Chapter 6

The Admiralty Board was meeting again, this time just them. It was a few days after his tour of the human cruiser and Admiral Yaf'Hemin stood onboard the Rupa, in front of the holographic images of the other admirals. Every piece of machinery looked at, every scrap of information they had seen, had been scanned and recorded. Those scans and records had then been poured over in more detail by scientists and engineers, led by Captain Daro'Xen. He had allowed them the time to do their due diligence before their report had been presented to him of their findings, and from there presented to the rest of the Board.

"They are indeed primitive when it comes to most things," Yaf'Hemin said. "If we're just focusing on the ships, their kinetic barriers are a fraction of ours and their warships rely primarily on nuclear energy instead of antiproton power like every other military. Their scanners are about half the range of ours, and would likely have trouble penetrating the atmosphere of a planet. They might be newer but I'd take most of the ships in the Heavy Fleet, even the ones that are a century old, over this cruiser of theirs. Our barriers can withstand more and our ships can easily outmaneuver theirs in a fight. That they lost a space battle to these humans is making me question this supposed vaunted turian military."

Murmurs of uncertainty followed his words. While no one had voiced their opinion one way or the other with what the humans had offered, each of them had hope for what could be. And that hope seemed to be burning up right in front of them.

"What of their ship itself? The design, the hull, the layout, what did it look like?" Admiral Nila'Camis vas Jazzor asked. "If they give us the structure, we can install our own systems and our own engines; if they give us the resources to do so."

"I will give the humans credit. They might not know how to protect it or power it, but they do know how to build a warship, and look like they have a good idea on how to arm it. We were on what they call a heavy cruiser, which is apparently a cruiser but with a thicker hull then they normally make them. Yet it was still spacious, with plenty of open rooms and corridors. Their armaments, while not up to the speed I saw on a salarian cruiser a few years ago, they do look like they can deal some decent damage. Captain Daro'Xen believes it will likely take a year or two, but with our help we can get the humans adequate barriers and engines on their ships. Shorter for their firepower."

"And the AI?" Admiral Kaer'Weeme vas Shonbay questioned. "Can we trust it?"

"Daro'Xen and Rael'Zorah would be better to answer this question. They spent the entire time we were on board the human ship with the AI. From what they told me the human AI is different from the geth. They are each a separate unit that can interact with each other, but cannot connect like the geth can. Each one is created with a certain task in mind and is programmed to fulfill that task. There are restrictions on it that limit its capabilities, and it understands that it is a piece of complex programming and the concept of having a soul does not apply to it."

This information would be presented to the Conclave, and the decision was going to have to be made about if they would agree to the deal the humans were looking to make. If the answer was no, they'd go back to the status quo and nothing would change. But if they answered yes, then everything would change. The Admiralty Board might not be making the decision on their own, but their opinion would hold a lot of sway with the other members of the Conclave.

"I'm going to vote in favor of the agreement," Admiral Yela'Vofal vas Ronil said. "This is an opportunity for our people we haven't had since that blasted war with the geth."

"Really?" Admiral Rof'Waafor vas Fowan said in surprise. "You who are so adamant that we take back Rannoch at all cost, will accept the human offer to settle one of their worlds?"

"It is because I want Rannoch back that I will accept it. Think of it logically. If we move some of our people onto this human world we'll have a planet to grow on and more space on our ships. This colony will grow crops, which means we'll have more food and will need less rationing. We will be able to lift the one child restrictions we've had. Our population will swell, which means in twenty years we'll have more men and women to pilot ships or wield a firearm. By accepting this, I might not be able to walk on Rannoch myself one day, but any grandchildren I have will be able to and I owe it to them."

"If we upgrade their barrier technology and give them the designs for antiproton engines, they'll likely be retiring a lot of warships and scrapping them. They might be slow, but we can upgrade them to the best of our abilities and could easily add hundreds of ships to our fleet," Yaf'Hemin added. "I will also be voting in favor."

"Well I will not be. I do not trust any civilization that needs to rely so heavily on AI. Not to mention, we have no way of knowing what types of diseases and bacteria this partnership with them could introduce to our fleet," Admiral Rof'Waafor vas Fowan said.

"I agree with Rof. One day the humans will learn the lessons we learned with the geth, and I will not have our people nearby when that disaster happens.," Admiral Kaer'Weeme vas Shonbay said.

Four pairs of eyes turned to Admiral Nila'Camis vas Jazzor. She was the tiebreaker and whichever way she voted, whichever way the Admiralty Board leaned, would hold a lot of sway with the Conclave.

Justin Wayne was having a great couple of weeks. His dissertation on the gas bags, not an official name by any means but something the locals of Eden Prime, where the animal was native to, started calling them, had been greatly received by the grading committee. He had officially graduated from the University of British Columbia with a doctorate in wildlife biology and was now, officially, Dr. Justin Wayne. He just had an amazing interview with an officer in the Systems Alliance on his application to join the Alliance as a researcher, which would allow him to live out his dream job of studying animal life on newly discovered planets. And to top it all off, Alison had said yes when he asked her to marry him.

He felt on top of the world, invincible even. Things were going so well he had picked up a bottle of scotch on his way back to his apartment as a reward for himself. While he had never been much of a scotch drinker himself, he had seen that several of his male professors had bottles in their offices and figured it was something distinguished men did. He'd get used to the taste eventually, right?

Justin threw open his apartment door and sauntered into his apartment. He kicked the door closed behind him, realizing that he was no longer a grad student who had to live in a studio apartment anymore. In a few weeks he'd be starting a job, a good paying job, and could get a bigger apartment, one shared with his now fiance.

With the door shut he noticed how dark it was, which given it was the middle of the day and the sun was shining nice and bright, was a bit odd. The shutters on his window had been open when he left but were now closed. Had Alison stopped by while he was out and forgot to tell him?

Justin tried to turn the overhead lights on but when he flipped the switch the lights stayed off. He flipped the switch a few more times, not believing it would really make a difference, but needing to do something as his brain took a moment to process what was going on. With the little light available to him, he placed the scotch down on the kitchen counter and took a step toward the window.

"Hello Dr. Wayne."

"Jesus Christ!" Justin cried, jumping in the air. He squinted into the darkness of the apartment and could vaguely make out a figure sitting in his reading chair. "Who's there?"

"I'm here to offer you a once in a lifetime opportunity Dr. Wayne. Something that will not only benefit you, but also humanity."

A tiny circle of orange light appeared as if the person was smoking a cigarette. Then the smell of smoke hit Justin's nose. Not many people still smoked cigarettes. The last research put out said only about six point three percent of people smoked, the majority of them men.

"Smoking's against my lease," Justin muttered, for some reason thinking about losing his deposit on the apartment rather than the fact that there was some stranger sitting in the dark in his reading chair.

"If you accept my offer Dr. Wayne, the security deposit on this lease will be pocket change for you."

"I've already applied for my dream job with the Alliance."

"That's why I'm here. I'm with the Alliance too." Another pull on the cigarette. "I know you'll get the position and I'm not asking you to abandon it. I am asking that you work and report to me as well."

"Who are you?" Justin asked, leaning forward slightly and squinting his eyes again. The voice told him it was a guy. From what he could see, they did not wear a military uniform, but rather a suit.

"I'm a man who realizes that humanity is balancing on the edge of a knife. Teetering between allowing ourselves to become subservient to alien races because we aren't strong enough to protect ourselves, or having those same alien races invade our space and wipe us from existence. And if we want to keep this balancing act, then we need to do more than we've been doing. We need to work to advance human interest in the Milky Way so that when the time comes, we're not balancing on the knife, we're wielding it."

Another drag on the cigarette. His studio was small and the stench of it filled the room. He had never personally been around anyone who smoked, and he found the smell of it was making him a bit light headed.

"You said you work for the Alliance?" Justin asked the mysterious man.

"I do. For a black ops group that focuses on genetics, cybernetics, biotics, weapons research, and the like. We have so much potential as a species, and I intend to make sure we reach that potential by bringing on the best and brightest of humanity. And that's why I want you, Dr. Wayne, to join Cerberus."

Entering a foreign star cluster that was on high alert without being noticed took patience. You couldn't use the mass relay because the space around it was being monitored. Which meant you had to travel to it by conventional means, using your ships FTL engine to traverse the emptiness of space that existed between the clusters. At the halfway point between where you were leaving from and where you were traveling to, you needed to start slowing down your ship, less you enter the new system with too much speed. That meant thrusters being adjusted so they faced in the opposite direction mid-flight and letting them push against your previously built momentum. It was best to enter a system at a crawl and to cut your engines off completely, less their heat signature give you away.

When the mission was surveillance on the system, once in the system you had to scan it to find the best place to hide your ship, but you had to do so without your scan being picked up by the enemy. When you found a suitable spot it was the careful use of thrusters that navigated you to that spot, your engines remaining off the entire time, all the while passively scanning to make sure you didn't accidentally bump into anyone. You could travel across lightyears worth of space in two weeks, but it could take you over a month once you entered the system, to maneuver to your selected hiding spot.

That's why patience was so important, though harder to achieve for a species like the salarians, but Captain Vamaf Jaerlan was a rare exception when it came to his species. Growing up was told he had the patience of an asari, and at twenty-two years of age he had outgrown any youthful impetuousness and had added the patience that comes with middle age on top of everything else.

"Careful now," Captain Vamaf said as they moved to set down on the tiny moon. Even with its small size, the moon had a minimal gravitational pull they needed to be wary of. "We don't want to come down too hard and damage anything."

The third planet in the system the humans called Utopia, in the Exodus Cluster, was a gigantic gas giant that was one-point-three billion miles from the star. Due to their orbits, at the moment it was over a billion miles from the occupied world in the system, and just over seventeen billion miles from the mass effect relay. Scans of this gas giant showed no structures on or around it, but it had 112 satellites, some as small as an asteroid that had been caught in its gravity well. What better place to hide than amongst the clutter of all these satellites?

One of the satellites was large enough to hold a surprisingly thick atmosphere, but that also meant it would have a solid gravitational pull that would require many more seconds to pull away from should they have the need to make a quick exit. Captain Vamaf had chosen a much smaller one but one that still had some gravity, so that when they cut off most of the systems to avoid detection, including the one that generated the mass effect field that allowed their artificial gravity, they wouldn't all be floating on the ceiling.

Given the orbital distance of this gas giant, they calculated they could sit on this moon for eight years before its orbit brought it close enough to the mass relay for passive scans to detect them. This mission was only supposed to last for six months so if their ship was still in the system by then, they'd be long dead.

"Do we still have a connection with the FTL comm buoy?" Captain Vamaf asked.

"Yes Captain," his communications officer said. "I still have a clear line of sight to the comm buoy for tight beam transmissions."

They had dropped the comm buoy a few millions miles before they entered the system. The thrusters on the buoy were designed to counter the momentum on it from its drop in order to get the buoy as close to a zero velocity as possible, and to ensure it didn't accidentally enter into the star system and potentially alert the humans that something was going on. Their ship could accelerate a transmission to the speed of light, which meant it would take six and a half SCT (Standard Citadel Time) hours for the message to reach the FTL comm buoy, and from there another several hours to reach it's destination on the Citadel.

"Good, send a message to the council that we have entered the system and are setting up for surveillance. We will provide updates regularly."

Amanda Briggs had grown accustomed to dealing with Rile'Meesa, as this was now the sixth time they were meeting. The quarian was calm, clearly intelligent, and well spoken, at least as much as she could tell through the translation software used, but she also had a passion in her, a passion for her people and their survival. From what Rile said, it was something all quarians had. It was a refreshing change of pace from the human diplomats and politicians she had been dealing with most of her adult life; most of whom put themselves and their own personal gains above those of their people.

The Conclave had voted yes, though Rile did say it was a close vote. But how close it was didn't matter. What mattered was, was that they voted in favor of it. That meant that the two of them needed to work out the details of the agreement, make sure it was agreeable to their side, get the final concessions and details sorted out, get it all written up, and then present it to their individual leaders to sign and ratify it. Amanda expected it to take another month before everything is all said and done but once it was, she'd be able to ask for almost any job she wanted. Did she realize the hypocrisy in her disdain for self-serving politicians and diplomats, and her using these talks with the quarian to further herself? She did, but did she care? No.

"You can choose which of our colony worlds you'd want to settle," Amanda said, sliding across a datapad. "They all have small populations concentrated in a few villages and towns, so there's a lot of space to grow. Personally, from what I've seen of them I'd recommend Eden Prime but you guys can make your own choice."

The offer of colony worlds didn't include anything in Sol because outside of Earth, none of them were naturally livable worlds; that and the Systems Alliance didn't want thousands of another species at Earth's doorstep. It also didn't include Reach, because Reach was in the process of being turned into one giant military complex.

Rile took the datapad and looked through it. It had details of each of the human colonies including climate, biodiversity studies, topographical maps, and tons of other information that would help her people make a decision on which world to settle their first colony in three hundred years. Each one marked where the human population centers were, as well as pointing out the areas farthest from those centers.

"That is a decision best left up to the Admiralty Board," Rile admitted. "You're positive our colony will be completely cut off from your AIs?"

"Yes. Whichever world you choose, you'll get land on the other side of the planet, thousands of miles away from humans and anything an AI can access."

"I hope your people will understand it has nothing to do with humans. We don't want them to think we're fearful of them or hate them or anything like that."

The last thing the quarians wanted to do was offend their new hosts at the start of their partnership. Humans were the first race to show them any empathy since they had been forced to flee their homeworld.

"Don't worry. When this is approved we'll make sure every citizen in the Systems Alliance is aware of who the quarians are, and the struggles you've had to endure," Amanda assured.

This deal between the two species was going to be beneficial for both of them. Those in the Systems Alliance who handled such things would make sure the quarians were warmly received by all. Amanda was sure the propaganda machines that the Alliance controlled were already in motion, painting a positive picture of the quarians and the Migrant Fleet. Speaking of-

"The ships the Migrant Fleet will be providing to us? When would we expect them?"

"You must understand that our ships are our lives, and being a captain of one is a great honor for us. We are asking for volunteers from the heavy fleet and the patrol fleet, those who will be willing to give up their ships, and the prestige that goes with it."

"I can understand this is a big change for your people," Amanda said. She left out the but you didn't answer my question part of her response, hoping Rile would answer it on her own.

"Admiral Yaf'Hemin believes he'll be able to get the first six ships delivered to the Alliance soon after the agreement is ratified. Our other ships are very crowded, and it will be hard to find space for all the crew members on the ships we're going to be turning over, even if it is only temporary. But he suspects he should have them to you within the next three Earth weeks after ratification," Rile said, hoping she did the conversion correctly.

Humans, like most species, based the units they used to measure time on the spin of their homeworld on its axis, and its rotation around their star. From Rile's understanding, Rannoch had a longer spin on its axis, but a shorter trip around Tikkun. So a standard day was a longer amount of time for a quarian than a human, but the reverse was true for a year.

The common time used in Citadel Space was 100 seconds to a minute, 100 minutes to an hour, and 20 hours to a day. But neither the humans nor the quarians were part of Citadel Space, so both kept to their own times. Though if they were going to be sharing a world there would likely have to be some kind of change to how time is measured. Likely the quarians would have to try to adapt to the human clock and way of keeping track of the days. It would take likely take generations before such an adjustment became natural to the quarian way of life.

"This is a big moment for both of our species," Rile said.

"It is, so let's make sure we get it right."