Mass Effect: Techno-Organic Revolution

by Clockwork Dragonfly

They thought themselves invulnerable, invincible, and infallible. They thought themselves the apex of all life, they thought of themselves gods. But in their arrogance, the reapers would make a fatal mistake. They would not notice some Prothean refugees discreetly moved both nearby mass relays away form the primitive humanity, thus cutting them off from all reaper influence.

9. Chapter Eight: Bloodstained Ice

Mass Effect Techno-Organic Revolution: Chapter Eight: Bloodstained Ice.

"How do we still create new things? Easy, anything greater than an S4 intelligence is barred from developing anything that requires less than its full computational capacity, something that suits them just fine as most of them seem to prefer contemplating the mysteries of existence over 'lowering themselves' to make improvements to a standard fusion reactor when we can easily do it by ourselves with a bit more time without their aid.

Make no mistake, the trans-sapients are no longer normal Terrans as we know them. While their minds may be human neuromorphic, those individuals aren't anything even remotely close to being human.

Even the High Council recognizes this, classifying them as members of the newly made fifth branch of Terrankind, the trans-sapients. They have even gone the length of adding a fifth off-shooting branch to the left side of the ATC's Yggdrasil sigil to signify this momentous occurrence."

— ATHENA: S4 Terran of the Second Branch regarding the newly born S5 intelligences.

Codex

Non-Council Races: The Agonal

The Agonal: The Agonal are a semi-flight-capable, bipedal, six-eyed, and four-winged insectoid species that were discovered by a Salarian exploration team of the Citadel Council which activated a partner relay that linked to one in their space that was covered in a moderate amount of ice. This species lives from 300 to 375 years and has evolved in the Nolon Void in between the Sagittarius and Perseus Arm upon their temperate homeworld of Rixian.

Rixian would escape the notice of the reapers and had their homeworld ignored by them as they rightfully thought that the Agonal's direct evolutionary ancestors had no reason to develop sapience. This was true until a large comet struck Rixian, forcing the Agonal to need more intelligence to survive the famine and cold of the resulting ice age. Arceologists belive that it was in this ice age that this more intelligent proto-Agonal would discover making fire.

First Contact would occur between them and the citadel council in the Uk'gar'ak system, a fringe system on the farthest edges of the territory belonging to the Agonal Hive about 3,022 light-years away from Rixian and 27 light-years away from the newly unearthed secondary relay 1557.

Homeworld

Rixian: Rixian is by all means a typical garden world but is unique because it resides within a binary star system around an orange dwarf and a white dwarf star, which are named the bright and dim eye of eternity by the Agonal.

Religion and Beliefs

Cyclicism: The by far largest religion of the Agonal is Cyclicism, the belief that upon their deaths, their souls will return to the Well of Eternity in the soul-realm, a realm of existence where all life springs forth upon birth and returns to upon death to be reincarnated into the body a new Agonal of the same caste upon the process of larvae shaping. The Agonal also believe that biomorphs, drones, and animal intelligences have semi-souls that are similarly reincarnated upon their deaths and are also reborn upon larvae shaping.

It is also believed that their host stars, the bright and the dim eye of eternity, are flaming portals into the soul realm that all dead souls pass through to be reincarnated upon their deaths, something which has led to a great deal of fire and stellar iconography to be associated with the religion and for the Agonal to ritually cremate their dead in the belief that 'fire begets fire' so they will have a more smooth transition into the cycle of reincarnation.

Of course, the Agonal now know that the eyes of eternity are not portals but stars, but this religious belief has still not lost much traction as stars are extremely hot and burning orbs of super-heated gas and plasma (or with white dwarfs like the dim eye to be super-heated yet subnuclear carbon) that would painfully incinerate any living individual that tried to travel into them, and thus into the afterlife, similarly to how some grief-stricken individuals of scripture had.

This, of course, has led the more zealous Cyclicists to see the stars themselves as holy relics that not only act as portals for the dead to pass through into the soul realm but also spiritually embody the cycle of reincarnation itself in the life cycle of stars.

Government and Civics

Agonal Government: Known as the Agonal Hive, this government is led by The Council of Queens who individually lead all Agonal on every colony or habitat that they have created (or nests as they call them) and can trace its roots to an ancient council who had represented all the nation-state nests on their homeworld of Rixian many millennia ago.

The Agonal Hive currently spans roughly 3,000 light-years and was created about 1,123 years ago to unite the colonies in their solar system. As a result of the discovery of hyper-drive and hyperspace over 800 years ago, they have grown to create many interstellar colonies, mines, and outposts that they name nests.

Agonal Castes: Unlike the castes of the former Batarian hegemony, the castes of the Agonal are not only treated with substantial amounts of mutual respect and all have equal standing before the Queens, but are entirely biological in their natures.

Queen Caste: The powerful psionic leaders of the Agonal, the Queen Caste can give birth naturally to larvae and use an enzyme that contains retroviruses to reshape the genetic structure of their larvae into members of one of the various castes, drones, bio-forms, or a new Queen near the end of their lives. This practice, of course, has long since fallen out of practice in favor of cloning and mass vat-growing larvae and retro-viruses.

Worker Caste: Members of the Worker Caste were enhanced to excel in fields such as architecture, construction, shipbuilding, interplanetary navigation, mining, maintenance, farming, larvae cloning and shaping, physics, hyperspace mechanics and navigation, subspace mechanics, bioscience, etc.

Warrior Caste: The warrior caste of the Agonal Hive are soldiers, guards, and intelligence agents who are designed to excel in war and subterfuge.

Administration Caste: Members of the Administration Caste were enhanced to work as powerful living computers in a way very similar to council-made mentats. This caste excels in bureaucratic work and the management of psionic and electronic information alike.

Technology

Bioscience

The Agonal are masters of genetic engineering and instead of creating normal technology like most other species except for Terran biokinetics and the Terran province of the Daevorian Bio-Alliance, they instead grow specially designed bio-forms and drones to fulfill these roles and specially grown and programmed animal intelligences in place of VIs to guide and control them.

Bio-armor: The primary material used in the protective shells and carapaces of the Agonal's living machines, bio-armor is an extremely regenerative material that is very similar in function and form to the Terrans' living metal but is entirely organic.

Biomorphs: The Agonal do not create machines, buildings, and starships traditionally; but shape one or more cloned or natural Agonal larvae with cloned or natural queen retro-viruses to shape the larvae into the desired shape and functionality.

Animal Intelligence (AI) Unit: Quite simply, these animal intelligence units are specialized bio-forms that act as fully biological and non-sapient VI programs.

Drones: Run by animal intelligence units and remotely directed by psionic individuals or electrical signals, drones are a special type of biomorphs that fulfill a wide variety of roles and are the Agonal's direct biological equivalent of the Terrans' drones.

Power Generation

Fusion: The Agonal have long since engineered many of their more advanced bio-forms to run on electrical energy and to use a pure hydrogen fusion reactor instead of a digestion-based stomach. These reactors have roughly twice the power output of the reactors used by both Geth factions.

Antimatter: Primitive and unrefined hyperspace technology, like that of similarly primitive and unrefined gravitic and uncatalyzed ME technology, requires a massive amount of power that necessitates a reactor that can produce as much or almost as much energy as an antimatter reactor. While they are no longer used to power modern hyperspace technologies, antimatter reactors are still frequently used to power some of the Agonal's more powerful weapon systems and their rather primitive subspace technology.

Higher Dimensional Physics

Hyperdrive: The hyperdrive is a highly complex kilometer-long or larger rod-like device that jumpships are built around which uses a highly irregular, specific, and unintuitive set of high-energy particle collisions and seemingly nonsensical quantum fluctuations (Mostly to a human neuromorphic mind anyway, a rare few first and second branch Terrans would be able to fully understand the math, members of the new fifth branch would be able to brute force it, and most third and fourth branch Terrans of an aquatic or aerial evolutionary origin would all be able to fully understand it.) to expand and merge some of the planck-scale compactified extra spatial dimensions that exist 'above' normal reality into a bubble-like pocket dimension around the jumpship. From here, the hyperdrive keeps this pocket dimension stable while using conventional thrusters and quantum tunneling to instantly transport the jumpship and the hyperspatial bubble it created forwards to any location within 19.2 light-years every 4.8 hours, or speeds of 92.16 LYPD.

Tactical Hyperspace Jumps: Tactical Hyperspace Jumps are short and very low-power jumps of only a few thousand to twenty million kilometers by using a different set of programming with a hyperdrive. These tactical jumps can be done once every minute instead of every 4.8 hours.

Tactical Hyperdrive: The Tactical Hyperdrive is a much smaller and infinitely more limited hyperdrive equipped on dropships that can only be used for tactical hyperspace jumps, which have a top speed of about 5.6 times that of light and find use for short-distance in-system travel when the dropship they are the core of cannot link to and hitch a ride on a hyperdrive-equipped in-system ferry.

Hyper-Relays: Sacrificing the height and with of the hyperspatial bubble in exchange for increased distance and no recharge period, hyper-relays send bursts of information through a phased tight-beam information laser through a tiny photon-wide hyperspatial channel that links two locations up to 50 light-years away. These devices are used in the same way that mass relay species use comn bouys and the terrans rift-gate mk1s.

Hyperspatial CWIS: The hyperspatial CWIS is a device that opens up a small hyperspatial bubble around a projectile or energy blast; only for the bubble to be collapsed as anything within it is instantly shredded down into its base quarks. This can be done every fifteen seconds.

Hyperspatial Weaponry: hyperspatial weapons are an offensive use of hyperspatial CWIS that equips a modified version of the device onto a missile warhead or bomb to detonate on impact or penetration. This weapon then drags both it and anything in its effective range into a bubble of hyperspace to be destroyed when the bubble it created is collapsed afterward.

Subspace Technology

The Agonal subspace technology is as power-hungry as it is primitive. They discovered subspace when they noticed that their most powerful electro-laser weapons slightly warped the fabric of spacetime.

Grav-Furnaces: Grav-Furnaces are extremely power-hungry devices that use energy from an antimatter reactor to fuel a stream of electro-plasma that is used to warp the fabric of spacetime in rudimentary ways.

Grav-Thrusters: Grav-Thrusters are devices that drag a ship forwards by using the electro-plasma from a grav-furnace to create a zone of attractive gravity in front of it, thus creating forward and reactionless thrust.

Grav-Screens: Grav-Scenes are an evolution of grav-thruster technology that uses the electro-plasma from a grav-furnace to create a zone of attractive gravity in front of the ship while creating an equally repulsive zone of gravity behind it, creating a thin bubble of spacetime that acts as a thin gravitic shield.

Grav-Wave Drive: Currently in development but still several years away from being fully developed, the grav-wave drive is the name of the Agonal's in-progress and primitive warp drive that will use powerful grav-screen technology to create a warp bubble.

Predictions show that this new drive will allow for speeds of 50.42 times light-speed, nine times faster than a tactical hyperdrive but at the cost of requiring an antimatter reactor.

Weapons

Electro-laser Weapons: The bio-forms of the Agonal can create a large amount of electrical energy that can be slowly and continuously discharged or grounded at a safe rate or be allowed to accumulate for a certain amount of time in bio-capacitors before being sent out in large blasts of energy-wreathed ionized particles from weapon apertures that are grown from local biomass within them when required.

Muon Lance: The Muon Lance is the second most common weapon used by the Agonal and is only so because it cannot be so easily grown out of bio-forms as electro-laser weapons. The muon lance is a particle beam weapon that fires a stream of stabilized super-heavy muons that when colliding with matter, will replace the electrons within a target's atoms which shrinks the diameter of their molecular bonds and forces them to crash into each other, initiating nuclear fusion with each muon potentially catalyzing many more nuclear reactions. The fact that organic matter has so much hydrogenated material only makes this weapon that much more effective against it due to the fact that hydrogen only has one electron in its orbital.

Pulse Lasers: The third most commonly used weapons by the Agonal, these green visible light pulse lasers are used for defense and medium-ranged offensive capabilities in everything from drones to hive ships.

Gyro-Dart Guns: Designed to penetrate bio-armor and ablative shells, these chemically accelerated weapons were designed to fire small rocket-propelled shells that deliver various types of payloads such as acids, poisons, explosives, pheromones, tiny psionic emitters, and other detrimental weapons into their targets before activating.

Ships

Agonal Ships: Agonal ships are a single magnitude of size larger than Citadel ships but are a level of magnitude smaller than equivalent Terran ships.

Dropships: Less than 1,000 meters-in-length or less, dropships are either manned or autonomous ships built around a tactical hyperdrive core that takes up the roles of short-ranged transport and as gun platforms.

Fighter-Drone (unmanned hunter-killer): 95m.

Light Transport (shuttle): 200m.

Heavy Transport (large shuttle) 300m.

Fighter (corvette): 400m.

Warship (frigate): 600m.

Heavy Warship (destroyer): 800m.

Jumpships: 1,000 meters in size or larger, jumpships are built around a full-sized hyperdrive core. These ships act as both mobile fortresses and also as ferries for the massively slower dropships to hitch a ride on to enable them to travel interstellar distances.

Lesser Hiveship (light cruiser) 1,000m.

Hiveship (cruiser) 1,500m.

Greater Hiveship (dreadnought) 2,500m.

Apex Hiveship (super-dreadnought) 4,000m.

Hivestation (mobile fortress) 5,000-7,000m.

Misc Technology

Matter Resequencer: The Matter Resequencer is the name of the rudimentary molecular fabricators used by the Agonal that use raw chemical feedstocks containing basic elements and functions similar to those that are currently being used by both Geth factions and were once used by the Terrans.

Void-Lift Strands: Functionally identical to the now defunct Terran space elevators, void-lift strands are long strands of carbon nanotubes that act as rails for tram-like cargo bio-forms.

[Warning! Level 5 Security Clearance Required!]

Non-Council Races: Terrans: Technology: The Catalyst Files

The databases of the former reaper god-child that was the Catalyst was an invaluable resource for the ATC, accelerating many of their various advanced technologies by approximately two real-time centuries. This database had thousands of both reaper and reverse-engineered Leviathan technologies, observations on Leviathan artifacts, and other pieces of invaluable information that the Terrans incorporated into their technology when possible and to study when it is not.

The Indicton Field Projector: The Indicton Field Projector is a Leviathan device reverse-engineered by the Catalyst that disrupts the formation and use of mass-free bubbles, but unfortunately not tunnels, within a radius of a light-month which consequently rips nearby ships out of standard ME FTL while also preventing any from entering it.

ME Rift-Gate: Using eezoless ME fields instead of gravitational force, the range of normal point-to-point wormholes created by two rift-gate mk1s and mk2s can be increased from 22 to 220 LY and by two mk3s and mk4s from 2,200 to 22,000 LY at the cost of linearly increasing transit time.

Infinity Gates: Made using the technology of ME-wormholes, knowledge taken from the Catalyst's databases, and the power output of several ZPMs; infinity gates are a massively upgraded form of rift-gate that functions identically to E-QECs where it can transmit to any location in the entire galaxy with only a few nanoseconds to a few milliseconds of transit lag depending on the distance with any sized wormhole.

The Ark-ship known as Babylon 5 is currently being retrofitted with an infinity gate. It has also been calculated that the transit lag time between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will only be about twenty to thirty seconds.

Zero-Point-Modules (ZPM): ZPMs are a new invention just created by the Nuunian Hyperdimensional Combine, one that combines the ATC's vacuum energy extraction technology, eezoless ME field technology, some knowledge from the Catalyst's databases, subspace bubble technology, and a little bit of inspiration from the ancient Terran sci-fi series of Stargate to create a device which provides an effectively limitless supply of energy in titanic quantities.

These devices work by draining all the vacuum energy from within a tiny subspace bubble up to the size of a medium-sized asteroid until it reaches its maximum level of entropy before creating a new bubble and draining that one. This is while the drained bubble are released and allowed to be replenished with virtual particles by the effectively infinite background energy of the universe itself.

These ZPMs allow for a level of energy generation that is several magnitudes greater than even the greatest black hole reactors at their highest setting while only being about the size of an average singularity reactor. This is something that has (in conjunction with psycho-alloys) allowed for both warp drives and rift drives to be made six times faster by increasing the power able to be put into the warp bubble to allow for speeds of 120 LYPD and a reduction of rift-drive recharge times from two hours to a mere twenty minutes which has, in turn, allowed rift-drive speeds to be multiplied sixfold from 2,200 LYPD up to a staggering 13,200 LYPD.

These devices have two major downsides, however, that have prevented these ZPMs from outright replacing all other forms of portable power generation such as fusion, antimatter, and singularity reactors.

Firstly, like black hole reactors, the truly massive amount of power they create destabilizes any subspace bubble they are placed within or any attempt to beam their full or even a large portion of their energy output through a wormhole.

And secondly, is the fact that a full third of a ZPM's energy output must be used to keep the device from tearing itself and everything within a range of several light months apart while simultaneously launching a beam of energy many times greater than a GRB cannon in the opposite direction.

Even with these two downsides, the ZPM is still greatly superior to every other form of power generation known to the galaxy and allows for a level of power generation that could be used to construct entirely new full-sized galaxies in conjunction with matter replicator technology if given enough time.

Instead of being used for vanity projects like the new being materially repurposed Sol Dyson Sphere (which was close to being put on the chopping block from its impractical nature due to how easy it was to use a few dozen black hole reactors to generate a similar output of energy) and the Sol Replica project (which was just being made as a historical recreation and for similar 'because we can' reasons'), these devices are being used to fuel the Terran' rapidly growing war fleets in preparation for the reapers.

GRB Cannon MK2: Immediately banned under the Luna Conventions, the GRB Cannon MK2 is a ZPM-fueled weapon that somewhat stabilizes and weaponized the process of a ZPM containment failure to launch a beam that can atomize an entire star system with a single shot on its highest setting. These weapons can only be fired from planetoid engine-sized ships, world engine-sized ships, or larger structures.

GRB Cannon MK3: Immediately banned under the Luna Conventions, the GRB Canon MK3 is a hyper-weapon fueled by an array of several ZPMs that has the power to atomize an entire star cluster in a single shot. These weapons can only be fired from world engines or larger-sized structures.

Gauss-Alpha Accelerators MK2: Normal Gauss-Alpha Accelerators work by magnetically and gravitationally accelerating a rapidly alternating stream of alpha particles at a target which acts like countless billions of monomolecular chainsaws, shredding them and anything nearby on the molecular level while simultaneously ripping out their electrons to form free-flowing monoatomic hydrogen gas that quickly ignites and causes incendiary damage around the impact zone.

The MK2 version of this technology takes this to the next level by incorporating Catalyst-derived technology to launch a barrage of countless billions of nano-scale biotic warps with uncatalyzed ME fields that greatly increases these weapons' already extremely fast molecular unraveling effect several times over in addition to also increasing the incendiary damage. This is in addition to new Mars-made mechanisms that manipulate the strong and weak forces to make the affected molecules unravel even faster yet again.

The Ego: The Ego is a fundamental part of reality and the Catalyst files have expanded Terran's knowledge on the subject in regards to forcing its power onto the fabric of reality.

The Energy Web: The energy web is the electromagnetic portion of the ego that consists of the web of synapses that compute electronic information.

The Essence-Seat: The Essence-Seat is the quantum-computing base upon which full consciousnesses and partial consciousness fragments are formed when working in conjunction with the Energy Web. The Essence-Seat is also the basis for both psychokinetic abilities and technology.

Anti-Ego Weapons: Anti-Ego Weapons are weapons that are not only banned under the Luna conventions but are utterly opposed to the path of the mind as they use psychokinetic energy to target and destroy the essence-seat of egos instead of letting them fade back into the universe, something that even the similarly banned anti-sophont zoned energy siphons allow for despite their utterly painful draining of the energy web.

Despite the Terrans' extreme aversion to them, however, they have still been drastically improved with the Catalyst's knowledge and have been shown by its data on that devastating war to be entirely necessary to destroy Leviathan artifacts and technology without requiring overwhelming firepower.

Death Pulse Generators: Made by the Catalyst in the War of Galactic Sundering and used to turn the tide against the Leviathans, death pulse generators are exceedingly advanced anti-ego weapons that launch a directed or omnidirectional pulse of anti-essence-seat quantum fluctuations to destroy anything tied to this be it egos, ego fragments, celestial crystal, or elementals.

These weapons however, by their nature, propagate through space and are thus blockable by deflector shields or a standard phase shield, something that the Leviathans exploited by equipping their Elementals and Celestial Technology with these devices and by sending the Lords of Mass and Weight against these weapons.

These weapons have since fallen out of use and eventually into disrepair as they are not useful for the Catalyst's operating procedures of trying to 'preserve' the life of those they harvested as these weapons do nothing but destroy the most basic essence of all sufficiently sophisticated forms of life.

Death Pulse Generator MK2: A Catalyst-made improvement on normal death pulse generators, these devices surround a death pulse with powerful mass effect fields to allow it to not only propagate through space at FTL speeds, but to overwhelm several layers of a weak or standard multi-layered deflector shield array.

Alternative Physics Shaper Matrix: An extremely primitive version of infinitely more refined Leviathan technology of which the Catalyst never truly figured out, the Alternative Physics Shaper Matrix (or shaper matrix for short) is a massive device the size of the Pacific tectonic plate on Terra which uses psychokinetic energy to temporarily change the laws of physics and the conditions of matter and energy in a light-second radius away from it in any desired manner. These devices can only be placed on world engines or larger-sized structures and require an ego-infused S4 intelligence to both fuel and operate the alternative physics shaper matrix.

The High Council was less than amused when they learned that the scientists in charge of the development of this project had convinced the central S4 intelligence known as CIRCE to turn an entire gas giant into a mass of pure gummy bears as a test of the shaper matrix. These scientists were then reprimanded for being unprofessional and ordered to have CIRCE turn the gas giant back to its original state.

Psycho-Alloy: Covering various types of physics-defying metamaterials infused with psychokinetic energy, various types of psycho-alloy could, for some time, only be slowly made by psykers that are masters of psychokinesis. This changed with the creation of the first shaper matrix which has allowed the production of these components on an industrial scale and has quickly found use in significantly enhancing every and all aspects of Terran technology.

[Warning! Level 5 Security Clearance Required!]

Non-Council Races: The Leviathans: Celestial Technology

Celestial Technology: Once the cruel and arrogant rulers of the galaxy and much of the local group, the Leviathans didn't have any traditional technology of their own that didn't rely on their psychokinetic energy-fueled alternative physics technology, which they named Celestial Technology.

Ego Merging: During and after the first cycle, the Catalyst would begin the cloning of the Leviathans' psychokinetic and psionic slave species known as the Nalsn who acted as their lieutenants. This was to harvest their egos to merge and use them as batteries to power the Leviathans' celestial technology while they exist in a state of eternal suffering, torment, and madness.

This same knowledge of ego merging would be used to construct the first capital ship Harbinger, with all following capitals being based on its design. Unfortunately, however, the majority of these following copies would be significantly lesser than the original, as they were constructed with the egos of species without any innate psychokinetic abilities. Nazara is one of these true capitals and there are approximately 10,000 others.

Celestial Crystal: Made from pure psychokinetic energy that is somehow condensed into a strange form of physical matter, celestial crystal is an opaque, faintly glowing, yellow-white, and crystalline substance that acted as the main building material of the ancient Leviathan species. This material is almost indestructible and can only be destroyed by either using an overwhelming and highly focused blast of energy or by using anti-ego weapons on it.

Celestial Golems: Powerful yet mindless automatons made of celestial crystal, celestial golems are psionically controlled and ego fragment-powered drones that the Leviathans used in place of mechs for both war and dangerous labor that was unsuited for their organic slaves. Due to the Leviathans' paranoia, these golems have a deep-seated design flaw/feature that allows them to very easily be fully reprogrammed by any psionically capable individual.

Celestial Loom: This hyper-advanced device can 'spin' a jupiter-sized mass of refined materials (including exotic matter such as element zero and celestial crystal), ships, and/or other war machines into existence every hour by breaking the second law of thermodynamics and rearranging the produced matter and energy that it had created out of nothing. Unfortunately for the reapers however, there is only one of these artifacts as the knowledge of how to construct them was erased by the Leviathans.

Elementals: The Elementals were Leviathan-made S6-intelligence-rated hyper-weapons housed in custom-built and moon-sized celestial golems that as their name implies, controlled and acted as the avatars of various universal elements but had hard-set limitations despite the wide overlap of many of their domains. These archetypal-gods-made-real/physical had full control over a single aspect of reality that relates to their domain of influence within the entire star cluster they resided in.

This manipulation, however, had limits, as it could not alter the essence-seat of the ego, and in turn their fundamental natures, without destroying their physical shells and subsequently dying. In addition to this, any seemingly logical overlap of powers between spheres was infinitely less effective than the elemental who controlled that sphere.

These elementals could also impart a small portion of their power onto the egos of other, chosen beings; creating the demigod-like individuals known as the Empowered. However unlike those of normal beings, the egos of the Empowered did not rejoin the universe but into the over-ego of its patron elemental, making it ever so slightly stronger.

The Elementals and the Empowered were all destroyed during the War of Galactic Sundering at great cost by the Catalyst's potent death pulse generators while all information on how to make them was erased by the Leviathans. Despite this however, the Catalyst's insights into them, their powers, and celestial technology in general have proven to be invaluable to the ATC's development of alternative physics technology in the form of the shaper matrix.

The list of the fifteen now-destroyed elementals and their respective domains of influence are as follows:

The Lord of Fire: (flame and plasma)

The Lord of Air: (unionized gasses)

The Lord of Water (liquids)

The Lord of Earth (raw materials)

The Lord of Iron: (refined materials)

The Lord of Life: (flesh and genetics)

The Lord of Circuitry: (inorganic computers)

The Lord of Energy: (electrons and other high-energy particles aside from photons)

The Lord of Light: (photons)

The Lord of Darkness: (dark matter, Darklight, and the nullification of most types of energy)

The Lord of Perception (psionic waves, self-shape-shifting, and the energy web of egos)

The Lord of Time: (time)

The Lord of Weight: (gravitational force)

The Lord of Mass: (mass effect)

The Lord of Nuclear (weak and strong forces)

Celestial Drive: The Celestial Drive was the Leviathan's form of FTL travel that can reach speeds of 80,000 LYPD and has been built into many of their ancient artifacts. This method of FTL travel works by using advanced alternative physics technology to violate the laws of distance and relativity. Unfortunately for the reapers, the Leviathans erased all information on these drives from the celestial loom so they cannot make more.

Celestial Gates: Celestial Gates are the Leviathans' equivalents to Rift-Gates and Mass Relays that work on alternative physics technology and send anything entering it instantly to any other celestial gate regardless of how far away it is. Similarly to many other celestial technologies, the Leviathans erased the information on how to make them from the databases of the Celestial Loom.

The Catalyst briefly considered using these instead of the mass relays but decided against them because, unlike the mass relays, they could not be remotely manipulated and shut down or be filled with hidden spyware.

Chapter Eight: Bloodstained Ice.

Salarian Cruiser Eye of the Storm: 27 light years from relay 1557, secondary linked to primary 787

'We…we thank you?' Captain Zursok mentally responded with a good deal of discomfort and trepidation at having his mind touched by psionics.

'I am He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge of the administration caste. The Council of Queens has been informed of your arrival and is eager to open relations with your people.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge said psionically.

'How are we communicating right now, exactly? Is this some form of long-ranged psionics?' Captain Zursok asked.

'I suppose you could classify it as something like that. Regardless, we were forced to scan and create an adapter based on your thought patterns before we were able to contact you as it seems that cross-species mental communication is impossible without creating one to ensure compatibility beyond the most basic of emotions.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge explained.

'That is interesting… But who is this Council of Queens? Is that the name of your ruling government?' Captain Zursok asked.

'Yes, they each rule over one of our nests, our interstellar colonies as it were.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge replied.

'You have FTL travel? Does it manipulate mass or gravitational force to alter the fabric of spacetime?' Captain Zursok asked curiously.

'We were unaware that one could manipulate the mass of any object in such a way beyond adding or subtracting physical material. As for gravitationally, we are still in the prototype phase for that in the efforts to create an infinitely inferior form of FTL drive.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge said.

'So you do have a different form of FTL? And why would you want to create an inferior form of FTL drive?' Captain Zursok asked.

'Yes, we use hyperspace to achieve FTL travel and communications; as well as a few things offensively and defensively. That being said, they do take up quite a bit of space.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge said.

'Hyperspace?' Captain Zursok asked.

'Yes. I won't tell you how it works. Still, we simply expand and merge the compactified higher dimensions above normal spacetime into a bubble-like medium that is partially disconnected from normal reality.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge said.

Captain Zursok digested that. Of course, the STG was aware of those compactified higher dimensions, but they didn't know they could be manipulated, let alone used as a method of FTL travel.

'How much space, exactly?' Captain Zursok asked.

'One standard kilometer at the least, but they can easily be scaled up or used in conjunction with other hyperdrive cores instead.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge said.

'Oh, that would be problematic. I can see how even an infinitely inferior FTL drive would be a boon if it could fit on smaller ships,' Captain Zursok acknowledged.

'Indeed, the fastest we can move smaller ships is 5.6 times the speed of light by using a tactical hyperdrive core. These cores can be as small as fifty meters.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge said.

'That is slow, but such a drive would still be very useful for tactical FTL jumps, as the name itself implies, and for slow in-system transit,' Captain Zursok mentally responded.

'Those are indeed the things we use them for, but do you have any more questions?' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge asked.

'Could you send us information on your species and technology that you are willing to share with us?' Captain Zursok mentally asked while noting that Agonal names seemed to follow something similar to the Hanars' soul-name naming conventions while being entirely public instead of hidden for only those who were close to them.

'Yes, our naming conventions seem to be similar to those aquatic Hanars that you are currently thinking about.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge said.

'Oh, I didn't mean to transmit that…' Captain Zursok thought back nervously.

'That is alright, your species seems to be mind-blind after all. And on that topic, would you like that knowledge to be transmitted in a psionic or electronic manner?' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge asked.

'Both, but only to my mind. On a related note, it is standard for the STG to be equipped with brain-computer interfaces, of which I can use to greatly accelerate the electronic translation process…' Captain Zursok responded before adding on. 'Oh, and please disconnect your psionics from everyone on the ship unless we specifically ask to be connected? It is a grave violation of our culture to enter our minds like this without permission.'

'That is acceptable and we are deeply sorry for our offense.' He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge said apologetically as Captain Zursok nearly lost his balance from vertigo-induced nausea as a result of the rushing onslaught of information being pumped into his mind before He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge disconnected from both his and the rest of the crew's minds.

"Send the first contact message to them. We may be able to communicate psionically but I want to do it digitally, too." Captain Zursok said to his communications officer.

"Yes, sir," Jagoln said while typing away on his console. "Information sent."

About a minute or two later, they would get a response and a large information package that included everything that Captain Zursok was sent psionically in addition to many other facts and details about the Agonal Hive.

"Alright, contact the citadel council. Union Code FC-0S-207 and 877-46P1A." Captain Zursok said.

"Yes, captain." Jagoln acknowledged.

The Citadel: Presidium, New Council Chambers.

"And that is the reports on our increased eezo mining-" Councilor Esheel said before stopping mid-sentence to read a priority message on her omnitool, one routed through a QEC, no less.

FC-0S-207, the union code for peaceful first contact. And 877-46P1A, a priority communication channel request for the councilors.

"It appears that one of our exploration teams has found a new species. They are requesting to speak to us directly." Councilor Esheel said while typing on her Omnitool to accept the request and put the call on the room's holographic projector.

"I am Captain Zursok of the Salarian Union exploration cruiser Eye of The Storm, and I would like to report that we have made first contact with a new species. They call themselves the Agonal Hive." The orange hologram of Captain Zursok fizzled into existence and said excitedly.

"Really? What are they like?" Councilor Quentius asked eagerly.

"They use purely biological technology like the Daevorian Bio-Alliance province of the Terrans, they mostly use psionics to communicate, they have a level of technology around that of the orthodox geth, they have subspace technology and are on the cusp of developing warp drive technology, and they have discovered and widely use a method of FTL travel and communication that neither we nor the Terrans have discovered" Captain Zursok said.

Those last two caught the councilors' attention, as a new form of FTL travel was invaluable and even a form of primitive yet working subspace technology was equally valuable for them. All their attempts to create a working warp drive required an absurd amount of power where their most potent fusion reactors were simply nowhere close to being enough. As such, Quentius and Esheel leaned forward with extreme interest while Irissa was disgusted by their interest in unsanctified technologies.

"We must bring them into the citadel as an associate race as soon as possible!" Councilor Quentius said urgently.

"I agree in full." Councilor Esheel agreed.

"How fast is this method of FTL travel when compared to other known forms of it?" Councilor Quentius asked.

"Their hyperdrives have top speeds of 92.16 lightyears per day but require a large core that must be a kilometer or more in length." Captain Zursok said.

That FTL speed just made those two councilors even more eager to bring the Agonal into the Citadel alliance, regardless of their FTL drive's weaknesses.

"That is unfortunate, but perhaps we could use it only on dreadnoughts and space stations if we manage to bring them in?" Councilor Esheel suggested, of which was met by Councilor Quentius's agreement and Irissa's scowl.

"Please continue about their ships, Captain Zursok." Councilor Esheel said.

"Unlike ours and Terran ships, these ships are slow and non-maneuverable in normal space when compared to ours, but they do have a form of tactical FTL jumps they can make every minute and are developing their primitive subspace technology in a direction that will probably soon fix this shortcoming." Captain Zursok said.

"Hmm, yes. Still a good investment," Councilor Esheel said.

"Indeed. I propose we invite them here to the citadel through Captain Zursok and offer them to join us once they meet us," Councilor Quentius suggested.

"I second this motion." Councilor Esheel said.

It was then that everyone slowly turned to the disgusted and grimacing councilor, Irissa.

"I say nay," Councilor Irissa said with contempt.

"Good. We have a majority, we will begin preparations. But first, please send us that information." Councilor Esheel said simply.

"Of course, councilor." Captain Zursok said as he sent the information.

"Thank you Captain Zursok. We must go over this information now." Councilor Esheel said after the data transfer was completed.

"Understood, councilor." Captain Zursok said as he closed the data stream, causing his hologram to fizzle out of existence as the call ended.

It was then that the counselors would temporarily adjourn the meeting to look over the plethora of information the Agonal known as He-Who-Weaves-Knowledge sent them regarding the Agonal Hive.

Meanwhile: Janus System, Theia Station.

"So you wish to use the deployment of the genophage alteration that we helped work on with the Salarians to help unite your people?" Andria Norman asked.

"Yes, I do." Urdnot Wrex said simply.

"And how do you even know of these developments?" Andria Norman feigned ignorance, knowing full well that he got it from the new Terran shadow broker.

"I have my ways," Wrex said cryptically.

"You mean a frequent employer of yours, the shadow broker." Andria Norman clarified.

"Yes, you have done your research well… I'll send them your regards the next time they contact me for a job." Urdnot Wrex confirmed while highly suspecting they got this information from the shadow broker. He was completely right about that of course, but it just wasn't in the way he was thinking.

"And what will you do with this potential newfound unity?" Andria Norman asked.

"Focus more on the important things such as education, crops, trying to heal the land, and burying stupid old grudges." Urdnot Wrex said.

"That's a lot of good things, things that most chieftains on Tuchanka would not care about in favor of fighting their enemies." Andria Norman pointed out in approval.

"The Krogan must look forward and heal for once, we must if we are to have a future." Urdnot Wrex said with conviction.

"So how do you think your people will take the fact that they can lay and hatch eggs at a significantly slower rate that is approximately equal to the average mammalian species' incubation period?" Andria Norman asked.

"Honestly, I see it as a good thing and the female clans agree with me, a few eggs at a time that are guaranteed to hatch is infinitely better than one hatching egg out of hundreds of dead ones." Urdnot Wrex said.

"That and it will limit your population growth so that it doesn't spiral out of control and strain local resources to and beyond the breaking point, as it did right before the rebellions." Andria Norman pointed out.

"That too." Urdnot Wrex agreed. "The strength of the Krogan are not its numbers, but individual battle prowess."

Andria Norman didn't comment on that because it was categorically false, she had read the council's AARs on the battles of the Rachni Wars and their victory was most certainly the result of a mixture of the Krogan's biological hardiness and their heavy utilization of sapient-wave tactics of such a scale that were only sustainable due to the Krogan's insanely fast reproduction rate.

Of course, the Rachni Wars could have been won by the Salarians' attempted but failed mech-swarm tactics if it weren't for the Rachni's preference for living in highly toxic environments that a species of the council's technological advancement could not overcome practically.

"Getting back on topic, I agree with you that the Krogan people must heal and look to the future. That being said, however, why are you coming here to me to discuss it?" Andria Norman asked while knowing full well why he was here due to her team of chronokinetics.

"I wish for my new Krogan state to become an affiliate state of the ATC and for you to aid our few scientists in healing our planet back to its original state." Urdnot Wrex explained.

"I highly doubt that Warlord Okeer would be willing to help undertake such a terraforming project." Andria Norman pointed out.

"Our few willing scientists, then." Urdnot Wrex amended in slight annoyance at mentioning the hated Warlord Okeer, but he knew that she, unfortunately, had a very valid point about that incredibly ancient, insane, and science-obsessed warlord.

"Hmm… We will help you, Urdnot Wrex." Andria Norman said. "But as for healing your planet, we have already promised to do the same with the Batarian planets we glassed, but we have been massively strained in that effort due to our full shift of a war economy."

"The Reapers. If you Terrans are that worried about them, then they are beyond anything even a Krogan-backed citadel could hope to fight off, let alone win." Urdnot Wrex mused.

"Yes. I will show you our fight against the six-kilometer-long and techno-organic reaper capital ship known as Nar'ithoth as evidence of that very fact." Andria Norman said grimly while mentally pulling up a holographic display of the battle for Wrex to see.

And Wrex would be proven completely right as he watched the Terrans throw millions of autonomous drones and hundreds of manned ships at the reaper capital ship and its escort composed of thousands of the Kalros-damned collectors while a Terran ship about twice the size of the reaper exchanged continent-atomizing white deathfire with the reaper's more powerful planet-atomizing crimson deathfire before it finally disabled it. From here it parked itself next to its corpse and seemed to teleport it away in a swirling implosion of spacetime.

It was then that he saw yet more shocking information. The Terrans had lost 40% of their forces in this engagement with one reaper.

Wrex looked up with a grim face as he asked a very important question. "How many?"

"Three trillion capitals, fifty billion of their own lesser ships which are each about ten times weaker, and a reliably predicted ten million collector vessels." Andria Norman said simply in an equally grim tone of voice.

"Shit," Wrex spoke, experiencing true terror for one of the very select few times in his life.

"I will not lie to you, Urdnot Wrex, the galaxy will quite literally burn in this war. Stars will die, systems will be atomized, clusters will be stripped of all matter….This is why we would like to invite the Krogan people to join the Andromeda Initiative." Andria Norman said.

"The Andromeda Initiative?" Urdnot Wrex queried curiously.

"The Andromeda Initiative." Andria Norman affirmed while pulling up a holographic picture of a large terran arcology ship. "This is the Babylon 5, an arcology ship designed to comfortably carry enough willing members of all known species to repopulate their respective species in the Andromeda Galaxy under the false-presence of exploration… Oh, and their entire respective extranet databases." Andria Norman explained.

"It will be hard to sell to the clans, but I think enough of the females will agree." Urdnot Wrex said while ignoring how casually the terran spoke about downloading the entire extranet. "As for the males, a few might agree after the cure but you may have to resort to artificial insemination at large."

"Excellent. We will begin construction of the Krogan district on Babylon 5 immediately." Andria Norman declared.

The Terminus Systems: 527.6 LY off the relay network: Erebus Custer; The Nyx System.

'You know, it's one thing to read about one of these magnificent megastructures and to see them in person.' Naomi Hiss said in awe.

'I agree in full. It's quite the mesmerizing sight.' Agornox, her husband, and fourth branch Terran said in agreement.

While the black sun catalyzer wasn't the biggest megastructure she had ever seen by a long shot, only being about the size of a small moon, there was just something mesmerizing about the glowing semi-enclosed purple sphere that was built around a feeding black hole.

And the technical side of the megastructure was no less mesmerizing to her, seeming to be extracting and refining dark matter from the black hole with the mass effect while simultaneously pumping a flowing stream of Darklight, mass effect fields, elections, and other forms of unknown energy back into the stellar remnant in a swirling whirlpool of glowing indigo energy before having it jet out of both of the poles on the black hole.

The elegance and perfectly meshed functions of this device were beautiful, simultaneously being a Penrose sphere, a dark matter extractor, a dark matter refinery, some sort of dark energy cloud producer and spreader, and other unknown functions lost to time due to the petty and vain Leviathans.

It was a shame really, but the drastic action of the Leviathans destroying all knowledge and people with the knowledge of how this technology worked was perhaps justifiable as it allowed the eezo-free voids, them, and the eventual end of the reapers to come to exist.

Regardless of that though, it was her job to study this device and gather whatever useful information and technology from the failing device that she could from it.

As for why it was failing, the obvious reason was the slow evaporation of the black hole from the Penrose process it used to generate massive amounts of energy over the last two billion plus years. But that wasn't everything however, as the black hole seemed to be undergoing degradation far faster than it should be, something that most likely had something to do with it generating and spreading dark energy clouds across the galaxy and part of some of its small satellites.

There were some new additions, however, in the form of twenty-four mass relays in orbit of the device which were pouring various gasses through the gaps in the megastructure and into the black hole.

At one point, the Catalyst tried replenishing the black hole by siphoning off material from several dozen gas giants, but that had only ever-so-slightly slowed the degradation instead of fully stopping or reversing it. Despite its overall ineffectiveness, however, the Catalyst had deemed that any extra time gotten out of these devices was invaluable.

The synthetic nature of element zero and the fact it would one day cease to exist was being kept secret from the relay species to not destabilize the Asari and Hanar governments with the reapers right over the galactic horizon. One of her chronokinetic friends said such a revelation. would have a 99.999% chance of resulting in an intense, pointless, and highly destructive civil war in both species governments.

Still... it would be a shame if they had to destroy these megastructures, but then again they would only do that if they began to lose against the reapers in an unrecoverable way.

Two Hours Later: The Citadel: The Presidium; The New Council Chambers.

"So, what do you think of the Agonal? I think we were correct in our initial assessment." Councilor Quentius asked.

"As do I. They are a fascinating species, one that would advance us massively in the fields of bioscience, subspace, antimatter, and higher dimensional physics if they agreed to join us and share their technology." Councilor Esheel said.

"Yes. Especially their higher dimensional physics and technologies that even the Terrans themselves haven't managed to make. Technology such as this could even prove to be our first true bartering item for the Terrans. Unfortunately for us, however, they are also almost as conservative as the Elcor." Councilor Quentius lamented.

"Not that antimatter is any less important, it seems to be the key to unlocking the most basic subspace technology." Councilor Esheel added on.

"Yes, that as well." Councilor Quentius agreed with a nod.

"And in comparison to the Elcor, we don't have the same leverage to speed those negotiations due to them having an entirely different base of FTL technology as they have not discovered, or even heard of, element zero." Councilor Irissa said with a scowl.

"Despite that, however, their method of FTL travel directly correlates with STL speed. They also have neither the knowledge nor eezo to compensate for inertia, and their only form of fully developed FTL technology requires a dreadnought-sized ship to be placed upon; all of which could be rectified by our eezo." Councilor Quentius said

"Yes! That's an excellent incentive we can use to get them to join us!" Councilor Esheel agreed before her excitement faded with the horrified realization "Which will turn out to be useless because the Terrans and their allies have access to that same eezo and knowledge of how to use it for that, not to mention the fact that they would very likely offer a limited amount of aid in helping them advance their subspace technology in exchange for becoming their protectorate."

"Hmm, what exploiting their main religion's reverence of stars as holy relics then, cyclicism they called it?" Councilor Quentius mentioned.

"Good idea, but no, trying to frame the Terrans as heretics to their religion wouldn't work because religion has predictably taken a backseat after a certain level of their societal development." Councilor Esheel denied while Councilor Irissa's face shifted ever so slightly for a few milliseconds.

"Hmm, yes, the Hanar are the only exception to that rule, but that was only because the Protheans uplifted them in absentia." Councilor Quentius mused.

"And the Asari, based on the Cabal of Athame's deification of the Prothean mad scientist Athame and the sainthood of her advisors and coworkers." Councilor Esheel added on. "And speaking of the Terrans, I think there is a reason they are abiding by our secrecy and not contacting them."

"And what would that be?! It's clear they are trying to surround us while they consolidate as much power as they can!" Councilor Irissa exclaimed, fuming over the decisions of these heretics and their comparison of the Athamites to the stupid, goddess-damned Prothean-cult of the fucking Hanar.

"Aside from the fact there is no way they don't already know about them, they are doing it for the same reason they directly gave us mind shielding and indirectly psionic sensors while also allowing us to pick apart the geth scrap on and above Neloh Prime; pure pragmatism." Councilor Quentius said.

"Explain." Councilor Irissa said, still rather angry at how the cabal's Ardat-Yakshi agents had been foiled by the technology of the heretical terrans that had been so eagerly accepted by this weak-willed council.

"It's simple. They don't want us to be a burden and an undefended stockpile of 'raw materials' for the reapers once they arrive." Councilor Quentius explained.

"That… that makes an excellent deal of sense…" Councilor Esheel admitted.

"Aside from that, the Agonal's use of psionics deeply unsettles and upsets both me and the Asari Republics. They are simply too close to the Rachni for comfort." Councilor Irissa said, hiding her hatred of this new species of foul sorcerers and her abject disgust at the council's wish and plans to bring them in.

But despite all her hatred, she was beginning to reach the last state of grief, acceptance.

The Terrans had changed the galaxy for the worse by destroying everything that the Cabal of Athame had ever stood for and achieved in the eyes of the galaxy.

No longer were the Asari Republics seen as both the greatest empire since the Protheans, but as a technophobic and gene-spliced offshoot of first-branch Terran humans that only existed thanks to the work of some unethical Prothean mad scientist.

No longer was the Asari Republics' advice met with those seeing it as the wise counsel of experienced and kind ancients, but with open disdain, mockery, and dismissiveness.

No longer were the Asari seen as the species who were the apex of culture but as a backward empire of narcissistic control freaks and xenophobic demagogues.

No longer were the Asari people looked upon with awe and wish for emulation, but with a deep pity for its secretly powerless people who mistakenly believed that they controlled their destiny in a flourishing democracy.

She hated it but it was undeniable, Asari supremacy and control were no more; possibly never to be regained again.

"You just hate anything that can flaunt around your species' 'cultural shame' that you have supposedly 'locked up for everyone's safety' when in reality you have been secretly using them as special forces and spies for their 'infallible' psionic powers." Councilor Esheel air quoted repeatedly before pointing to the silver-gray lining of mind shielding inside of her ceremonial hood, but neglecting to mention her mind-shielding cranial implants.

Councilor Irissa just scowled at this comment and the reference to the similarly psionic terrans and their heresies while pushing down the urge to try and biotically throw Councilor Esheel into a wall.

"Yes we are well aware of what they are thanks to our new psionic sensors and the utility of such a subspecies for the Cabal to use is blatantly obvious." Councilor Esheel said happily, which just made Councilor Irissa scowl even harder.

"Regardless, we must begin our plans on inviting them to the citadel. That and releasing information on them to the public, something that will thankfully be a million times easier than the Terrans, as they don't use AIs, but only Mentat equivalents in the form of their administration-focused biological caste." Councilor Esheel said happily.

"And thankfully their caste system is infinitely better than that of the old hegemony." Councilor Quentius said.

"Both I and the Union suspect that is due to it being entirely biological instead of social in its nature." Councilor Esheel said before adding. "And on another note, the Umbriel has recently arrived. As has the fighter-sized Terran transport ship, Fear is the mind-killer, that is ferrying the requested psionics-mastering psyker in the form of one-third branch terran named Salix Primavera."

"I will never understand these wretched Terrans' ship naming conventions." Councilor Irissa muttered, momentarily slipping up over her anger at the arrival of the Terran psion.

"It's rather simple. They are either parts of full phrases or quotes." Councilor Esheel explained while pointedly ignoring yet mentally noting her freudian slip of calling the Terrans wretched.

"Regardless, I'll send some people to meet this Terran." Councilor Quentius said.

The Citadel: Presidium: Private Docks.

The Fear is the mind-killer flew through the void like a silver dagger, coming into land on the docks before a female Turian c-sec officer on the edge of the landing pad before beginning to impossibly fold in on itself. From here the torrent of metal fell into the head of a glowing golden staff like water into a drain, a staff held by what looked to be a large levitating octopus-like creature that wore yellow robes and had glowing indigo and floating ATC sigils of the new five-branched Yggdrasil behind himself and above the left and rightmost of his eight tentacles.

But looks can be deceiving, as this was not just an animal, but Salix Primavera, a third branch Terran that is a member of an uplifted non-cannibalistic octopod species that is a master of psionics, psychokinesis, and photokinesis and he would gently lower himself down and greet the Turian officer.

"Greetings, I am psyker Salix Primavera, a third-branch Terran and a master of psionics, psychokinesis, and photokinesis." Salix Primavera said.

"Uh, Hi. I'm Decutiria Candilius, but you can call me Officer Candilius." Officer Candilius said, her mandibles flaring in shock at seeing the alien before her.

"I assume you have not seen a member of my subspecies of the third branch of Terrankind before?" Salix Primavera asked.

"Not in person, no," Officer Candilius said.

"Understandable. Now, shall we get onto healing your former councilor and his two colleagues?" Salix Primavera asked.

"Yes, they are in Pheova Memorial Hospital waiting for you and I am to take you there," Officer Candilius said.

"Then let us not waste time." Salix Primavera as he locomotes his way behind Officer Candilius toward Pheova Memorial Hospital.

A few minutes later they would enter the hospital, eventually coming into the room holding the three former councilors.

"I assume you are the Terran psyker, Salix Primavera?" A Salarian doctor said.

"Yes, I am." Salix Primavera affirmed.

"So what exactly are we expecting to feel from this? Or are we going to be under anesthesia?" The former Turian councilor, Sparatus, asked.

"You must be awake and conscious for the procedure due to the nature of how the brain and egos work. That being said, you will feel something roughly similar to extremely heavy intoxication while I am working and you will suffer from a temporary condition similar to a severe hangover afterward for a few days." Salix Primavera explained to the former councilors and the Salarian doctor.

"Hmm, that makes sense." Former councilor Loglin considered.

"Indeed, quite a mild recovery for extensive brain surgery, but not unexpected for such an advanced species." The Salarian doctor said.

"What will Matriarch Benezia feel? I assume it will be far worse for her as we have only been lightly and subtly indoctrinated while she has sat directly inside of a reaper for years." Former councilor, Loglin speculated.

"Indeed. She will have a much longer recovery time of six months to a year depending on the damage and if her mind is even still recoverable." Salix Primavera said.

The four aliens in the room shivered, a several-month to a year-long hangover did not even remotely sound fun. Regardless of that, they still hoped Benezia wasn't too far gone yet and didn't have to be mercy-killed.

"Alright, let's get this over with." Former councilor, Tevos said angrily.

"I suggest you lie down for this," Salix Primavera said to the former councilors, who complied and laid down on their beds.

"Are you ready, Salix Primavera?" The Salarian doctor said while manning some medical and psionic sensor equipment, to very carefully watch the process in action.

"One moment." Salix Primavera said while using his omni-manipulator staff to forge bounds of golden hard-light around the shocked-looking former councilors. "Intoxicated individuals are rarely static, it is merely a precaution for the operation."

"Understandable." The former councilor Sparatus said while trying to mentally prepare himself.

Not but a few moments later, the three former councilors devolved into nonsense spouting and squirming messes while Salix Primavera extended his mental awareness into the minds of the three former councilors, forcefully rewiring neurons back into a healthy and natural state based on the mental baseline of their respective species.

As this was occurring, the Salarian doctor looked like he was in heaven while he watched the process with a mixture of active psionic and MRI scans over on his console.

Not but two minutes later, he was done and he made the three councilors fall into unconsciousness with a sleep-suggestion to expedite their recovery. After this he allowed the hard-light bounds to unravel in a flurry of golden light as they were no longer needed.

"Thank you, psyker Salix Primavera! The Salarian Union will be very pleased to see these scans and will use them to try and create our own cure for indoctrination in time!" The Salarian doctor said excitedly.

"It was my pleasure, doctor." Salix Primavera said.

One Hour Later: Private Citadel Docks.

Gracefully coming into the dock, the Umbriel would immediately be set upon by various tech workers and industrial mechs to do routine maintenance on the ship.

A few minutes later, Salix Primavera and Officer Candilius, his female Turian escort from c-sec (not that he needed one) would enter the room and make their way towards the entrance hatch, where Specter Saren Arterius and psyker Jane Shepard were waiting for them.

"Specter Saren. Psyker Shepard." Salix Primavera said while leaning his octopod head forward in a respectful nod. "I am the requested master of psionics for this mission. I have already cured the former councilors and I am here to aid you in curing Benezia and her followers of what are most likely biotic commandos."

"That is good. Let us not waste any time, then. I'll take you to get acquainted with my team before we can do combat drills." Saren Arterius said simply and to the point.

Two Minutes Later: Umbriel Mess Hall.

"Hello everyone, this is Salix Primavera, the new psyker I told you that was coming," Saren explained before beginning his introduction and pointed at the faux blue and silver LOKI mech platform. "This here is Azor. He's a member of the Geth Orthodoxy faction and specializes in using biotics, small arms, and long-ranged combat weapons."

"Greetings," Azor said simply.

"This is Garrus Vakarian from c-sec. He's an expert in long-ranged combat weapons, criminal investigation, and shipboard weapons." Saren said.

"Pleasure." Garrus Vakarian said while curiously examining the Hanar-like Terran.

"This is Dr. Liara T'soni, she is an archeologist who has extensive creative thinking skills that led her to theorize the reapers long before anyone else ever had. She is also a fully trained Asari commando and has extensive training with small arms and biotics." Saren said.

"I am looking forward to working with you, psyker Salix Primavera." Liara T'soni said.

"And since you know Shepard I will get to myself, I am Saren Arterius and I am skilled with my biotics, cybernetically enhanced CQC, and use of small arms. " Saren explained. "And now with that out of the way, let us do combat drills… That and I am quite curious what two Terrans fighting each other looks like."

Five Minutes Later: Combat Practice Room.

Watching the two Terran psykers spar was certainly an interesting experience for everyone, especially considering they were both holding back their true potential to not implode, explode, or atomize the entire ship and its crew.

It was like twin hurricanes of death and destruction faced off against each other at speeds barely visible to a baseline eye. Gauss-alpha energy-infused cyclones of gravitational force faced off against flaming yellow-white hard-light augmented by powerful psychokinetic abilities.

"So that's why your group uses something as archaic as a staff as a tool…" Saren realized as he watched the flaming bolts of explosive hard-light shoot out of the staff from a seemingly impossible direction before being countered by an orange gauss-gravity blade.

It was here that he understood why it was called the omni-manipulator staff, as in addition to its plethora of uses, it can launch weapons fire from any physical direction and use its greater reach to augment this effect despite there being no clear opening ports for tools and weapons.

Two Days Later: Noveria Orbit; The Umbriel

"Hanshan control, this is the THS Umbriel, requesting a landing vector and zone at port." The Umbriel's communication said.

"Umbriel, your arrival was not scheduled. Our defense grid is armed and tracking. State your business." The feminine voice demanded back.

"Council Business. We have a Specter on board, one Saren Arterius." The communications officer said.

"Planning access THS Umbriel. Please advise that we will be confirming identification on arrival and if confirmation cannot be established then your vessel will be impounded and you will be confined." The feminine voice said before closing the communications channel being used.

"These people seem to be quite welcoming." Garrus Vakarian said sarcastically.

"Well considering its intended purpose to research things formerly forbidden in council space, places like this hopefully won't be around much longer now," Shepard noted.

The group would then exit the ship after landing and walk along a stone walkway for a minute before reaching a team of three guards. Two male Turians led by an Asari.

"That's far enough." The lead Asari guard said sternly.

"We are not looking for complications here, I will let you perform your check on me and my specter authorization codes." Saren Arterius said.

"We will need to confirm that. Also, I must advise you that firearms are not permitted on Noveria, Sargent secure-" The Asari guard was cut off by Shepard summoning her omni-manipulator staff and gravitationally locking the three guards in place.

"Citadel authority supersedes yours, we must keep you restrained here while we wait for your superiors to properly identify me." Saren Arterius said before sending a grateful nod at Shepard.

"Captain Ala'ah, stand down!" A voice on the loudspeaker said after a few moments which

Shepard saw as a sign that they identified Saren properly. As they were no longer going to attack them, she released her gravitic hold and let the three guards limply crumble to the ground like wet noodles. "We confirmed their identity, specters are authorized to carry weapons here captain."

"You may precede specter. I hope the rest of your visit will be less confrontational." The Asari guard resentfully said while getting up and dusting some snow off of her armor.

As the group walked through Port Hanshan, they began to see why this place was so often called the frozen miniature ilium…. Well before the Terran-backed Free Terminus Bloc came in and liberated that cesspit, anyways.

As such they by complete accident busted a Hanar and Drell-staffed smuggling ring, foiled a plot of corporate espionage by an extremely unsubtle Asari that everyone assumed was a Cabal agent, and defended a witness from assassins inside a cafe in broad daylight by the same squad of corrupt cops led by the Asari captain Ala'ah that greeted them at the very gate to this damn port.

Truly a wonderful place this ice pit was.

It was then that they reached a security checkpoint leading to the office of the person who ran this place, A male Salarian administrator named Bel Anoleis.

A Salarian of whom they had managed to gather some rather incriminating evidence from the Omnitools of the corrupt cops.

Truly an amateur this one was, no wonder he was here and not in the (in)famous STG.

"Hello Specter and entourage, I am Matron Gianna Ate'zea, Administrator Annoleius's secretary." The deep purple Asari said neutrally when seeing them approach her.

"Hello Matron Gianna Ate'zea, thank you for calling off your corrupt cops when you did." Saren Arterius said.

Matron Gianna Ate'zea just grimaced heavily at this. "Yes, I unfortunately heard about that and your battle with them in the lounge area. You have my most sincere apologies for my lack of judgment in character."

"Will enforcement be investigated for this?" The young and somewhat naive Liara T'soni asked the other Asari.

This question of course just caused everyone in the room to look at her incredulously.

"What? Why is everyone looking at me like that?" Liara T'soni asked in confusion.

"Three words. Miniature. Frozen. Ilium." Garrus Vakarian explained after a short few moments of an awkward pause.

"Oh…" Liara T'soni trailed off in awkward understanding.

"To be fair, Illium has seen a massive amount of improvements since it was liberated by the Free Terminus Bloc," Shepard noted.

"While that may be true, it will take some time before that reputation is changed just as it will be for Omega." Salix Primavera said.

"Regardless of this planet's frankly just reputation and the lack of what could be considered a proper investigation in civilized areas we will look into it…" Matron Gianna Ate'zea trailed off quietly before running a program on her omnitool that set up a privacy field. "And by that, I mean I will… It is good to finally meet you all properly, Gianna Ate'zea of Noveria Internal Affairs, at your service."

"Interesting. What exactly are you looking for, agent?" Saren Arterius asked.

"Any incriminating evidence on administrator Annoleius." Matron Gianna Ate'zea said.

"I have some right here, those hitmen didn't wipe their omnitools anywhere remotely quick enough, and even then the data could have been easily reconstructed," Shepard said while sending the rather damning evidence to Matron Gianna Ate'zea's omnitool. "Please make sure to put that data to good use."

"Oh, believe me, I will..." Matron Gianna Ate'zea said both happily and ominously before releasing the privacy field and reverting to her normal and chipper self. "Now let us go see Administrator Annoleius, you have been expected in his office."

"Of course, lead the way, ma'am," Saren said as he and the other followed her into the Salarian administrator's office.

And honestly, it wasn't that special at first glance, just a bunch of cheap copies and forgeries of various expensive art pieces from Citadel and Terminus space… and well that was interesting, he somehow got a genuine piece in the form of a stolen oil painting of ancient Batarian origin.

"Administrator Annoleius, we're chasing two individuals that are or have been declared traitors, criminals, and terrorists here on this planet. As such, we need a pass to the peak 15 research facility." Saren Arterius said.

"And who are these individuals?" Administrator Annoleius asked.

"Desolas Arterius and Benezia T'soni." Liara T'soni said sadly.

"I'm sorry but I can't tell you information about shareholders as those two individuals own the biotech corporation of Binary Helix." Administrator Annoleius explained.

"Can you at least tell me if they are here?" Saren asked.

"Yes. Benezia T'soni is currently here and is at the peak fifteen research facilities along with some crates of likely research materials." Administrator Annoleius said.

"Benezia?! She's here? You have to let us get to her!" Liara T'soni exclaimed.

"Unfortunately it's not that simple as I can't let you do that without authorization from the corporate court as we must ensure our clients' confidentiality." Administrator Annoleius said.

"And how long will that take?" Liara T'soni asked.

"A few months, most likely." Administrator Annoleius said smoothly.

"A few months?! Isn't the whole reason you specters exist to cut through red tape like this in concerns of galactic safety?!" Shepard turned to Saren and demanded.

"In citadel space, yes. Unfortunately in a truly major and stupid fuck-up up by the council, they allowed the corporate court immunity this higher authority." Garrus Vakarian explained in a tone of extreme annoyance.

"We don't have a few months, so you will let us travel to peak fifteen or we will make our way there by our own means," Saren said threateningly.

"Are you done wasting my time yet, specter?" Administrator Annoleius said resentfully. "Because every second you waste my time is costing the corporate court a lot of credits."

"No, and if you don't give us that pass then we will be taking it from you by force," Shepard said bluntly.

"I have top-of-the-line anti-psionic mind shielding implants, so don't even think about trying any of your psyker–" Administrator Annoleius paused for a moment before shaking his head. "Oh, what was I saying? Oh right, I was just about to give you a garage pass for peak 15! Here you go!"

And so it was that they got their garage pass, much to the surprise of everyone else in the room except for Salix Primavera.

"Thank you so much for your cooperation, administrator Annoleius," Shepard said smugly.

Once they had properly left the area, Liara T'soni was the first one to break the awkward silence and demand an answer for what just happened back there with the administrator.

"How did you do that? What exactly did you do that with?" Liara T'soni asked.

"Unlike Salix Primavera, among two other disciplines, I'm a master of technokinesis. As such, I used some short-lived neurojack nanites to hijack his nervous system before subtly altering his memories to better suit my needs. They're completely mechanical by the way, so there's nothing psionic to be blocked." Shepard explained to her.

"I suppose that explains that, now let's go see what ethical violations and reaper abominations Desolas has cooked up at Peak 15." Garrus Vakarian said.

"Are they not one and the same?" Shepard asked semi-sarcastically.

"Hmm, that is a good point. What exactly is the difference between an ethical violation and a reaper abomination." Garrus asked.

"This sounds like the setup to a bad joke, and if it was, the punchline would be scale," Shepard replied with dark humor.

"Ha! I'll have to remember that one." Garrus Vakarian said with a small chuckle.

Generally in good spirits, the group would walk down towards garage 08 where they could leave to reach the peak 15 facility. This however all changed when Shepard sent a message to everyone's HUDs.

'Heretic Geth ambush passed this door.'

Everyone immediately went on alert and took out their weapons and when they passed through the door, they ambushed the heretic geth ambushes, of whom rapidly adapted to this new situation faster than any baseline organic could ever hope to possibly match.

It wasn't enough to save them though.

Saren and Azor mowed down platforms with biotics and mass effect field-infused superheated plasma, Salix Primavera did the same with flaming yellow-white bolts of explosive psycho-augmented hard-light, and Shepard did likewise with gauss-energy-infused cyclones of gravitational force while the baseline organics supported them.

In naught but a minute all the ambushing Geth heretics had been counter-ambushed and turned into broken piles of scrap metal.

"What is going on here?! I thought I heard gunfire!" A female Turian officer rushed in and demanded.

"We were ambushed by heretic geth, ma'am," Saren said simply.

"You expect me to believe-" The Turian officer began but cut herself off when she saw the semi-molten head of a geth prime.

"Where did they come from?!" She demanded.

"Benezia brought them with her, in those crates, you foolishly didn't check in a thorough enough manner." Garrus Vakarian sniped.

"I… I think I need to inform the corporate court of this, the presence of geth is going to be terrible for our shareholders and they will want to have an advanced warning." The female Turian officer said before quickly leaving.

"So? Are we going to take the Makori? It's a fairly reliable Turian APC / Tank hybrid." Garrus Vakarian asked while pointing at the said vehicle.

"No, we're taking the Warblade MK504 Light Scout Hover-Tank," Shepard said while taking an eight-meter high, ten-meter wide, and fifteen-meter-long hover-tank out of one of her tesseract vaults that just barely fit in the large garage area.

"Light scout tank?!" Saren demanded incredulously.

"A rather outdated one at that, but still somewhat viable," Shepard affirmed.

"And how exactly will this thing fit through the front door?" Garrus Vakarian asked in shock.

"A phase module," Shepard said before teleporting everyone inside the tank with several implosions of spacetime that brought everyone into comfortable leather seats.

The light scout tank then began hovering off the ground and ran straight towards the closed door before phasing through it and into the blizzard of ice and snow.

All of this was easily blocked by its outermost ion shields however and soon enough they would encounter heretic geth forces, several battalions of them to be precise.

"Geth!" Liara T'soni shouted.

As for Shepard, she saw them long before and had orange gauss-alpha beams fire at the geth from one of the dozens of turrets, effortlessly shooting through their super-enhanced kinetic barriers and atomizing all that remained while plasma and biotics diverted away harmlessly by the light scout hover-tank's layered deflector shields.

In addition to this, the heretics' way of destruction caused them to burst into crimson explosions that took out dozens of nearby platforms and walker-tank platforms in their deadly eezonic death-throes.

After two minutes of what could only be called pest target practice at best and pest extermination at worst later, the awestruck council species and the two terrans arrived right outside the Peak 15 research facility.

In another quick implosion of space, everyone was then in front of the door to the personnel entrance to the facility and Shepard held her hand up while sending a HUD message.

'Heretic ambush beyond this door'

This ambush would go much like the earlier one, turning it around on them and rendering them down into broken piles of scrap metal.

As they were cautiously making their way to the nearby reactor and computer core, however, they ran into a problem, an insectoid one that spat acid.

"What are these bugs?!" Liara T'soni screeched in fear as she launched biotic warps at them while using biotic charges to avoid their acidic spit-bolt projectiles.

"I've got a positive answer to what we're facing, they come up as a perfect genetic match for Rachni drones!" Shepard responded while telekinetically crushing several dozen Rachni drones.

"And they're all extremely weak to psionic control, like far more than a normal organic being should be." Salix Primavera added on while psionically ordering a drone to halt.

"I thought that Rachini Queens controlled all the drones, workers, and soldiers?" Liara T'soni asked curiously.

"Its unusually receptive mind supports this. It only has the smallest of ego fragments within its brain and even then it is only more of a feral psionic feeler drone than a separate organism." Salix Primavera said.

"Feral you say? Perhaps Desolas never found a queen and simply cloned the Rachni using the information on their genetic structure that we recorded?" Saren theorized.

"Perhaps…" Garrus Vakarian trailed off in deep thought as his analytical mind considered the possibilities here.

"I wouldn't be so sure, there's a major psionic presence deep below us." Salix Primavera said.

"Is it controlling the drones?" Saren asked.

"No, it's not. But it does seem to be radiating… sadness and loneliness?" Salix Primavera somewhat questioned how weak the reception was due to the thick lead lining of the chamber that while admittedly wasn't even remotely anywhere as good as proper mind shielding, did muffle the psionic power within that room to a certain degree. "It's a bit hard to tell, I think the room is lined with thick plates of lead in the walls."

"Hmm. Lead is adequate for blocking psionic powers but is completely impractical for personal use." Garrus Vakarian noted.

"But excellent at muffling it in walled spaces like buildings." Salix Primavera confirmed.

"Regardless, we will cross that bridge when we get to it," Shepard said as they walked into the reactor chamber after dispatching a few geth, had repaired the VI core and had taken enough helium-3 tanks for the reactor to last several weeks and plugged it into the reactor's fuel intake.

"Hello, I am the local VI of this installation. My designation is Mir'ia." An orange asarioid hologram popped into existence and said.

"Mir'ia, I am Specter Saren Arterius and I demand full access to the local servers on matters of galactic safety," Saren ordered.

"Please wait, confirming identification," Mir'ia said while scanning Saren and his omni-tool. "Identity confirmed, greetings Specter Saren. Unfortunately, I cannot do that without express authorization from the members of the executive board of Binary Helix."

"This again huh? Yet another annoyingly obstructionist corporate VI. " Shepard said with a sigh while easily hacking into Mir'ia.

"Greetings Binary Helix executives Desolas Arterius and Benezia T'soni, how may I help you," Mir'ia said while mistaking Saren for his brother Desolas and Shepard for Benezia.

"Tell us about the Rachni," Saren ordered.

"Formerly known as species 39, the Rachni were found on a derelict ship leftover from the Rachni Wars. Upon this ship, an intact queen egg was found and hatched." Mir'ia explained chipperly.

"What did Binary Helix want with the Rachni?" Saren asked.

"Originally it was to make beasts of war to sell to the terminus but was later repurposed to instead serve Desolas Arterius for the same purpose," Mir'ia explained.

"What is the status of the Queen?" Shepard asked.

"The Rachni Queen has proven rather resilient to attempts at reprogramming to serve Desolas Arterius. Benezia T'soni is currently trying and failing to do so in the hot lab of this facility." Mir'ia explained.

"How do we get to the hot lab?" Saren asked.

"Sending data now. Is that all Desolas Arterius and Benezia T'soni?" Mir'ia asked.

"Yes it is," Shepard said.

"Very well, logging you out," Mir'ia said as its hologram fizzled out of existence.

"You want me to pull another Exo-geni with Binary Helix? I downloaded all the data from the central server and I could release it all onto the extranet?" Shepard said with a grin.

"...No, this data is too sensitive for the public at this time… However, I would like a copy of the data to give to the council for them to quietly persecute the company and the corporate court." Saren said after a short moment of consideration.

"Sending data," Shepard said as she sent him the relevant data to his omni-tool.

It wouldn't take long for the group to reach the service elevator for the hot lab. Almost as soon as they exited the hallway they were met by dozens of Asari commandos led by Matriarch Benezia herself.

"Saren. So you have brought my daughter into this? You will find that it will not sway my course." Matriarch Benezia stated firmly.

Unnoticed to everyone else except for Shepard however, Salix Primavera was preparing to unleash a mass psionic alteration to heal the minds of every indoctrinated individual in the room, something made all the easier by how everyone affected was the same species.

He then sent a message to everyone's HUDs.

'Keep her talking, I'm preparing to heal everyone at once in one mass exertion.'

"Why did you do this mother?! Why did you join Desolas and the Reapers?!" Liara T'soni demanded.

"The Reapers cannot be stopped! Not even by the heretical terrans like those with you!" Matriarch Benezia began ranting madly. "The reapers will darken the skies of every world! Everything you know will fall! To join the reapers is to be filled with the divine light of-"

"I have you now!" Salix Primavera cut off her crazed monologuing as he unleashed the mass psionic exertion on every Asari at once, making them fall to their knees like limp noodles as he healed all of their minds.

"Defend psyker Salix Primavera! We've got incoming!" Garrus Vakarian exclaimed as geth heretics began firing at them.

"My entire attention is not occupied." Salix Primavera grunted as he surrounded himself in a flaming yellow-white dome of hard-light.

The group would quickly destroy the few dozen supporting heretic platforms in the room in the same pattern they had perfected against them here and on other worlds, the augmented act as heavy hitters while the baseline organics acted as support for them.

"Almost done, psyker Salix?" Liara T'soni asked.

"Almost, give me a minute." Salix Primavera said while working and about a minute later finished up healing the indoctrinated Asari and knocked them out with a sleep suggestion. He then placed all of the Asari into stasis chambers within one of his tesseract vaults in a swirling implosion of space located around each body.

'A soul healer? Those with your notes are very rare.' A psionic signal emanating from the Rachni Queen in the tube seemed to find a pseudo-interface with everyone's psionic sensors and spoke one-way through it.

'You are the Rachni Queen?' Salix Primavera messaged back psionically.

'I am.' The Rachni Queen responded.

'Why did your ancestors initiate the Rachni Wars? If you have that information, that is.' Salix Primavera asked psionically.

'The same sour yellow note that you made fall flat had affected us. A foul piece of technology from the dark ones who came before was planted on our homeworld.' The Rachni Queen explained angrily.

'Really? Then how were you unaffected?' Salix Primavera asked.

'We were hatched in an environment free of the sour yellow note, thus our soul is clean.' The Rachni Queen explained.

"I didn't know about any of this, this changes so much in regards to the context of the Rachni Wars!" Liara T'soni exclaimed.

'What will you sing? Will you free us and allow our choir of peace to sing? Or will you kill us and make the silence ever-present once more?' The Rachni Queen asked.

Saren was about to say something but was cut off by Salix Primavera. 'I refuse to commit genocide when all other possible options have not been exhausted… However, as you are known to be a violent species we Terrans will confine you to a suitable planet and closely watch you and your species progress to confirm your sincerity while you recover.'

'We thank you for your kindness, soul healer, and we hope we may one day gain a favorable note of trust from your kind.' The Rachni Queen said before disappearing into a stasis chamber within one of Salix Primavera's tesseract vaults in a swirling implosion of the fabric of spacetime.

"While some may debate it, I think the council and our respective governments can accept the Rachni being confined to a single world blockaded by the Terrans on a sort of probationary period." Garrus Vakarian said after a few moments of consideration.

"I think you are correct, but that doesn't mean that they will have to like it… or agree on how long they think it should be," Saren noted. "And on that note, I think we're done here."

"Psyker Salix? Is my mother alright?" Liara T'soni asked with a great deal of trepidation.

"Yes she is alright as her mind was not too far gone, it was however extremely close to being so, she would have been gone in a few weeks. As of now, she is currently frozen in time inside of a stasis chamber similar to those holding the Asari Commandos and the Rachni Queen inside a tesseract vault." Salix Primavera said comfortingly.

"Well, I'd call that mission a success." Garrus Vakarian said good-naturedly.

"Affirmative." Azor agreed. "Will we be departing this facility now?"

"Yes we will, let us go back to the ship," Saren ordered while everyone followed him back to the garage and took a small Terran stealth shuttle of Shepard's back to the ship.

Sol: Luna; Konshnu, War Simdeck.

'Greetings sophonts, due to the critical knowledge gathered by second branch infiltrator Xvyr, we now know that the numbers of the reapers are beyond even our most pessimistic predictions, with there being just over three trillion Sovereign-class reapers and fifty billion lesser ships.' Lord Admiral Hatchett of the United Alanis Gulf Alliance spoke grimly.

This got everyone's attention and got people to start the equivalent of nervous muttering, even with their ZPM-hypercharged matter replicators multiplying their industrial output countless times over those numbers were rather frightening.

'In addition to this, I would like to welcome the avatar of the first S5 terran intelligence, RASPUTIN, into the simroom.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.

Then, a crimson orb of constantly shifting and maze-like light entered the war room, and everyone could feel the sheer computational power radiating off of it.

'GREETINGS. I AM RASPUTIN, FIRSTBORN OF THE TRANS-SAPIENT INTELLIGENCES.' The avatar of the god-like first S5 intelligence (and due to the newly perfected process of ego infusion, perhaps the only ever gas giant-sized one), greeted politely.

Everyone would look at the avatar of this truly immense being in awe for a few virtual moments before allowing themselves to get back to the purpose of this meeting.

'We now know the most traveled route the reapers use to travel from the Canis Major dwarf galaxy.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said to the tens of thousands of sophonts in the virtual room as he pulled up a simulated hologram of the local group and highlighted the path the reapers would take.

'Despite being massively outnumbered, all chronokinetics say that we would win in a conventional war after a decade of mass bloodshed and sacrifice. However, we have calculated that asymmetric warfare will better serve us in this fight.' He said as he pulled up two simulated renderings of fighting the reapers using asymmetrical warfare and conventional warfare that were created by the chronokinetics under his command.

'Due to this, we will not be sending in massive fleets to attack the reapers while they traverse through dark space while laying what was named SHIVA Mines, new hypernova-rated darklight and black hole bombs equipped with warp drives, subspace sensors, subspace sensor range extenders, and indicton field projectors. The last of these was among the various advanced ME field technologies from the Catalyst's databases.'

The mentioning of hypernova-rated darklight and black hole bombs, two of the most powerful weapons in the Terrans arsenal which detonated with the force and range of a stellar hypernova and could vaporize entire star clusters each, caused people to start muttering in nervous but reluctant acceptance over their deployment.

'And yes, the ATC High Council has passed the unanimous vote required to use these terrible path-defying weapons of last resort.' Lord Admiral Hatchett added on grimly.

'Indicton field projectors?' One admiral asked.

'In short, it disrupts the creation of negative mass effect field bubbles within a radius of a light-month which in turn rips out ships in mass-free superluminal transit bubbles by disrupting their continued cohesion and prevents ships from entering them at the same time.' Lord Admiral Hatchett explained.

'USEFUL IN THE INTERGALACTIC VOID.' RASPUTIN' interjected. 'BUT ONLY IF THEY TAKE ONE OF THEIR COMMON ROUTES, THE HARBINGER WILL MOST LIKELY ENSURE THAT THEY WILL NOT.'

'While we hope they do fall for this trap that would take out 80-90% of their forces, we are still preparing for the worst by fortifying the galaxy above and below the steller planes of the important council and protectorate systems.' ATHENA informed.

That got everyone's attention, such numbers were far more manageable considering the battle of Khar'shan indicated that a single cruiser-led battle fleet could take out a single capital reaper with about 40% of the ships in that battlegroup being destroyed… Still, they were preparing for the worst-case scenario by mass-producing tens of thousands of world engines in the replicator-forges every single day and equipping them with either a variant of GRB Cannon or a Shaper Matrix.

And according to the Catalyst's information, support reapers were significantly weaker than their capital counterparts by tens of orders of magnitude and again weaker in comparison to the 'true' capitals that have access to psychokinetic abilities from the psychokinetic species they harvested. That and due to the reapers' comparatively snail's-pace rate of construction of only two million capital reapers and twenty million support reapers every day, they would quickly win this war through a mixture of attrition and asymmetric warfare tactics.

Still, if they broke out the Celestial Loom, that advantage would very much be narrowed…

'That is a very true statement as these indicton fields unfortunately do not affect the mass-free tunnels of jump drives nor the moderately paced warp drives the reapers can reconfigure their drives to act as.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said before pulling up three videos of unmanned test platforms in the operational vicinity of indiction field projectors.

The first of these platforms were equipped with an eezoless jump drive and effortlessly jumped away in a blue-shifted and blurred streak accompanied by a flash of lightning.

The second of these platforms were equipped with a moderately paced warp drive that used uncatalyzed ME fields to perform a traditional warp jump that saw the ship simply pop out of existence as spacetime was warped into a subspace bubble and forced to move the ship forwards at superluminal speeds.

And finally, the last video showed a test platform equipped with an uncatalyzed ME-powered mass-free bubble drive being violently ripped out of superluminal transit immediately after entering it while tumbling erratically and showing signs of being slightly damaged. Unlike the others, however, this one then cut to the same platform trying to create a mass-free bubble and suffering a similarly small degree of damage.

'How did the first test platform go to FTL with its jump drive so close to that barren moon? That cannot be past the system's jump point.' One admiral asked.

'Simple, the jump drive must be launched from a truly gravitationally neutral location which mass effect fields cannot create, but gravitational fields can.' Lord Admiral Hatchett explained while sending the technical data on the devices in question for the sophonts here to assimilate.

'This technology will give us far fewer advantages over the reapers until they land in the galaxy proper, as RASPUTIN rightly pointed out.' One admiral pointed out after assimilating the data that was sent.

'Unfortunately yes, and even if they fall for this trap the reapers will get over their surprise quickly and scatter out of the range of our subspace sensors before making a long series of randomly aimed FTL jumps to escape us while exponentially predicting our chronokinetics' less and less reliable due to their lack of workable knowledge and gravity wells.

Still, if fallen for this initial ambush will allow us to dramatically reduce their armada by the previously mentioned 80-90%' ATHENA said while truly hoping the reapers would valley for this trap, but not truly believing it fully.

'We will attempt to compensate for this lost advantage by exploiting the weakness of the jump drive.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.

'And what is that weakness?' One admiral asked.

'They cannot change their exit vector or location, only being able to physically leave the jump point from one star system and travel through a mass-free tunnel to one that is directly adjacent to it.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.

'Oh, I see what you're getting at!' One admiral said. 'We will place our bases in interstellar space where jump drives can't reach and standard ME drives can be indicted, reinstating that tactical advantage while inside of the interstellar void!'

'Exactly.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said. 'Getting back on topic, while these conventional battles in interstellar space, we will be sending a large conventional war fleet to the Canis Major dwarf galaxy with two objectives.

The first objective will be to destroy the reapers' abominable harvest worlds where they slowly yet and industrially farm for the biomass and egos using cloned DNA from the previous cycle to combine with mundane materials and element zero inside of on-world factories to make new reapers.

And as for the second objective, that will be to commandeer or destroy the Leviathan artifact known as the Celestial Loom while doing the same with the other artifacts in their possession.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.

'And when the reapers land in the milky way?' One admiral asked.

'Then we will be using my previously mentioned strategy in addition to using hit-and-run attacks to hit the reapers hard and fast before jumping away before they can mount any form of a meaningful response. From here we will do this again and again until the reapers are finally destroyed after one year of heavy galactic warfare… or the previously mentioned decade if they don't fall for the trap.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said grimly.

'And what of the relay species?' Another admiral asked.

'The relay species are rapidly advancing out of their fear of both us and of the terror they feel from the threat the reapers bring to their continued living existences. As such, they may not be able to contribute much in a meaningful manner except for the orthodox geth, they will not be a pure liability anymore.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.

'All but the Asari, that is. The cabal is stifling any advances their species would benefit from now that the citadel council's fear has overcome their culturally-ingrained luddism." One admiral said resentfully.

"Yes, all but the Asari. That being said, however, one liability is better than six.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.

'Do you suppose the reapers will even bother invading them? We are the biggest and most immediate threat to them, after all.' One admiral asked.

'Most likely they will, if only to harvest more biomatter to convert into new husks and space-forms to throw at us haphazardly.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.

'And the intergalactic relay that is the citadel?' Another admiral asked.

'We have contingency plans for that which involves the forceful evacuation of all sophonts on the citadel onto a Biocon arcology ship before destroying the station.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.

'And the Agonal Hive that the council thinks we don't yet know about?' The same admiral asked.

'While somewhat higher than them, the Agonal's level of technological advancement puts them in the same boat as the orthodox geth where they will be able to aid us in a limited manner, but they are not a relay species so I didn't mention them alongside them.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.

'Are we going to contact them?' One admiral asked.

'Yes, we are, the diplomatic corp has sent a stealth frigate to contact the Agonal Hive and warn them of the reapers and to try and negotiate for a working example of a hyperdrive.' Lord Admiral Hatchett said.