Winning Peace - Chapter 53:

I'd decommissioned the various bodies I'd kept myself connected to as I'd promised my wife.

There were, in total, about three dozen newly-legitimate sapient humans running around the Systems Alliance that didn't realize they'd just come into existence some weeks ago. It was better that way. The existential crises that would ensue were they to find out their entire sense of self up to that point had been a lie, a psychotic break would probably be the least of their worries. I'd keep an automated monitoring protocol on each of them to check for instabilities, but as far as they were concerned they'd all gone to sleep the night before and woken up the day after.

Business as usual.

Those were, of course, the fates of my extra human bodies.

My consciousness was still stretched across the galactic gulf by two dozen separate instances of a reinforced cybernetic braincase hooked into a miniaturized FTL transmitter suspending my sense of self between the physical forms they were installed within. Only one of those was anywhere near recognizable as human, let alone as anything like Ezekiel Lopez.

My original gray matter, the small sections of flesh that still remained from my progression into transhumanism and posthumanism, were actually lodged deep within a rogue planet. Unlike the myriad caches of advanced technology I'd secreted around the galaxy, though, the one that held what was arguably my original being was riding what appeared to be a cold, dead rock three times the size of Earth that had long-since cleared the outer limits of what could be considered the Milky Way.

Even if things turned out well and I stopped the Reapers from their appointed task, it was comforting to know that I had one last fallback ready in case I fully lost despite all of my preparations.

Even if I considered it unlikely at this point.

Still, that fallback seldom held anything approaching my full attention. On this occasion, I was focused on the body that had just dropped out of hyperspace and into real space in a small burst of radiation. Instantly, three different varieties of STL engines embedded within that frame kicked on and propelled that part of me straight towards a ruined world with a devastated ecosystem and the ruins of an ecumenopolis dotting it.

I plummeted through the atmosphere, not bothering to slow as the friction of a direct reentry tried to eat me alive in a burst of fire.

I had more important things to care about.

Still, it would be both impolite and counterproductive to incinerate the cavernous home my soon-to-be-host would be receiving me in. As well as the host himself, for that matter. Given that, I took a long parabolic route to my destination, arcing through the alien sky of the dead world long enough to bleed off the heat of my arrival.

Then I slammed into the cavern containing the thorian.

I only needed one thing from the creature, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered visiting. In fact, I'd put off confronting the thorian simply because I'd thought I had alternative solutions to finding Ilos. I knew that it was behind the mysterious Mu Relay that had been lost in the explosion of a supernova thousands of years ago, but I should have been able to cross the distance to the destination relatively easily even without a relay.

If I knew where to go, at least.

Which was a little odd, but had a perfectly reasonable explanation.

I knew more about the First Prothean Empire than anyone currently living, after all. I knew where they'd come from, how they'd expanded, the planets they'd conquered, the cultures they'd obliterated or subsumed, and the massive hulk of a civilization they stewarded at their peak. The empire of fifty thousand years ago had given even the reapers a tough time, taking centuries to finish culling and, even then, there had been holdouts which survived the purge.

I knew all of that, so why couldn't I just find Ilos and go there?

Well... here's the thing...

The protheans didn't call the world Ilos. That name was an asari transliteration of what they thought the planet's name was based on a faulty translation of ancient prothean glyphs. Which, as a side note, they'd misinterpreted what those glyphs were, too. They were actually the name of an ancient warship that had been assigned to patrol a nearby sector of space.

But! I knew the general area of where 'Ilos' was supposed to be, right? So it should be easy to match up the Terminus Systems to First Empire worlds and just search the systems the two had in common!

Two problems.

The first was that what I vaguely remembered as the 'Terminus Systems' in the game franchise I'd watched a play-through of thirty years ago wasn't the Terminus Systems of the galaxy I now found myself in. The existence of the New Prothean Empire had shifted borders all over the place and nothing really corresponded the right way anymore.

Second, and much more important, was that outer space was very large, and so was the First Prothean Empire.

Which should be self-evident, but... Holy Jesus Fuck the protheans conquered and colonized a lot of worlds. Just... continual growth and expansion of a civilization that encompassed thousands of different sapient species with periods of growth and stability that lasted so long some primitive species transitioned from their stone age to their industrial age in nearby systems.

So while it would seem a relatively simple thing to search out the world that the asari had misnamed Ilos based on the prothean records shoved in my head...

Well, I'd been doing so.

For the last five years.

I was almost finished looking over ten percent of their colony worlds in what I believed was the right area.

The other avenue I'd thought to exploit had been the New Prothean Empire's records, though one glance over them had spoiled that possibility. As I vaguely remembered Javik commenting once upon a time, the survivors who were put into cryo-stasis with him weren't members of the Prothean Empire. They were what was left of a single system's defensive force that had been cut off from their command structure some three centuries prior. No living prothean that had been put on ice remembered the glory of their empire at its height, much less knew of a single world that had a top-secret project developed on it to sabotage the Citadel for the next cycle.

Thankfully, I had at least been keeping an eye on the thorian itself, just in case someone was indoctrinated with the bright idea to go questing for a backdoor into the Master Relay.

Which... ah, may or may not explain the several metric tons of cloaked antimatter bombs I had waiting in hidden locations on the planet as well as the hidden observation station in interstellar space I'd portaled to before making the FTL hop to the planet.

Even if they're out to get you, it's still paranoia. It's justified paranoia, though, which means you're not mentally ill, so everything's good.

Of course, the other half of the equation was why I needed the not-Ilos mini-relay maintained by Vigil. Obviously, I didn't really. I had resources I could mobilize and crazy bullshit tech I could deploy, and I was doing all that and more, but I also wanted to try my best to accomplish my goals surgically and stealthily. Which, to that end, it wasn't the mini-relay I actually needed.

It was the advanced prothean VI Vigil that I needed.

Specifically, I needed to know what the ever-loving fuck those prothean scientists had done to the Citadel systems.

Whatever it was, they'd done an incredible job at making the entire process utterly opaque from my standpoint. Key systems were just fucking inactive with basically anything I did just slamming against a wall uselessly. There was, undoubtedly, some trick the reapers themselves had, or failing that a master key-code that could turn everything back on, but despite having a reaper corpse, I couldn't figure out what that was. Maybe they changed the master code every million years or so?

Part of the annoyance I was feeling was, no doubt, being a week away from just picking up a new set of divinely-gifted knowledge to solve my problem.

Maybe, anyway. I've never tried throwing such a specific niche issue at it before. Couldn't hurt to try, though.

Of course, I wouldn't be dealing with this if I'd just resorted to the easy way sooner, but I'd...

Well, I'd wanted to solve a problem myself, the hard way.

And I'd thought I'd have the time to do it.

I thought I'd have some kind of indication that Harbinger would be moving before shit started hitting the fan. I didn't anticipate him using my own diversions for the galactic powers against me, or directly mobilizing the Collectors. That had certainly been a curveball.

I'd kept an eye on their comings and goings through their main relay near the center of the galaxy, but they didn't do all that much. And, also, I had some really, really big guns ready to FTL jump around the relay path and blow their base into stardust.

But perhaps I'd gotten just a bit complacent, playing house and dabbling in diplomacy.

Did I regret that time? No, never. I'd needed to get out and touch grass, metaphorically at least; remind myself what it was like to truly be human instead of just an automaton cracking away at problems and manufacturing more contingencies.

I stepped up to the thorian, brushing off chunks of debris from my dramatic entry and opened my mouth to-

The grav-wave sensors I'd laid out in a network over the joint asari-human military exercises went off.

Sometimes, I love being right.

I retasked a group of my students to start running checks on the asari who had even tangential knowledge of the event while I...

Well, I waited just long enough to establish that there weren't any more vessels coming through, saw one exceptionally large ping on the sensor feeds, and promptly moved to act.

By filling that general area of space with the kind of enhanced, energetic plasma that utterly ignored the shielding of the mass effect barriers.

Over the course of a few brief instants, Harbinger was speared through by lances of light so intense they'd give the core of a star a run for their money.

As an afterthought, I spoofed the asari and human sensors to ensure they didn't see the destruction of the reaper or its attendant flotilla of Collector ships.

I paused, one hand raised and my mouth forming a greeting when I realized that, if I had actually just killed Harbinger...

I didn't need Ilos, Vigil, or the thorian's help to find either.

The coiling mass of vines seemed to overcome its shock and begin to rally to attack me, when I mentally shrugged.

"I came all this way, I suppose I'd better have a backup plan," I sighed, then shifted to a prothean dialect the plant monster would hopefully recognize. "Greetings! I am a human! I desire information related to inhabited prothean worlds from the height of their civilization."

There was a pause in the readiness of the great thrumming vines.

I felt, more than saw, the activation of biotic nodes begin to shift the air around it into audible sound. "In exchange, you will give me a member of your race to learn the ways of your people."

Having come prepared, I pulled out a folded mat of portal-receptive material and flung it out onto the ground before opening a trans-dimensional doorway on it. Instantly, a brain-dead flash-grown clone that I'd uploaded with harmless cultural information about humanity was sent through.

"Deal," I stated. "Now tell me where this planet is-"

The squid-like cybernetic organism, a millennia-old construct of millions of members of a sapient, space-faring species hung dead in the interstellar void, its drive-core pierced by a shot from one of the mobile dolls' energy weapons I'd dropped in around it.

Heh, Treize was right indeed.

The Collector ships had taken the brunt of damage, both because I'd explicitly targeted them to get rid of complications and because the reaper had attempted to use them to shield itself when they'd come under attack.

I, meanwhile, observed the still-twitching organic substrate as its nanomachine support network tried in vain to repair the massively damaged critical components.

Reapers were, in some ways, much like the elder gods of a certain human writer's faux-mythology. They might cease to actively function, but they were as much machine as they were flesh. Unless you atomized them entirely, they could be repaired from just about any damaged state.

I could, in fact, have repaired the Leviathan of Dis back to operable conditions had I been completely insane and desired to do so.

But as unlucky as I'd gotten in the choice of my tactics, I'd also gotten lucky that the reaper sentinel for this cycle had decided to charge ahead in an attempt to activate the Citadel Relay instead of enacting some more convoluted strategy. I hadn't expected Harbing-ah, well...

Huh, his name's actually Sovereign.

Oops.

I blinked, the vaguest memory taking shape as I dragged off the still twitching corpse of the reaper. My experience in evaluating the ancient Leviathan of Dis I'd taken custody of to stop the Hegemony from Indoctrinating itself allowed me to interface with it both safely and effectively.

I flicked a metaphorical glance to each side and discreetly altered the translation program to read 'Sovereign' as 'Harbinger.'

We're going to remember that I was utterly correct in all of my assertions and didn't do something as stupid as misremember the space-squid's name.

Hopefully, they'd all be dead soon enough and no one would ever know.

At any rate, though, my brief glance through Harbinger's systems told me that it had expected to cripple most of the fleet, indoctrinate the surviving remainder through simple proximity to his own body, and then let the fleets be towed back to the nearest friendly port. The only one of which had the facilities to service massive dreadnoughts, of course, would be the Citadel itself.

And Harbinger could then ride in on the wake of the ships garrison fleet reorganizing itself and strike in the moment they had their guard down with his Collector escort.

I gave it... about a 73% chance of working.

Which wasn't bad, all things considered.

I blinked again as I looked through his communications with the greater body of the reapers.

Huh. I guess he'd woken up later in this world. It appears they come out of stasis every thousand years to do a status check on the galaxy. This version of Harbinger apparently overslept by about fifty years compared to what I know of 'canon.'

...and, when he did wake up, he woke up to the geth and the quarians peacefully coexisting with each other. Well, more or less.

Apparently, that had tripped some level of urgency in the reaper collective. It was one of the few things that actually worried the army of eldritch cybernetic automata. Of course, that was likely because of the very fact that the reapers themselves were a result of such events coming to their 'natural' conclusion. Inasmuch as 'natural' had anything to do with the Leviathans being pathetic excuses for idiots.

The most important part, though, was that I now had access to the master key to manually open the Citadel Relay.

Without, you know... having to turn the entire thing off and on.

Which, as funny as it might seem, was actually an option I had. It's just that turning the Citadel Relay off and on would trigger an automatic and total atmospheric venting and dump substantial sections of the retrofitted habitable zones into hard vacuum. Given that the reapers' priority was to convert organic sapients into gestalt cybernetic abominations, that was an option they only used in extreme circumstances.

So... now I just needed to pull off the most elaborate and carefully executed masquerade in galactic history to trick the various civilizations into believing I, personally, had nothing to do with what was about to happen.
I looked over the shattered hulk of the reaper I'd just killed, as much as they could die anyway.

Then I turned my head as one of my iconic portals opened up...

...and a 'reaper fleet' of my own design flew through.

I took a deep breath, even without the air to do so, and steeled myself.

"Attention, All Students: We're moving forward with Reaper Response Plan Theta-Seven," I called out into the ether of cyberspace. "Be ready to control the narrative."