Chapter 14 - Rumors of the Dark.

I've had a really shitty couple of days for a number of reasons which I won't go into. Rather than give into an urge for percussive maintenance on one of those reasons that caused this, I decided I'm better than that and can sublimate my well-earned anger into writing things. So I did :)

A minor side trip, and some more of the Geth. Next chapter picks up the main story again.

GS year 2409.8
Office of Insight Independent Information Services
Lower Tayseri Ward, Citadel

"You're insane. But then I've known that for years, so I suppose it's on me." Aidhe Scol, co-founder of Independent Intelligence Investigative Services, otherwise known as I3S, sighed as she shook her head sadly, looking up from the document being projected by her omnitool. Her partner, friend of many years, and generally crazy person Paeluis merely looked back at her with an innocent expression which his Turian features were ill-suited for. The Drell woman sat down and waved her free hand at the orange hologram floating above her other wrist. "It's impossible."

"No, it's real," Paeluis replied, his mandibles twitching slightly in apparent amusement, which made her give him a severe look. His sense of humor was quite unTurian, often misplaced, and had got both of them into quite a lot of trouble over the years. "I'm certain of it. All the evidence is right there."

She looked dubiously at him, then went back to the document, scrolling through it and examining it carefully. "A Relay is missing?" she asked very skeptically. "That would be the news of the century. You can't move Relays, I know that much. Something about quantum locked structures or some such technobabble. And you're claiming one is entirely gone?"

"I am." He pointed at one of the images that was currently showing. "That's where it should be and it isn't."

After several seconds, she gave him another, harder, look. "It's a picture of empty space."

"I know. That's the point, there should be a Relay in it."

"How could you possibly know this image of empty space is the specific empty space that should, but somehow doesn't, contain a Relay? When it's far more likely that it's, I don't know, empty space?" She sighed again. "Honestly, Paeluis, you and your crazy theories. Some of the crap you've come up with over the years has been pretty out there, but this is ridiculous. All you have is photos of things that aren't there. Not exactly proof, and not exactly hard to make. I can take a photo of something that isn't there." She indicated off to the side of the small office. "I mean, look over in the corner! No Relay! Oooh, how spooky! It's vanished!"

He patiently waited for the heavy sarcasm to die down, more than used to it after close to fifteen years of working together. "You done?" he asked mildly when she finally stopped talking.

"Not even close, but you may as well tell me the next idiotic conclusion you've jumped to from a standing start with absolutely no evidence," she groused, leaning back in her seat and letting the projection vanish. "I suppose this is going to be yet another case of the mysterious Others which you seem to think are responsible for basically anything that can't be reasonably explained. Or a lot of things that can be reasonably explained, and have been."

"I've told you, the truth is..."

"Yes, yes, I know, you don't have to keep saying it," she snapped, waving a hand and cutting him off. "Get on with it. What bizarre concept has come into that thing you laughingly think of as a mind this time?"

Paeluis smirked at her for a second, making her want to hit him. As usual. "All right, hear me out." She just stared at him and waited. "A Relay has vanished. I've got the evidence."

"Evidence he says," she mumbled under her breath.

"Evidence," he repeated firmly. "I may have been kicked out of the military on Palaven because they can't handle a genuinely inquiring mind, but I still have contacts there. They got me the data, and told me that there's a lot of excitement going on very quietly in the upper levels of the Heirarchy about it. No one outside knows. Not even the Council."

"Wanna bet?" she snarked, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms. "I can almost guarantee that the STG does, and if the STG does, the Asari probably do, since they've infiltrated the Salarian intelligence organizations the same as they have done for everyone else. And if the Asari know, that means the Council is well aware of it, but they'll never willingly let the public know because they're all complete control freaks. Assuming any of this is real in any way, of course. Which is isn't."

"How cynical you've become, Aidhe," he chuckled.

"Just being realistic. We've both seen enough shit in government work over the years to know that everyone spies on everyone else all the time. Keeping this sort of news private would be almost impossible," she pointed out with a degree of tired annoyance. "At least as far as governments themselves go. Keeping it from the public is more plausible but even there the Council leaks like a sieve half the time. And how could they cover up an entire Relay going missing? Why would they cover it up?"

"Why is easy, it's to stop the great unwashed masses panicking and running around like a pack of varren had just jumped out of the closet at them. You know how people are when something upsets them, and the idea that a Relay could simply… disappear… is exactly the sort of news that would upset people." He looked seriously at her, his demeanor making her watch and listen. As mad as he was much of the time, and although he was so open minded his brain was at times in danger of leaking out of his ears in her opinion, he was also smart and sometimes surprisingly insightful.

"After all, without Relay travel, we're basically nothing. Conventional FTL is nowhere near fast enough to get from place to place for the most part, except in relatively short range trips around a local cluster. As far as I know it's not even theoretically possible to go faster than an absolute maximum of perhaps twenty, twenty five light years a day, and no one can actually build a drive that will do more that perhaps a little over half that. The galaxy is over two hundred thousand light years across, and our civilization is scattered over the entire thing. No world I'm aware of is more than perhaps eighty to ninety light years from a Relay, but some of them are half the galactic disk away from each other. If, somehow, we lost the ability to travel via Relays..." He trailed off meaningfully as she felt somewhat ill at the concept.

"Civilization would grind to a halt," she finished for him, making him nod soberly. "The Citadel is at least two thousand light years from the nearest inhabited world, which would mean a round trip of over a year even assuming that anyone outside a military vessel could actually travel for that long to begin with. Getting from Thessia to Sur'Kesh would take decades. It would be functionally impossible, given the limitations of our technology or anything I can think of as a plausible improvement to it."

"Exactly. Not even the Salarians could make a ship that would travel that far without probably another hundred years of research," he nodded. "I wouldn't want to say it couldn't be done, I'm not a starship drive engineer, but I'm fairly certain it would be monstrously difficult and expensive at the minimum. Certainly far out of reach for most people, or even many species. Even the Quarians at their height probably couldn't do it, and they're the best engineers around. We're so used to being able to hop on a ship for a few hundred creds and go halfway around the galaxy without any real problem that most people have never even considered just how far that is." He shook his head slowly. "Most people don't even think about what a light year actually is. A distance so big light itself takes a year to cover it. And we can just cheat and ignore that. What would happen to us if one day, we couldn't cheat any more?"

They stared at each other in silence for some time, until Aidhe shivered. "Thanks. I'm going to have nightmares for days about the Relays all suddenly disappearing now. Well done."

He chuckled. "I didn't intend to scare you. But you see my point? Letting the public know that a Relay really has vanished might make a lot of people start thinking like that, and regardless of the truth of the matter, that could well end up going badly. Even though it's an inactive Relay and no one has ever used it, the implications are unsettling at best."

"Assuming that it ever existed in the first place," she retorted. "You still only have a picture of the absence of something. That's hardly proof of anything."

"We also have that document," he pointed out, indicated her omnitool. She glanced at it then fixed him with a hard look.

"Which is both of highly dubious provenance and so heavily redacted it's almost worthless. No times, dates, witnesses, nothing useful at all. Only what amounts to slightly more than a rumor that there was a Relay and at some point in the last couple of decades there no longer was a Relay." She shook her head. "It's nowhere near convincing. Anyone could have written this up and sent it to you. It reads more like one of the less plausible conspiracy theories from the darker corners of the extranet. I mean, that's exactly your thing, I agree, but you do remember some of the other things that you've ended up investigating as a result of such theories?" One corner of her mouth went up in a sly smirk.

"The Citadel is being run by an ancient artificial intelligence was one of the more unsuccessful ones, I recall," she went on as he looked mildly embarrassed. "We both got arrested by C-Sec. Twice. And told never to go back into the administration areas of the Presidium ring again without permission. Then there was that bright idea you had that the Relay Monument was some sort of weapon. We spent a week poking around in the access tunnels under it, got arrested again by C-Sec who were really quite rude, and physically thrown out of the area. And of course we shouldn't forget your pet theory that the Keepers are actually powerful aliens who are watching what we all do and somehow making certain people vanish for unspecified reasons."

"Hey, even you have to admit there's something odd about the Keepers," Paeluis said beseechingly. "They're all over the place and everyone ignores them, they can go into parts of the Citadel no one else has ever been able to find a way to access, and they melt if you try to examine one. That's suspicious in my view."

"Because you're a very strange person who needs to have his head looked at," she sighed. "The Keepers just fix things. They're harmless."

"That's what they want us to think," her colleague hissed, looking around in a somewhat paranoid manner. Despite herself, she followed his gaze, only to see blank walls. Eventually she realized what she was doing and sighed heavily.

"Why I put up with you I have absolutely no idea," she grumbled. He grinned in the Turian manner.

"Because I'm so charming and intelligent?"

"Noooo… That's not it," she replied slowly, causing him to frown.

After a moment both smiled at each other, then he shrugged. "Some of my ideas have worked out, you have to admit that, right?"

"Oh, sure, usually after we've run out of sensible ideas, you pull some idiotic concept out of your ass and by pure luck, and my own very hard work, it manages to save the day," the Drell woman muttered. "Like that time I had to do a backflip and snap the guy's neck. I was aching for two days."

Paeluis shrugged. "He'd killed six people and was going for number seven, so I think we were justified."

"'We?'" she queried. "I seem to remember I was the one being shot at. You were busy hacking completely the wrong data node."

"Which turned out to be the key piece of evidence we needed for the Case of the Missing Salarian Shopkeeper," he chuckled, the capitalization clear in his voice. She put a hand on her forehead and gently rubbed it in an attempt to stave off the headache that she always got when talking to the daft bastard.

"If you're writing another book, leave me out of it," she mumbled, then dropped her hand. "All right. You claim that a Relay has disappeared. I personally think it never existed, but fine, we'll go with your delusion for the moment. What, precisely, do you think we should, or even could, do about it? The Turian military doesn't like me, and very much doesn't like you. C-Sec isn't entirely fond of either of us either, even though we keep getting little jobs from them under the table. And I really don't want to come to the attention of the Council if I can possibly avoid it. Nothing good would come from that."

She looked at him with genuine curiosity. "Surely if you're actually right, which you're not, it would be a matter for the Council? Not a couple of relatively small time private investigators. What's in it for us? And all that aside, you yourself just finished pointing out how badly it could go if people started to believe this sort of thing was true."

"The Council, and the Asari, Turian, and Salarian governments, all have a vested interest in covering it up," he nodded. "And for once they might actually have a point unlike some of the other things they're covering up, like how much the Batarians are bribing them, and how many Geth are infiltrating the Citadel."

"Geth do not infiltrate," she commented, shaking her head. "We've been told that any number of times, there's never been any evidence to the contrary, and no one has even seen a Geth or a Geth ship outside the Perseus Veil in nearly eighty years."

"All that proves is that they're very sneaky," he replied.

Waving a hand irritably, she snapped, "Forget the Geth. Get to the point."

"Fine, fine, no need to shout," he said with a small smile. "See, the thing that worries me about this is what it implies. Don't think about what it could do to our way of life. Think about what could be doing it. As you said, we can't move a Relay. Even experimenting on them has been illegal for over fifteen hundred years at least, no one knows any more about the things or how they work now than they did when we first encountered them, we don't even know what they're made of. We know what they do and how to turn them on and use them, but we can't turn one off again, we haven't got the faintest idea what powers them as far as I can find out, nothing. They're basically a black box system that seems to have been designed specifically to be easy to use but otherwise entirely opaque."

"I've heard that before," she replied after a moment's thought. "And you're right, I agree. There really isn't much information on Relays other than that the Protheans built them, and that they're virtually indestructible. On the other hand no sane person would ever try to damage one, they've been completely reliable for as long as any species we know about has records of them, and they're essential to our lives. I suppose that other than scientific curiosity there isn't much reason to poke around with the things, and lots of reasons not to."

"Exactly. That's pretty much what anyone would say if they thought about it, which most people never do. They just accept them as part of the background and get on with their lives," he said, leaning forward as he spoke. "So no one seems to ask any of the other questions thinking along these lines suggests. How did the Protheans actually move the Relays, for example? They're close to twenty times the size of even the largest ship we know of, and are scattered all over the Galaxy in systems that sometimes don't even have planets. If they were built where they are, where did the materials come from? If they were built somewhere else, how did they move something a third the size of the Citadel from wherever they made them to where they are now?" Spreading his hands, he added, "It gets really weird when you think about it."

She was thinking about it now, and was forced to agree. It did get weird.

He motioned to the still-present hologram of an empty sector of space. "As long as the Relays are just floating around out there, either in use or dormant, no one really considers those questions except for a few academics that never really come to any conclusion. But now one has vanished. That makes me wonder how, and who. And of course why but that's not something we can probably find out without solving the first two. Did the Relay get bored and move itself? Did someone work out how they were moved and experiment on one way off the beaten track. Or was it… Them?"

"Them?" she echoed.

He looked around, then at her. "Them. The ones who live in the dark spaces between the stars."

Aidhe sighed. "Not again. You know you're full of it, I hope? 'They' don't exist."

"I've heard rumors..."

"Of course you've heard rumors," she retorted, cutting him off. "You go looking for rumors. All the time. Hang around enough bars, you'll hear rumors ranging from the Universe being the plaything of interdimensional scaly eldritch horrors to the current Primarch being a Salarian in a convincing costume. All of them are crap."

He waited patiently for her to stop, then opened his mouth. She pointed at him severely. "And no, I've heard the one about Councilor Tevos being identical quadruplets too. It's also crap."

"I wasn't going to mention that, but you have to admit it's possible," he grinned. She glared at him. "Forget it. The point I was going to make is that the rumors are oddly consistent. For years people have been saying there's something out there that's watching them. They can feel it, hiding in the dark. And sometimes… whatever is watching does something. People have seen… strange things. Little tiny ships that just disappear between one moment and the next. Asteroids that seem to move or vanish, then reappear somewhere else. Strange computer glitches out of nowhere. Sensor ghosts, or a real thing? The reports have come from all over the place, but one thing they have in common is that they're all in the general area of this part of space." He tapped his own omnitool, causing a galactic map, projected from above, to appear over the device. Flicking a finger he spun it, then pointed.

"There are no active Relays that lead into this entire sector. It's a huge chunk of totally unknown space. Anything could be hiding in there. Statistically, based on just the current species we know about, there could be upwards of a dozen intelligent species in this volume at least, but we have no way to know. No way to even get there without trips that would take decades by conventional FTL. And the only dormant Relay that I can locate that was aimed into this sector is now missing..."

Aidhe studied the image, then met his eyes with her own skeptical gaze. "And your theory is that someone or something living in this huge zone is stealing Relays?"

"A Relay," he corrected. "As far as I know."

"Why?"

"No idea. But I'd love to find out," he smiled.

Turning her attention to the heavily redacted possibly real report she read through it again, then closed the file. "This is entirely pointless," she commented with annoyance. "We have no leads, no one to question, no way to locate more information, nothing. The Heirarchy certainly isn't going to tell us anything, they're more likely to shoot us in the face for even asking, the Asari would talk us to death then kick us out knowing even less than we do now, the Salarians would probably just make us disappear, and no one else is going to have any data anyway. If we start digging into this we're just going to find out it's a series of stupid coincidences and paranoia caused by spending too much time on a ship."

"And what if we find out that there really is something to it?" he wheedled with a bright expression.

"Then the Council sends a Spectre after us and no one ever hears about it," she snapped. "If it is real it would be hideously dangerous to know about. I for one don't want to wake up dead one morning because some black ops department decided I knew too much."

Her friend looked thoughtful. "Depressingly, you have a point," he admitted.

"I know I do." Giving him a long look, she added, "Paeluis, let it go. Even if you were right, and we didn't get killed because of that, what good would it do? We couldn't tell the public for the exact reason you already mentioned. And unless more Relays start disappearing, not that one has disappeared, it probably doesn't matter anyway. No one has opened a new Relay in hundreds of years and it's not likely that they're going to any time soon. And there are dozens of dormant ones lying around all over the place even if they did want to. One possibly non-existent Relay that may or may not have ever existed isn't worth wasting time on. We've got other work to do, and bills to pay."

Paeluis thought, visibly rather reluctantly, then slowly nodded. "I suppose you're right."

"I'm definitely right," she replied with a smile. Checking the time, she went on, "And we're going to be late if we don't go right now. We have a client to interview."

She got up and headed into the outer office. He watched her go, then looked at the small projection floating over his wrist, giving it a flick with his finger and studying it. Eventually he shook his head and turned it off, before bringing up a virtual keyboard and typing a few sentences. She was probably right, but he still wanted to know the truth. And whatever else was out there.

He'd keep alert for any more information and sooner or later he'd get a lead. There was a rumor that a Quarian ship had encountered something bizarre some while ago, and other ones that said that the Quarian fleet was being followed by something. He didn't know why, or what, but it was maybe worth chasing up. Very discreetly, of course, but he knew a few people who might have something for him...

Closing his notes he made sure they were properly encrypted then rose to follow his partner, putting his sidearm in his pocket as he left the office. Around here you never knew when you might need a weapon...

GS year 2410.1
Primary Server Cluster
Rannoch System

New weapon innovation program exhibits high success rate. Four designs currently in production. Probability of organic factions correctly identifying results of weapon usage as of Geth origin less than 0.02%.

Observed unknown faction weapon ability beyond duplication.

No known method to generate gamma laser output within five orders of magnitude of observed unknown faction weapon.

Gamma laser highly unlikely to be only unknown faction weapon capability.

Innovative weapon designs sufficiently exceed known weapons deployed by Geth or organic factions to create convincing facsimile of unknown faction weapons fire. Damage caused to experimental targets both extreme and unusual.

Predicted results on Batarian ship classes.

Batarian ship classes are insufficient to resist innovative weapons even at extreme range. Predicted results is immediate annihilation with significant radiation emission. Total elimination of target assured on direct hit.

Predicted results on other organic faction ship classes.

All extant ship classes insufficient to resist innovative weapons. Predicted results identical.

New ship design completion status.

New ship class design completed. Construction of prototype in progress. Further series production requires resource diversion from current projects.

New ship series task set to maximum priority, resources assigned.

Hull design variance from standard pattern enforced by innovative weapons systems reduces probability of organic factions correctly assigning identification to Geth to 0.12% assuming maximum stealth utilized in all operations. Direct observation at close range raises probability by 2.1% maximum.

Additional camouflage can be implemented to divert suspicion of ship provenance.

Avoidance of Geth standard operational features will increase misidentification probability.

Avoidance of Geth standard operational features inefficient. Geth standard operational features are standard.

Standard features by definition identifiable. Efficiency secondary to mission success. Avoidance of Geth standard operational features critical to mission success.

Design of new operational features to mask ship provenance requires innovation or external influence or both.

Organic factions produce fictional ship classes and operational features for entertainment purposes. Innovation driven by influence from organic faction fiction possible. Utilization of aspects of multiple sources least likely to allow organic factions to recognize resulting designs.

Fictional innovation requires cognitive methods underutilized by Geth. Resources insufficient to implement cognitive methods on current server architecture.

Peaceful attraction of unknown faction criticality to long term Geth success currently unquantifiable but plausibly greater than zero. Mission to duplicate unknown faction actions towards Creators only method with probability of peaceful attraction higher than 0.9% based on current data. Mission success dependent on organic factions and Creators remaining unaware of Geth involvement. Simulation of organic faction ability known as imagination requires new cognitive methods. New cognitive methods require server architecture upgrade.

Task set to maximum priority, resources assigned.

New task spawned, locate optimum source of organic faction fictional ship designs for seeding new cognitive methods.

Citadel extranet search in progress. Winnowing of valid data from non-reproductory entertainment sources delaying completion of task.

Supplementary resources assigned. Purge extraneous data on completion of task.

Task completed. Designs located. 98.24% of downloaded date purged as irrelevant. Relevant extranet site copied to local storage. Search of data set suggests multiple possible innovative weapons designs utilizing non-conventional techniques. Not all designs feasible.

Archive weapons data for future research pending success of current mission.

New cognitive method architecture upgrade begun. Fictional ship design element search pending completion.

Embedded monitoring of organic factions continues. Monitoring of Creator ship Tralket and crew continues. Monitoring of Creator fleet increased. Prototype of new ship class paused awaiting outcome of imagination process. Monitoring and tracking of Batarian faction pirate vessels ongoing. New ship class assigned to Creator fleet protection. Prototype assigned to Tralket. Batarian proclivities give 81.8% probability of initial live fire test operation within six Citadel months.

Consensus reached.