The Conclave Chamber was quiet as they waited. That was rare, all things considered, given the frantic pace of the last few days. They'd literally torn down one of the great powers of the galaxy, and were in the process of rebuilding it as part of their own growing state. Breetai himself was surprised at just how fast the war had been executed, as he knew a dozen ways they could have dragged it out, if not won it, but the batarians, and by extension the galaxy at large, seemed to fight wars in some half formed manner. It wasn't that it had rules, after all, the Terrans had rules too. It was more that they were used to targeting specific pieces of each others empires, whereas the Terran way of war was an adapted form of the Zentraedi's tactics, which tended to be totally encompassing in their targets.
Still, the war was over now. What few leaders remained amid the batarians were being rounded up, and if they were guilty of crimes, under Council laws or the batarian's own, they were to be prosecuted. It had been decided early on that Terran law, while it would apply to them now, would not be retroactive. No, they would appease the Council, who seemed rather upset at their claim on all of the Hegemony's former territory, by showing respect for their laws. They even allowed the batarians legal council from the Council itself, though they refused any petition to move the trials out of Federation space unless the defendant was found innocent.
That was not the reason for their waiting, however. No, they waited for one person to arrive, a person who had a single report to give, and the only copy of several battle logs that needed to be reviewed. The waiting ended with a sudden thud as the doors to the chamber opened, and into it strode a powerful looking woman, whose long green hair shone like emerald strands in the light. She walked with a purpose, the doors sealing behind her with a hiss, and then the hum of privacy fields going up five layers deep in the walls, ensuring that none but those present would know of what was spoken.
"Conclave, Grand Admiral Miriya Sterling, reporting as ordered," she said, saluting them by snapping her arm out, so her right fist smashed into her heart. The leaders stood from their seats, and then saluted back, before they offered her a chair that rose from the floor, and then they got down to business.
"Do you have the recordings?" asked Breetai, and Miriya nodded, holding out a cube towards the Conclave. Amalgam, using his holoprojector's mass effect field, lifted the object out of her hand, and then gently flew it towards his own, before setting it on the Conclave Table. Sensors inside the table scanned the cube, finding a few data access points, and then glowing around it as it read the recordings, finally projecting them above the Conclave in hologram form.
"At 0834 hours on the final day of the war, a patrol group moved into the system where it was suspected Leviathan Command was hiding. This place was a technological development center, housing not only the schematics for the new weapons and defenses the batarians had deployed against us, but also several members of the Hegemony's leadership, that had fled to the location during the Ultimatum," she began, as a system displayed overhead, with several of their ships appearing out of Fold over a world that, even to the eyes of a Terran, looked rather dry and inhospitable.
"The patrol group, expecting a fight, used every precaution as they approached the world. It did them little good," she said this as the image of a full battle fleet, sixty scout ships, seven command ships, and one flag ship all came closer to the world. Then a beam of light shot upwards from below. It looked, to their eyes, much like the beams of the thanix cannons the batarians had begun using during their attack on Rannoch. It was stronger though, wide enough that it could encompass an entire scout, and worst of all it moved, twisting around in space so that it swept through the fleet, ripping holes in many of the ships that vanished in spheres of blue light as their protoculture engines ruptured.
"The initial attack destroyed a good sixty-three percent of the group's battle effectiveness, taking out not only the flag, but also all but one of the command ships. The attacker then revealed itself to us," the image of the planet zoomed in on a seemingly barren patch of land on the surface. The only sign that something was possibly there was a small hole in one part of the plain that obviously hadn't been there moments ago. Of course, it was still surprising when a ship, as large as a flag, ripped its way free from the ground, and then shot into the sky faster than any ship had a right to in an atmosphere.
The thing was oddly designed too. It looked almost, alive in the way it moved. A single large section, cone shaped, that had multiple 'legs' hanging off the bottom that seemed to swim in the air. Worse, it seemed each leg had a thanix weapon at the end, because as it rose, swifter than any ship its size should ever be able to move, each leg shot out a beam, and carved through the remaining ships, tearing them apart as it passed, leaving only three left of the entire patrol group, which quickly fled as fast as they could, while firing their own weapons at it.
"As you can see, protoculture weapons have as much effect on the barrier of this unit as one might expect, given the sheer size and obvious power. More surprising those, is that our missiles, which have proven effective in every case where they are able to hit, somehow are blocked by this same defense," and as they watched, beams of blue light and missiles swarmed out of the ships, streaking across space at the thing. Either to mock them, or because it couldn't move fast enough, it allowed every shot to hit dead center on it, and yet, none of the weapons seemed to have any effect on the thing at all, with reflex turret fire just splashing into nothing, while missiles crashed and exploded impotently against the veil of shimmering light around the ship.
"Re-enforcements were called in as soon as the threat the thing posed should it exit the system was recognized. However, while we believed at first the ship would make a break for the local relay, it instead began to seemingly randomly travel through the star cluster," and it showed in the holo, as the ship vanished from the scene, which widened to show the entire area, while a clock over it accelerated to show almost half an hour pass. The ship first went to the nearest system, which had one small listening post, unmanned, and nothing else. It then proceeded to blow away a small chunk of a random moon in the system, on a planet not even close to the automated post, before going FTL again.
"Over the next several hours this pattern repeated itself, and while we set forces to guard the relay, others were sent out to engage the ship. Unfortunately, that proved ill advised," the display time lapsed again, accelerating several hours ahead, with the unknown vessel popping into systems, most of them completely empty, and blasting some barren section of a world, before leaping out again. At one such system, a force of some two-thousand ships of varying classes, including geth and quarian, were waiting. The instant the ship emerged into real space, they engaged.
The battle was brief, though costly. The ship, either sensing their presence or possibly due to some random whim, made a straight shot for the fleet, which fired everything they had as it approached. Unlike the missile swarms of three small scouts, this time the sheer amount of fire filled the entire display, as a wall of metal, energy, and heat flew straight for the enemy vessel, slamming home against the barrier it possessed. Said barrier weakened under the strain of all that fire, but it plowed ahead anyway, the shimmering light dimming only slightly before it slammed into the formation.
It fired no weapons this time, and in fact, seemed to be unaware of the fleet now, just moving through it at a leisurely pace. Any ship caught in its path was shattered upon that barrier, however, and even when a protoculture engine exploded against it, the resulting sphere of blue light only served to weaken, but still not pierce the things shield. The rear guard command ship initiated a Daedalus Maneuver, the pinpoint barriers on its hull creating a shining aura around the form of the flagship as it smashed hard into the barrier. This, at least, paused the thing's advance, and finally, at last, made the barrier drop for a moment, before the flag crashed into the things hull, and then was smashed aside, allowing the strange ship on its way.
"That's not possible. The pinpoint barrier should have absorbed one-hundred-percent of the kinetic potential of the enemy strike, that's what it does. How did this thing overpower such a defense?" demanded Hayes, and the recording was pulled back, to just as the ship's barriers fell, allowing a full suite of sensors to scan the thing. That gave an answer extremely quickly, as the spectrographic analysis of the scan revealed the hull of this monstrous vessel was the same material as that which was used in the construction of the relays and the Citadel. It was the energy wave readout, however, that gave everyone the most pause.
"How did they get ahold of that?" asked Grant, his mind reeling with the possible breaches of security that must have happened, as the scan clearly showed that the vessel had not only a mass effect signature, but also a protoculture one, the two of which then merged to form the signature of the barrier protecting the thing.
"At least that explains how their barrier is so strong," commented Solo as he looked at it, but Exedore quickly shook his head.
"No, it doesn't. Or rather, it begs another question entirely. My own research line in combining protoculture engines with mass effect cores have proven that allowing the two to interact introduces a level of instability that makes them unusable under non-controlled conditions. To maintain such a barrier in battle with that instability would be impossible, the only way I can think of to counteract it would be for the eezo sample to be….oh my," the Prime Thinker cut himself off as the readout continued, and it was revealed how the instability was compensated for. In this case, the spectrograph showed a very disturbing number. Element Zero: One-Hundred-Percent.
"That...that is not good," said Vai'Gerrel as she stared at that readout. Even with the sample from the jamming device earlier that year, this was just...impossible. There was no way to remove all the impurities from a sample of eezo, physics wouldn't allow it as the rock tended to smash other elements into itself whenever energy was applied. And yet, the scanners of her own ships had helped to feed this data, and she knew they would be as accurate as possible. Somehow, somewhen, someone had created a perfect sample of eezo, and put it into this ship which was now smashing through her brothers and sisters.
"I must admit, this is the first I've seen that readout myself. Mrs. Gerrel is right, it's not good," said Miriya as she stared at it with them, and then shaking off her stunned state as she turned to face them.
"If we can continue?" she asked, and the recording resumed where it had paused.
"At this point, The Sword was called it, as no other weapon had proven effective against the enemy, who proceeded to destroy the southern continent of the sixth world in the system, and then left it again," the holo showed just that, the ship raining light and death on the already dead world, before flying off once more into interstellar space.
"With the knowledge that it had been stopped by Daedalus before, we gathered not just the Sword, but six flag level vessels to hold it down while we locked and fired. Luckily, as before, the ship proved to be ignorant of us, either due to some kind of damage or simply because it didn't see us as a threat," the holo moved as she spoke, her vessel, the huge Sword of the Southern Cross folding into the system alongside the other large vessels. When the alien ship entered the system, as before, they instantly attacked, the six ships of a size with it, slamming one right after the other into it, shifting its course or stopping it completely, while lines of yellow lightning played over the Sword's hull.
"With the aid of our sisters in arms, we were able to pin the ship down long enough to charge and fire the Sword's main cannon," the holo suddenly shone with a blinding light as the main gun of the SDF-4 was loosed. The blast that had so utterly destroyed a turian battlegroup one year previous was nothing compared to the main cannon, which was at least an order of magnitude greater in power, rippling through space like a massive tide of energy. It sailed towards the alien vessel, before engulfing it in the stream of power, leaving it only a silhouette in the pillar of star fire.
"This blast, I feel the need to state, would have been capable of boring its way through a planet without issue, and yet, despite that sort of power, the enemy vessel withstood it for a good ten seconds, before the hull finally buckled, and we were able to destroy it," and the holo showed just that, the thing in the image writhing in the flames, the tendrils twitching at odd, painful looking angles, before finally breaking off from the main body one by one, and vanishing into the light. Slowly, cracks then formed on the conical form that remained, and at last, it too succumb to the raw amount of power being directed at it, rending it asunder, and leaving only a burnt out husk in its wake.
"It was at this point, that I realized what we faced, and decided to seal the recordings of the fight as a black level secret. The only copy of this battle is now in the brains of those who witnessed it, and in that cube," she informed them, and for a long time, silence hung in the chamber, as the end of the recording repeated itself several times. Each Conclave member thought of what they were seeing, their minds reeling at the notion of what it was they had faced down, and finally, it was Amalgam who broke the silence.
"I assume you have the records of the batarian base this thing crawled out of?" asked the AI, and Miriya nodded. Amalgam then leaned forward, touching the table in front of him, causing it to sync with his program for a moment, before those records were displayed overhead in place of the recording.
"It says here they batarians found this ship on Jartar about one hundred years ago. That is about the time they began their rise into prominence, isn't that right?" asked the AI, and his compatriot nodded.
"That was about the time a rumor began to spread about the so-called Leviathan of Dis. However, no solid evidence of the object's existence was ever found. Obviously, they hid it much more skillfully than one would expect," admitted Solo, and then silence went over the chamber as everyone read the reports. The information was, at least, thorough, and covered a variety of topics, most of them related to weapons and defenses that had been developed by simply studying the Leviathan.
"We are actually quite lucky they built the research center two hundred miles away from where they stored the Leviathan itself," commented Hayes as she scrolled through some reports, getting a few grunts of acknowledgement from her peers as they poured over the data. Most of it were things that only Exedore and his Teams would be interested in, but after ten minutes of silence, Grant snapped his fingers, and pointed.
"Aha, a video record from one of the early researchers," he said, before pressing the tabletop in front of him, which responded to his touch by displaying a keyboard into which he quickly tapped out a few commands, causing the recording to take center stage in front of them. It was a batarian, obviously, a young one at that, probably in his late twenties, early thirties.
"I've decided to start keeping a log of my experiences with the Leviathan, considering the stories I've been hearing around base. The ones about people going crazy if they spend too much time around the thing. Hopefully, these logs can help me spot when it starts in me, and I can request reassignment if it gets too bad," began the recording, the batarian looking around at things that the Conclave couldn't see, as only he was displayed in the hologram.
"It's been about seven years since the Leviathan was discovered in some backwater system called Dis, on Jartar. The discovery is currently credited to a science vessel that had been on a long range assignment in the Hades area, but from what I heard, it was actually a band from the Cultural Committee looking to set up a base in the system that actually found the thing," continued the batarian, reaching forward and suddenly grasping what appeared to be a cigar in his hand, from which he took a puff.
"Those idiots found the thing in a crevice on the planet's surface, in what appeared to be an old crater, which had sealed itself up due to Jartar's tectonic instability, and only recently having been uncovered by a nine-point-eight quake that leveled half the continent it was on," said the batarian, as he set the cigar back down off holo.
"Lucky thing too. Another of those quakes hit shortly after the discovery was reported, and those STG jerks got their slimy tongues wagging about it. In the chaos of the quake, they were able to use a couple of ships to raise the thing from the surface, and bring it here to the binary star system we're now referring to as Leviathan's Rest," that obviously amused the four eyes, because he chuckled at the name, which seemed to be daring the other races to question it.
"Over the seven years we've had it, we've done lots of scans and studies of the ship's structure. The first interesting thing we found out was the thing is made of the same indestructible stuff the relays and Citadel are made of, though obviously damaged slightly now by both the impact, and whatever it was that had caused the ship to crash in the first place," that was when he pulled something new onto screen, a rock that he held in his hands like a snake that was ready to bite him if he moved wrong.
"That makes the others think it's prothean in origin, after all, they built the relays, right? And yet, so few of them question. Take this rock, for instance. I had it dated, and while the test for this sort of thing is difficult to pin down a specific date, there is no denying it's far older than the prothean ruins we've found. Rough estimates put the stone in my hand at almost a billion years old, and it's been sitting around, inside the Leviathan for all that time," he said this while staring at the rock, and there were a few startled gasps about the find from those watching.
"So, are the protheans older than we thought? Or were they just building on the ruins of someone else's empire the same way we're building off theirs? I'm no historian, so I'm not even going to try to answer that myself, but I can tell you now, this ship is far more advanced than anything flying today. If we could unlock even a tenth of its secrets, the Hegemony would be ruling the galaxy," with that, the holo jumped as the next entry played automatically, and they listened through reports of various findings, though most of the time it was just the researcher complaining about his coworkers or the staff. Then it got interesting again.
"This is my sixth month here, and just as they said when I started, the dreams came. I don't know what the others see. Some have complained about things, dark, oily black tendrils that rip at your brain, or some booming voice that shatters your slumbering ears. Me, it wasn't any of those things," he began.
"No, for me it was far simpler. I saw it. The Leviathan, but not the behemoth we have contained here in the base. No, it was sized like me, floating around overhead in the void of the dream. It spoke...I think. The words it said were so alien though. They contained meanings within meanings. I'm still...I'm still trying to grasp all of them, and yet, it was so glorious," he got a distant look on his face as he spoke, staring up at a ceiling no one else could see.
"Sir, you asked me to inform you when it seemed you were losing your grip. My program says there is a thirty-six percent probability that you are currently doing so," offered a monotone voice, obviously a VI who had probably been the one recording all this, who had never before spoken.
"I...I might be, yeah. But I can't stop now. Not yet. I have to know what it was saying. I have to..." and his voice just trailed off. The next few entries made no reference to the previous as the day to day operations of Leviathan Command were detailed, including one where he laughed at some pleb getting crushed by a loader vehicle during some test. Then another interesting entry popped up.
"I got the greenlight for a new project today. Those pleb-heads up in operations just don't understand. If they would just go on board the Hiktanu, walk through the corridors, they'd know what those of us down here know," he began.
"Hiktanu, sir? Do you mean the Leviathan?" asked the VI.
"Yes...no, no it's the Leviathan. But regardless, I had an idea last night, from the thing in my dreams. It told me how to build it, a new mass effect engine, at least twice as efficient as the ones we use now. If we can produce the design, we can outdo everyone in the galaxy. Really show those asari bitches up," he said, and then detailed the design for the VI, before the recording abruptly cut. The time stamp on the new entry said it was almost a year past the previous.
"Those retches! Those...ARGH!" the batarian researcher screamed in frustration, placing his hands on either side of his head and shaking them as he did so.
"We had them, the new engine worked perfectly, everything about it would have made us the top dog in the universe. And then the asari have to push out a model that is even better," he seemed to calm down, as he stroked the area between his eyes in a gesture that meant deep thought for the batarians.
"My design, I know it came from the Hiktanu. That thing was so much better than what we use now. But this one the asari brought out, it's only slightly better than that. How did they do that? How can you improve on perfection…" again, he trailed off, his eyes unfocusing for several moments.
"You don't, not unless it's not perfect. But even so, you, you don't just come up with something like that. My design was so different. And yet, their's incorporates elements of it. Could they really be just smarter than me? Smarter than the Hiktanu?" that thought gave the batarian pause, and then he leapt to his feet.
"No, no I refuse to accept that. They must be cheating somehow! They have their own Leviathan! No that can't be. Our's was an accident, a one in a billion chance. If they had this, they wouldn't be hiding it, they'd be using it to dominate everyone. But something, they have to have something, maybe a prothean data cache. Hell, maybe the bitches are female protheans and have been lying to us all these years," he said the last with a chuckle at some thought in his head, before the recording cut abruptly again, this time only jumping ahead a month.
"I finally see. The tools the Hiktanu is gifting me with are not for myself, not for the batarian people. They are not the weapons of war, they are the things to make the Hiktanu whole again. Maybe, maybe if we can fix them they'll let us into the Heart Chamber, the center of their form, where you can find perfection, true perfection," said the batarian, his face drawn now, like he hadn't been eating or sleeping. Once again, the recording cut, this time advancing another month.
"Those fools, they don't understand! They see the Hiktanu as our way to glory, not recognizing them for the perfection they are, the perfection they offer us! We can be as they are. We can Dwell in the Dark. Th-" suddenly there is a pounding noise in the background, and the batarian draws a pistol from his hip that had only appeared at this point in the recording.
"They're coming. They reject perfection, and so they'll destroy me. But I'll make them remember. This is going to be hard coded into the archives, no way to remove it. They'll bury it. I know they will. They're already talking about building a new base, farther away from the Hiktanu. Leaving them here in the dark while they study scans, never letting the Hiktanu touch their souls. But one day, the Dwellers will make them see, and they will be Reaped as a great Harvest," the last was said in a distorted voice, somehow.
The sound coming out of his mouth was like a hundred voices, and then he spun around as a blast echoed through the recording, shooting frantically at some unseen foe. The battle was over in seconds, as he was gunned down, with a half a dozen marines entering the recording. Despite being shot a dozen times over, however, the batarian kept firing, even when he was flat on his back, he just kept shooting into the ceiling, like his body was moving despite being dead. Then the recording cut out for the final time.
"Well, that was most disturbing," said Vai'Gerrel as she turned to face her peers, who could only nod in agreement. Well, all but two of them. Breetai and Exedore, looking very grave, stared into each others eyes. Without saying a word between them, they leaned forward and began typing commands into their stations at the table, soon causing the image of the Leviathan in flight to appear where the batarian had. Beside it though was a second image, this one of a crude drawing on a red stone. The caption read: Mars Base Sara. The drawing, with a human beside it for scale, was unmistakably the same as the Leviathan.
"Mars? The fourth planet?" said Solo, and then quickly entered his own command just by touching the table, bringing up an image of the planet over their heads.
"I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with this, Base Sara location. Where and when was this photograph taken?" asked Vai'Gerrel, and everyone turned to the two Zentraedi, who seemed less than enthused to answer the question, but did so anyway.
"Before the Terrans, this system was inhabited by a species called humanity, a fact I'm certain we're all well aware of. What some of you might not remember or even have known is that, before the Zentraedi came, humanity had been making its first punitive steps off their world, with several missions having landed on their moon, and then going farther, to the nearest world of Mars," as he spoke, Breetai began typing, zooming in on a particular area of the red planet, one without the bustling city scape that dotted much of the world. The image soon focused on a large crater, in which not a single building lay.
"On this world, the humans apparently discovered ruins, a datacache and some drawings, maybe by a species they had believed to be native to the planet. The leaders of their people, worried about a panic on their homeworld, decided to suppress the information, using what would now be Black Level encoding on it, and hiding it away. They built Mars Base Sara right on top of the ruins, to study them, and make certain that, even if there had once been sentient life, there was none there now," he continued, leaning back in his seat, crossing his hands in front of his face as he talked.
"This base was abandoned shortly after construction, as a world war was started by the arrival of the SDF-1 on Earth, and many of the researchers there were simply lost to the sand. During a year long trek across the system, wherein my own fleet pursued the SDF-1, there was a brief altercation over Base Sara, which was used as a bomb to destroy much of the ground force. This annihilated the ruins as well, of course, and left this ever present scar on the world," explained the one eyed Zentraedi, and the others seemed to pause for a moment to absorb that fact, even the Terrans in the room seemingly unaware of the ruins until this point.
"Why were we never informed of this? This Conclave should know of such things, when they might affect our dealings with other races," said Amalgam after a moment, and he got a few nodded heads.
"I agree. If we'd known that there had been galactic life with a base here in the Sol System, the Fleet might have been better prepared for the first encounter with the turians," claimed Miriya, surprising the rest of the Conclave, as they had assumed her to be in on the secret as a fellow Zentraedi.
"In truth? It was simply never important until now. The Mars Ruins were, at best, a footnote. The humans had barely four years of study on them to log, and much of that was lost in the ruination of the Earth. Of the survivors only one had any hard data on it, and that was Mrs. Lisa Hayes, your grandmother, Amanda," this came from Exedore, who turned to face Representative Hayes, and then began to type furiously at his station, bringing up a picture of the aforementioned Lisa.
"Mrs. Hayes apparently had a close relationship with someone at Mars Base Sara, though what sort of relationship she refused to speak on. However, her position in the military made her privy to the nature of the Base's existence, and thus, this photograph, the only known picture of the ruins. We, and the previous Conclave, were informed of the ruins upon the discovery of the relay that orbits this very station. Since then, however, there has simply been no need to keep that information in the foreground," explained the small Zentraedi.
"Until now," finished Solo.
"Indeed, until now," agreed Exedore, and the view above them shifted back to the Leviathan, and the picture of the ruins.
"So, what were these things then? That base didn't look nearly big enough for one of them, at least not that chamber, and it doesn't look the type to draw pictures," commented Grant, staring at the Leviathan as it flew through space.
"I will hazard a guess that these 'things', Reapers or Dwellers or whatever, were the ones responsible for the protheans sudden disappearance fifty-thousand years ago, and that the ruins themselves, given what we do know of them, were prothean in origin," answered Exedore, and that gave everyone pause. The Prothean Empire had stretched far and wide in this galaxy, and that said something of their power. The thing that wiped out an empire encompassing hundreds, if not thousands of worlds, could make short work of the few dozen the Terrans controlled.
"He said they were older though, a lot older, and yet they were constructed of the same material as the relays and Citadel. How is that possible?" asked Hayes.
"I believe, given these new facts, that our attribution of the relays and Citadel to the protheans has been mistaken all this time. As he proposed, they may have simply been using what was already there. I must therefore add that using those tools may be an issue, should their makers decide to return for us as well," said Exedore.
"Worse than that, old friend. You said the sample of eezo recovered from the batarian artifacts had an effect on the minds of those near it. This batarian, and many like him given the records, had similar experiences. What's to say that the Citadel and the relays aren't doing the same thing, subtly," added Breetai, and that made eyes go wide across the table, as everyone digested that little tidbit.
"I'm far ahead of you on that front. When I first discovered the properties of that eezo, I did a test with the relays involving similar circumstances using grown neurons. To date, not a single relay has had the effect as those samples. I even had a few smuggled onto the Citadel near the large eezo core at the Council Tower, to similar results. No, the eezo that causes this is in some way special compared to those we use regularly," he assured them, and that got a few sighs of relief from those around the table.
"So. the Citadel and relays are older than we thought, made by...whatever it was that made this ship. A ship that, after a billion years in a crater was still operational enough for the batarians to repair," said Grant, and everyone nodded at that assessment.
"If I'm reading these reports correctly, they've been keeping people away from it, and executing anyone who so much as utters the world Hiktanu. However, when their attack on Armestris failed so utterly, they began to get desperate. That would explain how they were able to develop so many countermeasures so quickly. This, Leviathan, was giving them the designs," said Exedore as he let the reports play out in the air above his head.
"Do you think the batarian was right? Could the asari have their own Leviathan somewhere?" asked Hayes as she watched the designs pass by the readout. Most of them were quite disturbing in their complexity, considering the batarians had not been known for their technical achievements.
"No, I can't believe they'd be able to hide something like this for so long. Remember, even we, a relative newcomer to the galactic stage, were aware of Leviathan Command. The asari, given their age, would have a hard time keeping a similar tech development center quiet," explained Exedore.
"Then how would they have improved on a design the way he describes?" asked Grant.
"That, if I may speculate, probably felt a twinge of resentment at someone so many centuries younger than themselves discovering something. Their scientific community is much broader in scope than the batarians, or just about anyone but ourselves. Given proper motivation, even if said motivation is just to show up a younger race, I'm certain they could bring several great minds together to improve, even slightly, on almost any design so long as it relies on theories they're aware of," offered Exedore, and everyone else at the table nodded again, only to be brought back to where they were by a cough from Miriya.
"Regardless of the details, the fact remains that, this Reaper, was able to do significant damage to our fleets, and without the Sword, likely would have been unstoppable. We must ask ourselves four questions then. How did they get ahold of protoculture? How many of these vessels still exist? Where are they now? And finally, when will they return?" these questions echoed through the Conclave Chamber, and everyone seemed lost in thought on the answers, before Solo finally spoke up.
"The first question is easily answered, the reports from the base probably tell us exactly where they acquired it. The final three though? I'm afraid we simply do not have the data to even speculate on them," admitted the geth, and a palpable quiet settled over the group.
"Then we will not speculate. We know they're out there now. With that information alone, we can prepare ourselves for their coming. Exedore can study what remains of the Hiktanu, and hopefully come to understand them better. The rest of us will prepare our people in our own way to combat this enemy when they re-emerge to harvest us," declared Breetai.
"Should we not warn the Citadel races? Don't they deserve to know about these events?" asked Amalgam.
"And you think they'd believe us? We just, according to them, stole a large chunk of their territory. Whatever we say to them will be at best ignored, at worst, they'll think we're trying to trick them. No, for now, this information, along with the Leviathan Command data, should be kept as a Black-Level secret, only those in this room, and our successors, should be made aware of this. At least until we have more to go on," answered Grant, and after thinking on it for a moment, everyone nodded.
"It is agreed then. For now, we must make preparations, as Breetai said. We must consolidate the gains made in the war, and make ready to annex any sovereign states that choose to join us. We can hope that these Reapers will not emerge within our lifetimes or those of our children, but if they do, we'll give them a hell of a fight," said Hayes, and the Conclave rose from their seats, Exedore quickly pocketing the datacube, as everyone left to prepare for the coming of an enemy they knew very little about.