Chapter 1-4
Under Covenant occupation, Port Septentrional was the most neglected of Narsompasi's three spaceports. Chieftain Lirinus hardly bothered to garrison it. As a goodwill gesture, he had appointed a Salarian from Port Septentrional to leadership of its tiny force of gendarmes. I spoke to Captain Falit immediately after arriving at Port Septentrional from the Vikasaya camp.
"A Spirit dropship filled with ammunition and small arms from your stockpiles is to be delivered here, to the Vikasaya matriline."
Captain Falit was baffled. "Why?"
"Can't say. Anuranite Lustration business. Our Covenant also needs you to conceal the loss of the small arms in your records."
Captain Falit, a native son of the Terminus Systems, naturally assumed that this was some corrupt Batarian arms-running scheme. That wasn't entirely wrong, and so I paid him off.
"Don't include any Jiralhanae small arms in the shipment. No spikers, no maulers, no brute shots, none of that. Plasma pistols, plasma rifles, needlers, carbine rifles, beam rifles. Toss in some grenades."
Captain Falit agreed.
That done, I flew back to Port Austral and spent the next two weeks there. Over that time, I had several more calls with Queen Yalat and Talita Valzeshia. At one point it looked like Talita had made a breakthrough with one of the larger Lystheni matrilines, but the next day Yalat had her worker drones cut down some tree sacred to the matriline, so little progress was made there. I also had several discussions with Chieftain Lirinus in person. Nothing got done at those meetings either, but I wanted Lirinus to know that I was in Port Austral.
One day, Lirinus called me early in the morning.
"Something's happened to Wul'Tazamuna and his excavators. Swamp-dweller attack, presumably. Thought you might like to know."
"What happened?"
"A distress signal, then silence."
"When do we set off to investigate?"
"I am traveling to investigate now. I'm in the air. I didn't think you'd have any interest in coming. You haven't even had the misfortune of speaking with Wul'Tazamuna."
"You should have called me at once! Apart from Queen Yalat and ourselves, Wul'Tazamuna is the highest blessed of Narsompasi! It is the duty of an Anuranite agent to ensure that the blessed tread in safety! I will fly to Wul'Tazamuna's camp myself."
Lirinus growled in irritation and hung up. Actually, it was convenient that Lirinus hadn't bothered to contact me before leaving himself. It meant that I was able to swing by the Vikasaya camp in my shuttle and pick Dir Ruz up before I pressed on to the Catacombs.
"It went well?" I asked Ruz.
"Couldn't have gone better," he replied. "The Lystheni are good shots. Probably would have driven Queen Yalat off a long time ago, if those heat-sink weapons were better. No problem for the Vikasayas now, though."
"They were happy with the arms shipment?"
"Oh yeah. You shoulda seen them! I think the trouble on this planet could have been avoided. I think the frogs would have been happy to convert, if the Exarch had offered them beam rifles and jobs instead of Yanme'e."
"Do you have the expedition's map of the Catacombs?"
"Yeah. Check this out, though!" Ruz showed me Wul'Tazamuna's engraved energy sword. "It was the only thing we pried off the Sangheili that the Vikasayas didn't want to keep! Can you believe it? They said that fighting with swords is stupid. Savages, right? I like them a lot, but savages!"
"Just find some place to put that where no one will see it," I told him.
Ruz stashed the sword away and made himself presentable, and we flew to Wul'Tazamuna's camp. Lirinus had traveled to the Catacombs with a large and useless entourage. The highest-ranked Jiralhanae gendarmes on Narsompasi milled about aimlessly, griping about the heat. No one seemed to be carrying out any kind of forensic investigation. I found Chieftain Lirinus looking over Wul'Tazamuna's body, or what was left of it after it had been filled with explosive needler shards.
"Covenant weapons," Lirinus said. "Someone killed thirty-four armed Sangheili, plus their Unggoy and Huragok servants, with Covenant weapons. The archeological site is stripped bare, and not only the expedition's weapons and armor. The expedition's records were looted as well." He looked at me carefully and sniffed. "You don't seem all that surprised. You must see the implications."
"It can't have been the Lystheni," I agreed. "They use old Relay Ecumene weapons. Sometimes they do buy newer thermal clip weapons from the cityfolk, but it's out of the question that they could get their hands on so many Covenant guns."
"You're the spy. What do you think happened?"
I sighed. "Lirinus, the truth is that my superiors in the Anuranite Lustration did give me orders regarding Wul'Tazamuna. I called on him shortly after I landed on Narsompasi. I was told to give him a warning."
"A warning?"
"Yes. I warned him that there was reason to suspect that he was in danger from the Renegade Spectre Yul Metagh."
"The Renegade Spectre Yul Metagh. Who might that be?"
"Where to begin… He's a Drell. They're lizard people who mostly all killed each other, but a few were uplifted by the Hanar. Yul Metagh is the first to ever become a Spectre. The Citadel Council sent him into the Terminus Exarchate to act as a spy, saboteur, and assassin. He joined a band of rogue Kig-Yar pirates-"
"I'm not following. Explain the concept of a Spectre."
"Agents directly beholden to the Citadel Council instead of its member governments. They've got all kinds of legal indemnities. They're used to operating with little oversight, so in wartime they're sent behind enemy lines and given carte blanche to act as they see fit. Yul Metagh is a particularly ruthless, brutal specimen. As I was saying, he joined a rogue band of Kig-Yar pirates, and the crimes he has committed are beyond description. He will stop at nothing to achieve his bloodthirsty mission- the cold-blooded murder of Covenant xenoarcheologists."
Lirinus pondered this admittedly strange story. Some of it was true, though. I had spent some of the last two weeks looking through Anuranite files, picking out a handy Spectre or STG agent to blame. "The involvement of Kig-Yar pirates would certainly explain the use of Covenant weaponry. But why would the Citadel Council, or anyone else, want to kill archeologists so badly?"
"We aren't certain. It's possible the Citadel Council hopes to interfere with the Relay Dissension. If a xenoarcheologist were to prove that the mass effect relays were created by the Forerunners, it would preclude the possibility of our destroying the relay network and creating an impassable gulf between our Covenant and the Citadel. The Citadel Council wants us to make that mistake, because they know that we will conquer them otherwise. But who knows? It could be something stranger. The Drell are odd people, steeped in the half-accurate faith of the Hanar. Yul Metagh may view any excavation of Prothean ruins as provocative in and of itself."
Lirinus looked over to Ruz. "What do you make of this?"
Ruz examined a nearby Sangheili corpse. The Sangheili look much less imposing when their armor has been stripped and they are lying on the ground in the nude, but then I suppose everyone does. A beam rifle had been fired precisely through the Sangheili's eye. Ruz nodded as though he were satisfied. "Looks like Kig-Yar work to me."
That got a short chortle out of Lirinus. "And why would you not tell me about this agent of the Citadel Council and his band of rogue Kig-Yar pirates?"
I shrugged. "Some San'Shyuum somewhere thinks that it would cause panic and demoralization if people knew that there were rogue Kig-Yar working with the Citadel Council. Silly, I know. People know what the Kig-Yar are like." Ruz grinned happily at this remark.
Lirinus nodded again, then smiled. Jiralhanae smiles are never warm. "So, what happens to Wul'Tazamuna's Deed of Excavation?"
"What? That's what you're worried about now? We need forensic scientists out here. If you don't have any forensic scientists, we'll trawl the cities for some Salarians who can do it. And put your gendarmes on high alert! The Spectre and his raiders could still be lurking around Narsompasi!"
Lirinus kept smiling while he listened to me bluster. "The work of investigating the teachings of the antecedents is too important for our Covenant to allow these kinds of incidents to delay it for long. Wul'Tazamuna's Deed of Excavation reverts to the highest-blessed of Narsompasi, who must see the endowment discharged. I am blessed of the Arbiter, Queen Yalat blessed of the Terminus Exarch, but you are blessed of the Prophet of Sagacity- a Hierarch! As a chain of command, it is convoluted and ambiguous, but the endowment laws are more straightforward. The Deed will revert to you."
Chieftain Lirinus was probably the last person on Narsompasi who I would have guessed to be familiar with the finer points of Covenant endowment law. I tried not to let that throw me. I spoke sharply. "You know full well that I have been in Port Austral these last two weeks. If you have something to say, say it now."
Lirinus' awful smile grew broader. "Only two things. Firstly, that while it would be illegal for you to sell the Deed for personal gain, it would be perfectly appropriate and even responsible for you to bequeath the endowment to Queen Yalat, who has the resources of her hive and is clearly more equipped to delve into the antecedent site than yourself. Secondly, that the only reason I studied anything about this topic is that I wanted to know what would happen if I killed Wul'Tazamuna myself."
"Well, you should be happy that the Renegade Spectre Yul Metagh got to him before you did something you would have regretted, something that would have gotten you into trouble with the law. With the Anuranite Lustration!"
"I am indeed." Lirinus let his fanged delight show for another moment before he dropped the expression and bellowed, attracting the attention of his subordinates. "Alright, you louts! We've done enough gawking! Back to the cities, to find a Narsompasikar who knows how to read a crime scene! Got to get some brainy frog native to tell us that this was done with Covenant needles and plasma, and not with swamp-dweller hot guns! Like we don't already know it. And put the gendarmerie on alert! Whoever did this might still be on Narsompasi."
"I'll alert High Charity. The Prophet of Diligence will see these pirates flayed." Ruz and I returned to our shuttle. I called Queen Yalat.
"Qelet B'Norai, my Deed of Settlement fully entitles my worker drones to cut down whatever trees the hive requires. If the heathen Lystheni choose to fire upon my worker drones afterwards, how can I be blamed? Is the hive supposed to go without wood?"
"Not what I wanted to talk to you about. Take a look at this." I transmitted the map of the Catacombs Ruz had salvaged from the expedition.
"An underground antecedent structure. Very inviting, but this scale can't possibly be right. Prothean? Interesting, I suppose. What planet is it on?"
"Narsompasi. And the scale is correct."
"Really?" It was the first and only time I heard Yalat's translated voice express surprise. "It must be the site that the Sangheili xenoarcheologist is working. I called him remotely when he first arrived on this world two years ago, and we agreed to leave each other alone. I have not spoken to him since. If you don't mind my saying so, I believe that I have a better working relationship with Wul'Tazamuna than any other vertebrate on Narsompasi."
"Wul'Tazamuna is dead at the hands of a Citadel Council assassin and a crew of rogue Kig-Yar. His Deed of Excavation reverts to me. It is my responsibility to bequeath the Deed to whoever on Narsompasi is best fit to investigate the Prothean Catacombs."
"I am very sad to hear of Wul'Tazamuna's death. High Charity is buoyed by the honor of all Sangheili martyrs." Queen Yalat went silent for a few seconds. "Now that I have paid Wul'Tazamuna my respects, I should say that I think that I am well placed to investigate these Prothean Catacombs. I have an amateur interest in xenoarchaeology, and you saw how I am sufficiently well-studied that I recognized that map as Prothean. My drones might provide the manpower necessary to excavate a structure of such imposing size, a size which is particularly remarkable considering Narsompasi's waterlogged geography. You must have called me because you recognized this yourself."
"You are my first choice for the job, but I do not wish to make this decision rashly. Now that I have informed you of the news, if you like we can revisit sacred Lystheni trees and such subjects..."
I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly things moved after that. The Yanme'e stopped expanding, and even drew back from territories they had already pressed into. Queen Yalat was preparing to evacuate the burrows she had dug herself and transfer the hive to her new home in the Prothean Catacombs. She agreed to change the terms of her Deed of Settlement. After she made the move, she would no longer be entitled to expand outwards with any guarantee of protection. Downwards, perhaps, but that couldn't bother anybody unless there were such things as Prothean ghosts.
The deal did raise the question of how Yalat could feed her relocated hive without surface agriculture. I was able to think of an answer to that which might solve two problems at once. The war and occupation had so thinned the spaceports' population and labor pools that it had looked to be impossible for the Valzeshias to staff their reopening shipyards. I prevailed on Talita to accept Yanme'e worker drones as laborers. The drones' paychecks would go to Queen Yalat, who could use the revenue to import food. Yalat may have been unwilling to sell off her legal privileges for cash, but selling drone labor struck her as simple good sense.
"I don't like it!" Talita yelled. "I don't want to walk into my shipyards and see those little termites there! I can stomach the idea of these warmongering insects all burrowed somewhere in a giant antecedent vault I never have to look at, but you are asking for interdependence!"
Well, she was right, I was. I went to Narsompasi to impose the peace of High Charity, whether anyone wanted it or not. Interdependence seemed like the best way of crafting a peace that might last even five seconds after Lirinus and I left. Talita eventually accepted it. It would help the shipyards open sooner, and she couldn't think of an argument against that.
Chieftain Lirinus helped arrange the naval contracts. As soon as the shipyards were ready the Valzeshias would begin producing Ceudar-pattern heavy corvettes, to vanquish the Citadel Council and spread word of the Great Journey to all peoples of the galaxy. With the gendarmerie in the spaceports, the cityfolk began to properly acclimate themselves to the Covenant. My reports to High Charity got sunnier and sunnier.
"We've almost done it," Lirinus said one day. "We have almost fixed this sweltering little planet. I will be able to tell my superiors that my pack is no longer needed here, and we will finally be able to leave this place, and perhaps I will see the Coreward Front."
"I am so happy for you!" Talita told Lirinus. I don't think that was true, I think she was still quietly resentful that Lirinus had put her under house arrest for a decade, but like most Narsompasikar she seemed to be willing to show Lirinus a level of courtesy that they were never willing to show the Yanme'e. "And I do not like to be a downer. But there is still one piece of the puzzle that we have not quite fit into place."
"Argh. What?"
"The Lystheni matrilines are no doubt happy that the hive has not provoked them in some while, and that they have not been attacked by your pack of eight-foot-tall policemen all armored in spikes." Talita liked to use the Jiralhanae term pack when talking to Lirinus. I don't think he realized that the word had a condescending undertone when she said it. "But they are not all going to think that it is happening just because we are very nice, and we mean well for them. Some of them, hopefully a minority, are going to imagine it is because we are tired or even scared of fighting. Preposterous no doubt, but they might think it. There is still the risk that the matrilines might talk, set aside their differences with one another, form a great host, and set to driving the Yanme'e out for good. And once they've done that, they might even start thinking about how nice it might be to raze the cities and never have to think about alien space empires ever again."
"I could thrash them for the umpteenth time, but if they imagine that I'm tired of doing that they are not entirely wrong. You look like you have a different solution."
"We lift your restrictions on assembly, sponsor and attend a new Summit of Matrilines, talk to all the Dalatrasses ourselves, and cut them in on things. We give them a stake in peace and the success of the shipyards."
"Not like I'd be able to enforce those restrictions after I leave. Fine."
"You're willing to cut them in on things?" I asked Talita.
"Of course I am! I have cut Yalat in on things, have I not? I am going through with your very sensible and smart plan to hire her worker drones… no, I am sorry. I do not want to be sarcastic with you. Qelet, you are a good partner, and you are always reminding me of your great forebear Degeul B'Norai! In all honesty Yalat's drones are very efficient workers, and it is much less money than I was prepared to pay her before you found that Deed of Excavation wherever you found it. But the point is that I am cutting her in, and I do not like her very much. I have always liked the Lystheni matrilines!" For one very odd second, Talita looked a little sad. "Far more than they have ever liked me."
