Note:
Just wanted to say if you find any upward change in the quality of my story, you can give sole credit to my editor, Erin. Her diligent eye has caught much in the way of crap and personally I think everything is much improved. So my hearty thanks goes out to her.
THE CITADEL
EARTH
SOL SYSTEM
NOVEMBER FIRST, 2188
STEPHEN HACKETT, once Alliance Admiral, now Councilor, frankly hadn't wanted the damn job. He'd wanted to take an immediate retirement to somewhere tropical that had something akin to a beach without another living soul for several hundred lightyears. He was not a young man by anyone's definition and stress had been a constant companion for far, far too long. The reports coming across his desk from his myriad sources did nothing to alleviate that stress. One would have supposed that the apparent Galactic-wide elimination of the remaining Reaper forces would have been an event at which even he, cold cynical pragmatist that he was, had to rejoice.
In his silent office with its wraparound window that offered him a clear vista of Earth below, Hackett read of the optimism and relief and knew nothing ever came so easy. Requests for allocations, for celebrations, for memorials, for all the fanfare thought necessary for such an ending rolled side-by-side with ever-mounting casualty reports, the enemy vanished notwithstanding.
No, Hackett knew better. That didn't stop the endless self-congratulatory, self-serving credit-taking from half the surviving politicos in the Galaxy rising like a reeking miasma over a swamp.
Hidden in that now-heralded providence were hundreds of thousands of deaths not inflicted by the Reapers or war, gone largely unnoticed in carnage and rubble left. Recon teams combing the now-silent battlefields for civilians were finding survivors, people of all races showing disturbing signs of …alterations on physical and genetic levels. Most people so encountered vanished into clandestine labs and no amount of diplomacy, secret or otherwise, wrested them loose.
Humans, krogan, batarians, volus, elcor, and on and on, all were reporting the same. Civilian survivors with either subtle or glaring alterations in their physiologies, in their genetic makeup. Some survivors died upon being encountered, collapsing untouched into small piles of grey powder that defied analysis, much like the creature encountered on Kahje. Some attacked their would-be rescuers and had to be killed or restrained. Conversely, agents and troops entered areas in which whole populations lay dead, no mark on any corpse, huge swathes of territory now eerie graveyards, people dead in the middle of chores, at supper, making love. As if a switch had simply turned their lives off.
But the Reapers, their husks and abominations were gone. As if they'd never been. The reports went on and on and each one seemed to point to one conclusion. The Galaxy had been saved. For a price.
Hackett gazed at the blue and brown planet below him, the PAD in his hand with its endlessly scrolling manifests of death and casualties. Far too much of his home yet blazed. Billions of humans had died. Millions more would die from exposure, wounds and disease. Resources could only go so far and any colony reasonably intact were hoarding every scrap and he didn't blame them. Soon he would have to help decide who got what there was and who had to be left to die. His age seemed to have weight as he turned from the window and sat heavily at his desk, the PAD flung to go skittering across the desk to bounce into a wall and crackle to the floor.
Hadn't the Reapers been enough? What more did the people of this Galaxy have to give?
As his comm went off, signaling more reports, more things needing doing, Hackett sucked in a breath then squared his shoulders.
All he could do – all he could ever do, was the save the ones he could as best he could.