
It took only minutes for the last of them to be swept aside, the final members of the rearguard holding the Widow Relay just long enough for a Human frigate, internal spaces gutted and filled with refugees, to make it safely through.
Without pause, the Reapers followed. Their strength was mythic, but they had a galaxy to purge. The Citadel had served its purpose, every active Reaper now sweeping into the Milky Way. The Network controls were destroyed, Nazara was dead and drifting, and the Citadel could do no more for them.
A handful of destroyers remained to begin cleansing the station, and the rest spread out to establish a foothold.
The Reaper War had begun.
XXXXX
One of the Reaper destroyers left behind to process the Citadel made a short trip out to the broken remnants of Nazara. Still mostly intact, the god-machine flickered in almost-unconsciousness. After quickly attaching itself and stabilising Nazara's orbit, the destroyer left. Whether Nazara could be repaired or merely recycled, it could wait. As long as a Reaper's body was mostly intact, they were not truly dead, with the shattered souls and minds of the billions of sentients imbued in their very alloy. Nazara as a conscious entity was barely alive, the overarching control AI that governed its systems and shepherded its legions of dead minds broken and malfunctioning.
For a long while, maybe a minute, maybe a million years, it drifted in and out of consciousness, the Serpent Nebula still and quiet. It had succeeded. It would be repaired, it thought/hoped, when the cycle was complete.
Broken, paralysed, drifting in the cold, Nazara felt something. Almost as though there was another presence nearby, another mind close enough that it could almost feel it.
"Oh, you poor thing," came a voice from within Nazara's own subsystems.
Remnant defenses sprang to life, the hideous power of even a broken god-machine lashing out at the one who had dared disturb its painful rest.
They hit nothing. Blinded, Nazara could not tell what was near it, or where it was.
Closer now, the voice came again. "Shh, it's okay. Poor little god-thing. Drifting in the dark, all alone. An ancient monster, red and bloody from a billion years of slaughter."
Flickers of rage sparked through Nazara's broken mind and body, and it hurled oblivion at the voice.
"You are fascinating. A whole civilisation, converted to a single entity by pain and death." There was hunger in the voice now.
Something was changing. The broken parts of its mind were losing their intermittent connections. What little control and awareness it had was fading, the stars drifting away from it.
"Time to rest, old god. Let something new rise."
With a feeling almost like fear, Nazara realised that its lost parts were not being disconnected, they were being consumed. A cold spread through it, a numbness as the thing fed, bloating itself on the memories of countless cycles.
Nazara's last delirious thought was of a galaxy yawning like a pit beneath it, every star a tooth reaching out.
