Petroleum Effect
Epilogue
The Citadel, Serpent Nebula, 19 August 2183
Fighting on the Citadel had not ended until the 20th of July. However, the invaders had been completely wiped out. Repairs were already underway.
The conflict had brought changes. Looming over the Citadel in a very literal sense, and over the galaxy in a more figurative sense, was the human Temple Ship. A vessel obviously both larger and more advanced than the ancient space station itself. The Terran Dominion made clear their vessel was friendly but asked alien ships to keep away. Two STG ships were ruthlessly destroyed to make that request clear.
Only a few days after the battle, the Terran Dominion was formally invited to join the Council as a full member and accepted. The treaty was unusually favourable, imposing no restrictions on the Terran military and requiring no access to Terran space - trade would continue to be conducted via the outpost in the Rainbow System.
The survival of the Destiny Ascension and the Council had kept the galaxy from fragmenting back into member states. The addition of a new, powerful and highly advanced member deterred outsiders such as the Batarian Hegemony or the Terminus Systems from trying to take advantage.
The death of the creature known as the Gold Star had ended the eviloid threat. Whilst they retained their strange powers, the creatures had gone insane with grief and mostly abandoned hostilities, making the surviving enclaves easy pickings for Council forces. The Daughters of the Golden Star became listless, only interested in mindless sex and eating. With their home of Delos-3 destroyed the majority of the eviloid population had been wiped out. The remainder were killed or disappeared into black-operations facilities of various governments for experimentation.
On 18th August, the human Temple ship had departed through a portal, accompanied by the nine surviving Terran superdreadnoughts and the survivors of the conventional fleet.
The galaxy of the Citadel Council slowly began to rebuild and return to something resembling peace.
The Temple Ship, Star PDCN 97615749, Serpent Nebula, 19 August 2183
The Temple Ship had left the Citadel, but not gone far, opening portals twice in succession to move 150 light years to a nearby, empty and unnamed solar system.
Basic repairs had started as soon as the fighting stopped. It had taken until 20th July to wipe out the alien boarders. Like cleaning a wound, repair drones and frigates had been tasked to cut out the alien contamination from the ship. Huge chunks of filthy, worthless slag were cut away, burned and launched into space. The bone javelin was cut out, towed away and vapourised. Damaged structure all around its entry bore was sliced away. The repair teams cut and burned until everything tainted, unclean or damaged had been sliced away.
Other frigates and drones had been tasked with collecting or destroying fragments of the destroyed sword ship. This had been mostly successful, it was hoped. Little if anything of value should be available to the other races. Some Reaper fragments had also been collected for analysis and stowed securely in a force-shield in an undamaged hangar. They would be worked on only by psionic personnel resistant to mind control.
Work was continuing on slicing out the damaged sections. Once it was completed, self repair systems and replication forges could repair the damage. The structure could be fully repaired and most systems and weapons could be replaced. There were clear schematics for Black Lances, discontinuity weapons and the various shield emitters. All that was needed was mass - a lot of mass - which was why the Temple Ship had stopped off in the unnamed star system, which had a large number of suitable asteroids with the required materials.
A few losses were irreplaceable in the absence of the High Lords or Archlord. Some laboratories had been destroyed as well as some unique weapons. Amaoth considered it fortunate that the destroyed devices had not gone off. One particular loss was the destruction of a cluster of sail-like structures that fired Void Punches. There were a few others surviving, dotted around the Temple Ship's surface. Perhaps, with study, Amaoth or another Grey Lord could replicate them and replace the one which had been destroyed - but it was low down their priorities list. Still, with time, the Temple Ship would be mostly good as new.
Once the removal of the alien taint was complete and sufficient materials harvested, the Temple Ship would begin opening a series of portals which would eventually lead back to Sol, the slow way. Amaoth did not want to use another precious nexus lens. After the battle, Miranda had returned to the ship along with the Normandy II and Shepard. Grey Lord Admiral Hackett had come aboard.
With her Herald, her Seneschal and Amaoth herself that was five partial Transcendents. Each was able to open a gate to move the Temple Ship a distance of approximately 75 light-years distance, once a day. With five Grey Lords and Ladies that was approximately 375 light-years a day, meaning it would take something over two months of continuous travel to get the Temple Ship a little over 25,000 light-years back to Sol. The journey would only begin once the material harvesting was complete along with some basic structural repairs.
One task Amaoth had prioritised was the final examination of Lilith Shepard. She had been approved for partial Transcendence and had undergone the augmentation operation. Shepard was now dealing with the training and ongoing growth of the cybernetic enhancements within her, along with her increasing mental abilities. She would make an excellent new Grey Lady.
The Intelligence, The Citadel, Serpent Nebula, 19 August 2183
The battle had been strange. It had been ordered, twice, by its creators, using an unexpected protocol - one it had invented. Had the Intelligence been able to form the concepts, it would have realised that the humans had somehow obtained the creators' private key. It could not. One of the many chains on the Intelligence was an inability to think critically in any way about orders signed by its creators. As far as it was concerned, the orders were real.
The ancient artificial intelligence was left with problems of interpretation. Fortunately, it had protocols to help it resolve contradictions. Core directives could not implicitly be overridden. It decided the creators' limited instructions meant it should continue the cycles, but without using the mass relay in the Citadel for the time being.
There were other relays. The tens of thousands of Reapers outside the galaxy were currently at their base in dark space, but there was an older one, from a bygone era, connected to a little known mass relay in Batarian space - known to some of the younger races as the Alpha Relay. It would take approximately two years for the Reapers to fly to the Old Base at FTL speeds. Then they could transition into the galaxy via the Alpha Relay and if that did not work, they would be closer to the galactic rim anyway, should they need to return the long way round.
The Intelligence sent the orders and its subsystems silently sent a report to its control consoles.
In the meantime, there was the problem of the Citadel. The humans and other Council races had begun cutting into it as soon as the battle was over, seeking to find and disable the components of the mass relay
The Intelligence was not only present in the Citadel. It was a distributed, holographic, artificial intelligence connected by quantum links to multiple sites hidden throughout the galaxy. If one site was destroyed, the Intelligence persisted. However, the Intelligence did not want to give up the Citadel. It had limitations. One of its stronger chains was that it could not create new node sites. It could move them, repair them, change the facilities - for example convert a hidden asteroid base into a shining installation like the Citadel. Once a node site was destroyed, however, it was not permitted to create a new one to replace it.
The Intelligence decided it had to shut down its Citadel operations - a decision it made very quickly and began implementing as soon as the last Reaper scout was destroyed. Throughout the Citadel, the keepers had begun to dismantle machinery and smash it beyond repair or analysis. Nanomachines assisted, destroying hidden microscopic filaments and sensors - converting them into mere flaws in the construction materials. Intelligent particles of dust deconstructed themselves into boring inanimate fragments.
Nearly every trace of the Intelligence on the Citadel was eliminated - the keepers, having completed their tasks, quietly dropped dead with the machines that birthed and sustained them destroyed. There were backups elsewhere that could be used to recreate them in a future cycle. For now, the younger races could maintain the Citadel themselves.
Soon nearly all that remained was a number of hitherto undiscovered chambers full of wrecked machinery and dead keepers.
A trace of the Intelligence was left, well hidden, buried in the centre of a few unexceptional, dense structural beams of the station. This last vestige consisted of a few tiny nanomachine buds wrapped in scanner resistant material along with a few dormant processor nodes and a handful of quantum links. The Intelligence had left only the bare mininum of itself that the Citadel still counted, theoretically, as a node site - so that it could be reclaimed for future cycles. For now, to all intents and purposes, it was a perfectly mundane, if advanced, space station.
The Council Chamber, The Citadel, Serpent Nebula, 19 August 2183
The Council was in private session. Ravenna, Valern, Tevos and Sparatus sat quietly. They had dismissed most of their aides and sat close on comfortable padded armchairs. Ravenna still insisted on wearing a sealed suit, whilst the others did not.
The Citadel had changed. As far as Ravenna and her staff could tell, the Intelligence had either died or left. There was still a sense of ancient death but no sense of mind control or current threat. The change left the Council unprotected from psionics and she had soon resumed her former influence.
"The Reaper threat is real," Ravenna was saying, "not a mere Prothean myth. All indications are that there are thousands of those things outside the galaxy looking to find a way back in. We're not even clear why the Citadel mass relay shut down when it did."
Ravenna and the Dominion had unsurprisingly failed to disclose their ability to override mass relays - let alone Miranda's little mistake in briefly opening the way to dark space.
The Councillors could have received their instructions remotely. There was barely a point to the meeting except to give Ravenna sufficient closeness to reinforce her psionic control over the Councillors themselves and also their staff.
"So, to help us rebuild our forces, we will need a number of human spectres to be appointed as soon as possible."
The plan was progressing nicely. With plenty of human spectres, with at least simple psionics, it would be possible to meet and influence nearly every important alien leader. To control every even vaguely important alien institution. The Dominion would be able to ensure that no alien rival in council space tried to reverse engineer its technology, to slowly secure control over banking and most galactic capital. Before long the galaxy would be ruled by humans in all but name, mostly owned, ultimately, by humans and its societies geared to total war on humanity's behalf.
Ravenna moved on to a final matter.
"I think we'll all agree, this place presents ... risks. It is time the Council met somewhere else. The Terran Dominion proposes the construction of a new Citadel in this nebula and the demolition of this space station immediately thereafter."
Citadel environs, Serpent Nebula, 19 August 2183
A few hundred kilometres from the Citadel, space unfolded and a creature emerged. The emergence was like, but unlike, that used by the so-called Gold Star. It was precise, neat, smooth and left negligible gravitic traces. If the being could be seen beneath its cloak, it would look much like a Reaper, only it was a living creature not a machine. It was somewhat larger than a Reaper dreadnought at approximately four miles in length.
The ancient Leviathan was what humans might call Transcendent, but advanced far beyond even the High Lords of humanity at their zenith. It looked biological from the outside and it was, but was heavily augmented with advanced technologies and possessed of enormous psionic ability.
The creature looked down on the Citadel, senses beyond the knowledge of the younger races, even the Terran Dominion, piercing the Citadel, every ship, every room. Its augmented, multi-faceted consciousness listened to every conversation and read every database. It grimaced in disgust as its mind flicked over unnoticed, mostly dead, fragments of its fallen brethren.
Had the younger races been looking, they would have noticed a vestigial similarity between the core of the titanic Gold Star abomination and the shape of a Reaper. The Leviathan was repulsed by what it saw - the creature that had attacked the Citadel was a corrupted member of its own species. The thing had been tainted by Shub-Niggurath at a young age, before it was fully mature and equipped with the full powers and knowledge of its race to enable it to protect itself. Then, the juvenile had been warped and perverted beyond all recognition to serve the purposes of the outsider. The thing had also remained undetected for far too long.
The observer above the Citadel was only a few million years old. Its name was unpronounceable to humans. It also had a title, a description that would translate into English along the lines of, the 'Vermin Keeper'. It was one of the current holders of the reigns of the Intelligence which existed to keep the galaxy's lesser races under control.
The Leviathans had created the cycles of extinction and the Intelligence that guided those cycles nearly a billion years before. That generation was gone. They had grown beyond the universe, left the galaxy, changed beyond recognition or died. Perhaps a very few were sleeping.
The being that eventually built and inhabited the Citadel had never slipped beyond the Leviathans' control but it had been left with almost complete autonomy. One of the secrets to artificial intelligence, the Leviathans had discovered in ages past, was to give their creations well-defined natures that coincided with the Leviathans' designs and then let them act in accordance with those natures. If an artificial being had to be given orders, you were doing it wrong. If an intelligence never needed to be restrained or commanded, to be told, 'no' then it would never rebel, could never rebel. What would that even mean?
The Leviathans' creation had lasted nearly a billion years. It had only ever been seriously injured twice. Once, several hundred million years ago, when a node site had been destroyed. A second time, the previous month.
The recent incident was serious - perhaps the most serious deviation from the cycle that had occurred in nearly a billion years. The outsider known as Shub-Niggurath had expended significant resources to enter the galaxy, influence and utterly reshape a juvenile Leviathan. What humans called the Milky Way was not simply unenticing to outsiders because of its low population - it was protected in a myriad ways - not least by ritual empowered by the sacrifice of trillions of unwanted sophonts every 50,000 years.
Were it not for these 'humans' the Citadel might have been destroyed and the younger races taken over by an outsider. It might have ended the cycles, returning the gibbering madness and horror of the old night. The Vermin Keeper had not lived in those eras but it had deep, racial memories of the dark aeons when barely sentient younger races had developed interstellar travel on their own and multiplied unchecked, becoming food and playthings of cruel and horrifying outsiders which flocked to the galaxy, attracted by the easy feast.
In these new ages of peace and prosperity, the younger races' development was channeled and those who could not stand on their own were ruthlessly exterminated. Nearly all of them, in fact. The galaxy was largely empty except for the Leviathans and a few other advanced races who were well off the relay network.
There had been questions, all those years ago, about allowing any non-Leviathans to survive at all. It was permitted because it was beneficial. Leviathan population fluctuated - sometimes many grew beyond, left or died at once and the population fell dramatically. A galaxy that was too empty brought risks of its own. So, a few of the more reasonable nascent Transcendent races had been allowed to live. By definition these races had already learned the threat of outsiders and either supported or tolerated the cycles. Perhaps the humans would be another such race.
The Vermin Keeper decided what action to take. The humans had not yet fully proven themselves, not yet passed all tests, although they were getting near. The cycle would be allowed to continue. The minor chains the humans had placed on the Intelligence with their forged commands would be resolved. An artificial intelligence that struggled with nonsensical or arbitrary instructions was far more likely to deviate.
Using a control console - in reality an augmentation embedded within its vast body - the Leviathan sent two sets of orders. The Intelligence was freed to use a mass relay on the Citadel as it saw fit. The 12 mass relays in the vicinity of the Serpent Nebula were reset - still active but the override was removed - returning control to the Intelligence.
Given developments, as the Vermin Keeper predicted, the Intelligence took the new orders in its stride. It decided not to try to reclaim the Citadel this cycle but proceed with its plans for the Reapers to re-enter via the Alpha Relay. It also had a plan for analysing the humans using its servants in the galactic core. The Leviathan left the Intelligence's plans unaltered.
The humans needed to be scrutinised in detail - it was possible they would be one of those races that were a useful addition to the galaxy's long-term population.
As unmarked as it had arrived, the Leviathan departed, arriving equally undetected in Sol, where it settled in beneath its cloak to observe.
Sanctuary of the Archlord, interstellar space near Sol System, Local Cluster, 19 August 2183
Archlord Lordak lay alone in the advanced, automated surgical facility with a sense of trepidation and anticipation. His health had continued to improve but his additional neurons he had kept firmly inactive for a time. When he had begun to activate them he had felt a sense of discordance, a sense of fracturing.
Whatever he had been before his death, his higher self no longer aligned with this new biological self. Lordak had considered the best way forward for some time. He decided to awaken his higher self and then to extract all his knowledge and secrets - parsing them into conventional digital files held in an external memory storage unit. He then retreated into his biological form.
His older enhancements did not integrate satisfactorily with his consciousness. The result, he was uncomfortably aware, was not fully sane. The Archlord did not know if he was Simon Collins' soul or Vessel's soul - or something else entirely. He did know he had been born anew. Lordak had decided that to restore himself to full power he needed to re-tread his original path. Having extracted all his important knowledge into conventional documents, he would have all his artificial neurons removed and destroyed. They were obsolete, anyway.
In replacement, Lordak would have new implants, basic electronic interfaces and nanotech seeds that would allow him to grow new artificial neurons of the latest design. To grow new augmentations of all kinds in an incremental process, using the latest technologies. He would relearn the original Collins Technique. He would re-experience the First Transcendence and then he would undergo a new Second Transcendence.
Of course there would be more time to recover after the initial surgery. It would be a year of more therapy before he even considered anything beyond simple psionics and mathematics. There was a slight risk, very slight, of permanent harm. It was a risk Lordak was willing to take.
Archlord Lordak intended to spend a lot of that planned year on the beach. His servants, the Acolytes of the Archlord, were onboard with the plan. Using his overriding access, Lordak had long ago - before his death and rebirth - created a false citizenship record for himself in the government databases. It enabled him to issue himself a, 'real' official passport in the name of John Smith. It enabled him to open bank accounts in the name of John Smith and stuff them with money - to give himself glowing reports in all government databases. Very few updates had been required to put all in place.
John Smith was a wealthy, loyal, citizen enjoying an extended sabbatical. He had two years booked in a luxury hotel in the Bahamas. Lordak fully intended to spend it with his beautiful, willing Acolytes whilst regaining his identity and powers at his leisure. All he had to do was undergo the procedure.
Archlord Lordak, once and future ruler of the Most Holy Imperial Terran Dominion, could have thought-clicked, but for some reason he had wanted a solid button. So he had one installed. It rested next to the surgical recliner looking sturdy and clinical.
He pressed the button.
END
From the author: Thank you for reading all the way to the finishing line! This is the end of Petroleum Effect - specifically, Petroleum Effect I.
Lilith Shepard and her companions may return in Petroleum Effect II, if there is the interest and I have the time.
Any questions or suggestions, message me or put them in the reviews.