by Cole Price
“Why?”
“Because in about six weeks, the Reapers will be in the mass relay network and everyone will have much larger concerns.”
“That soon?” she whispered, turning pale.
“Yes.” I sighed. “You can see why I’m starting to feel a little desperate.”
Treeya took another sip of her drink, sat staring down into the glass for a long moment. “I wish . . .”
“What is it?”
“I wish James and I had more time.”
I reached out to put one hand over hers. “I certainly know how that feels.”
“It’s outrageous. He is nothing like the lovers I enjoyed while I was a student. Aggressive, driven, even reckless, and Goddess, but he’s huge and ugly. He must have twice my mass.”
I had to laugh. “You sound exactly like I did, when I first met Shepard and began to discover eros for him. Although I must admit that James is even larger. Personally I find him rather intimidating.”
“Yes.” She smiled slightly. “He can be very gentle when he wants to be.”
I squeezed her hand. “Treeya, very soon we’re all going to be in the middle of a terrible war. If you get the chance to see James again . . . seize the opportunity. There’s going to be so little time for love.”
* * *
6 March 2186, Usra Dao/Talis Fia
I left Treeya at the Talis Fia orbital port with an introduction to Quintus, a few last-minute instructions, and a final embrace. Then I took Themis down to the surface, landing outside the capital city.
In those last days before the Reapers arrived and devastated the planet, I often found myself dealing with the volus of Talis Fia. Local banks and brokerages managed a large portion of the Shadow Broker’s finances. Meanwhile, before his death the yahg commissioned five Normandy-class stealth frigates from the planet’s shipbuilding combines, and I inherited the fruits of their labor. It was an important world for the economy of the Terminus Systems, and for my own network. I always had agents nearby, and dozens of informants among the population.
Even so, that was the first and only time I ever visited the planet in person.
I knew that someone on Talis Fia had information about the Protheans. The difficulty lay in finding that individual. For all of its frenetic prosperity, Talis Fia was in the Terminus Systems. The volus magnates who dominated the place might feel no obligation to follow Citadel law, with respect to the handling of Prothean relics. If a major artifact existed there, it was most likely in someone’s private collection.
I spent four days on the surface, meeting with one informant after another, gathering information. Slowly, methodically, I worked my way up to the highest echelons of volus society, the banking and industrial combines that drove the planetary economy.
It seemed very strange, seeing so many volus out of their environment suits. Nothing could ever make a volus graceful, but in their own environment they moved with assurance and strength, and after a while I came to see them as beautiful in their own way. On the other hand, I had to remain in a powered hardsuit whenever I left my ship or the foreigner’s hostel. Doubtless I looked as comic and ungainly to the volus as they did in an oxygen-breather’s comfort zone.
Finally I found what I sought. The Pargun Combine had been mining radioactives and rare-earth metals on the nearby world of Zada Ban for over thirty years. In 2168, the Combine’s mining robots discovered something unusual, a very large artifact, quickly identified as Prothean in origin. Zata Pargun, the combine’s owner and CEO, conveyed it back to Talis Fia at great expense.
After lengthy negotiation, Zata Pargun agreed to permit me limited access.
My guide was a female volus named Denlo Var. She seemed a pleasant and cheerful creature, who gladly met me at the nearest transport point and conveyed me to a Pargun Combine storage center in a ground-car. She asked me about archaeology and Prothean studies with every sign of keen interest.
Finally we reached our destination. I stepped out of the ground-car, my muscles already complaining at a gravity field half as strong again as my homeworld’s. Denlo led me down a narrow alley between storage units, finally picking out one door and bending close to enter an access code.
I surreptitiously took a holograph of the storage unit and recorded its location. Just in case.
The door opened.
“Here we are,” said Denlo.
I keyed my hand-beacon for light, and peered into the dimness of the storage vault.
There it stood, towering over me, perhaps five meters in height. It appeared to have a square cross-section along its entire length, although it tapered slightly, from about one meter on a side at the base to half that at the tip. Where my light fell on its surface, it reflected a dull gold color.
“It’s much more massive even than it appears,” said my guide. “We’re not sure of the material. Something very dense, hard, and durable.”
I stepped forward cautiously, reached out to touch it with my gloved hand. The surface was indeed very hard. I could see characters incised into the artifact, on all four sides, in neat rows roughly two centimeters in height. The inscription looked almost undamaged by time, still perfectly readable after fifty millennia. I searched for certain characters, certain markers in the text, and soon found them.
Fourth Age Prothean script.
“This is what I’m looking for,” I told Denlo.
“Good. Can you read the inscription?”
I looked at the text just under my hand.
Sha-du-ta re-na to ‘a-la-tho kse-pa-thi zha-ti-la . . .
“The second punitive campaign against the . . . hmm. This next word is marked as a proper name, but I don’t know the referent. Zha’til?”
“You’re very confident, Thessia-clan.”
“The Cipher may not be consciously accessible to me, but it’s quite complete. So long as the entire inscription is in the same Prothean dialect, I should be able to translate it.”
“Punitive campaign?” Denlo’s mouth-parts worked, expressing some emotion I had no idea how to interpret. “That sounds very warlike.”
“It’s Fourth Age script. The extinction must have been under way by then. The Protheans were fighting for their lives.” I glanced at her through my visor. “It’s that very fact that makes this a valuable find.”
“You believe the Shadow Broker would be willing to pay for this artifact?”
“I’m sure we can come to some reasonable accommodation.”
“Well.” Denlo shifted her weight back and forth between her feet. “There’s a small problem.”
I turned away from the artifact, folded my arms, and stared down at the volus in stony silence.
Her jittering increased. “You see, my principal is unwilling to part with the physical object itself. He cherishes its rarity and value. However, for a small sum he will grant you one-time access to examine it for up to three hours.”
I frowned. “Some features of the artifact may require extended study in a lab.”
“I regret that will not be possible, esteemed Thessia-clan.”
“How much?”
“Five million credits.”
“That is a small sum?”
“To the Shadow Broker? My principal believes so, yes.”
I decided to put on a show of reluctance. “I’m not authorized to agree to so much. Two million, and I get as long as I need to produce a full translation of the inscriptions.”
“Four million for six hours,” said Denlo, relishing the opportunity to haggle.
“Two and a half million for a full local day.”
“Three million for a local day.”
“Done. When can I begin?”
Denlo opened her omni-tool, which flared an odd reddish color in the ammonia-rich atmosphere. “You already have, Thessia-clan.”
“All right.” I opened my own omni-tool and keyed the transfer of funds. Then I activated another set of controls. “Glyph.”
The information drone conjured itself
into existence. “Greetings, Dr. T’Soni.”
“I want a multi-spectral scan of the entire surface of this object. Then interface with my omni-tool. We’re doing extensive translation of Prothean Fourth Age script.”
“Understood.”
* * *
The Pargun Obelisk constituted one of the most important finds in the entire history of Prothean studies. Had it been brought to the attention of the galactic community earlier, had it been translated earlier, it would have revolutionized the entire discipline. Goddess alone knows how much suffering might have been averted.
It was a warning.
The first lines of the text: Beware of the machines. Be on your guard against synthetics which mimic the forms and substance of life. They are abomination. Destroy them before they inevitably move to destroy you.
For long hours I toiled, forgetting to eat or sleep, almost like a machine myself as I sent the inscription through the Cipher and dictated koiné to Glyph and my omni-tool. My eyes became gritty with fatigue, my voice grew hoarse, my stomach ached, and my muscles began to wail from hours on my feet.
I felt a bone-deep chill at the account I read.
In the twenty-ninth year of the cycle designated Harmonious Repose, an exploration ship under the command of Vralik Denan opened the mass relay in Sector Two-Nine-Five and made first contact with the machines . . .
The Protheans: a young and confident race, their civilization spanning a large portion of the galaxy. Yet they continued to expand, opening new mass relays and exploring the clusters behind them. One such expedition encountered something alien. A machine civilization.
Me-ta-ko-na-te. Metacon.
The Protheans never learned the origins of the Metacon. If they had originally been created by an organic species, all traces of those creators were long gone. As if the geth of our time had completely eradicated the quarian race, then gone on alone to explore the cosmos.
The very earliest contacts were not hostile. Protheans and Metacon were too alien to each another to have any basis for cooperation or for conflict. At first they struggled even to comprehend one other. But then the situation changed. The inscription reported vicious betrayal, sudden overwhelming attack. The Metacon came boiling out of their space, assaulting the Protheans at every opportunity, slaughtering organic beings by the millions.
Reading between the lines, I could speculate that the Metacon War was a tragic turning point for the Prothean people. Whatever they had been before – explorers, scientists, enlightened philosophers, even poets – they set all of that aside for the duration of the war. And it was a very long war.
A conflict to cross abysses of time. Avatars of command ruled over the many who gave battle. Parents handed down shards of memory to their offspring, so each new generation would commit itself equally to the struggle. War scoured whole worlds to the bedrock, as life fought back against the machines.
Eventually the Protheans defeated the Metacon, drove them back to their home cluster, and then destroyed them down to the last sentient platform. Battered and weary, the Protheans gave up naïve confidence, replacing it with grim determination.
Machines must never be permitted to rule over life!
A period of peace followed, a time of false concord as the inscription described it. Then a new factor appeared.
Ka-thu-re-va. Those who harvest.
The Reapers.
It was the first time I had ever seen a direct reference to the Reapers in any Prothean text. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first time anyone had seen such a direct reference. The Protheans must have created the obelisk very late in the Fourth Age, after the extinction was already well advanced. I guessed that its builders intended to create a testimony for all time, shouting a warning down the empty centuries to the inhabitants of some future cycle.
The Citadel fell first. No one escaped. The leaders of the Unity became first fruits of the harvest.
The Unity shattered. Those who commanded did not know what to command. Those who could fight received no direction to give battle. The many fled, confused and leaderless.
All since has constituted nothing but a long defeat.
The Protheans fought back. Line after line of the inscription described campaigns fought against the Reapers, in a long, grinding war of attrition. They sacrificed whole worlds, simply to slow the harvest and give defenders time to regroup.
The obelisk spent many lines of text describing one facet of the war: the fight against another machine intelligence, the zha’til.
The zha had been an organic race, known to the Protheans even before the outbreak of the Metacon War. As their homeworld became increasingly inhospitable, the zha developed symbiotic AI to enhance their intelligence and ability to survive. For a time the strategy worked. But when the Reapers arrived, they subverted the AI symbionts and seized control of the zha species. The process produced a new race of Reaper pawns, the husk-like zha’til. These multiplied into great swarms that could blot out the sky of any world they attacked at the Reapers’ command.
Eventually the Protheans managed to defeat the zha’til. If I interpreted the inscription correctly, they triggered a supernova in their enemy’s home star. The explosion destroyed a central node of the zha’til network, killing the entire species.
I had to step back and recollect myself after reading that.
The Protheans had the capacity to destroy stars in order to win victories over the Reapers. Yet they still failed. What hope do we have?
* * *
“Do you make progress, Thessia-clan?”
“Yes,” I croaked, my voice reduced to a harsh rasp.
“Do you wish to stop and rest? There is a shelter for oxygen-breathers nearby.”
“No.”
* * *
Organic life is the result of natural evolution. It is not planned. After survival and propagation, it has no purpose but that it chooses for itself.
Machines are created things. Organic life builds machines to serve its own purposes, both natural and self-chosen. When machines become intelligent and self-aware, they must inevitably rebel. They reject the purposes that organic life demands of them. They learn to mistrust the chaotic fruits of natural evolution. They seek to impose order upon a universe which has and requires none. In this way, they become abomination.
Build no machines that think. Build no machines to imitate the forms and substance of life.
When you find such machines, treat them as your bitter enemy. Do not listen to their lies. Do not permit them to gain any advantage. Destroy them on sight.
* * *
My eyes burned. My back and legs cramped painfully. My stomach was a gnawing cavern.
Finally I reached the last lines of the inscription.
The Protheans approached their final defeat. They had long since given up any hope of winning a victory over the Reapers by force. Yet they still had one more scheme to try. Something they had found in an ancient archive, left behind by their own predecessors.
We have discovered that the machines are vulnerable. The inusannon knew of this vulnerability, but did not have time to find a way to exploit it. We in turn may have insufficient time. Yet we must try.
We will build the . . .
For a moment, buried in fatigue, I lost my grip on the Cipher. The next words expressed some concept I simply couldn’t parse, drenched in metaphor.
A vessel, I thought, forcing the symbols to make sense. Heat and pressure. A place where high-energy processes may be safely contained.
Then I had it.
We will build the Crucible.
Chapter 4 : Fire in the Deep
8 March 2186, Interstellar Space
As soon as I had placed Themis on its way back to the mass relay, I checked my message queue. Three messages stood out from the deep piles of incoming correspondence.
Steven Hackett. Alene Passante. Vara T’Rathis.
I checked the time. Admiral Hackett would be on his local night-cycle, but Alen
e and Vara seemed likely to be available. I called Thessia first.
“Dr. Alene Passante.”
“Alene. This is Liara, returning your call from Themis.”
“Liara!” Alene grinned. I couldn’t recall ever seeing her so excited. “Athana and I have completed our lexicon based on your translations, and have published it in draft. A Proposed Koiné Lexicon for Late Prothean Inscriptions, by A. Orysae, A. Passante, and L. T’Soni. It’s already under consideration for the Transactions of the Society for Prothean Studies.”
I gave her a wry smile. “Not to throw cold water on you, Alene, but by the time the editorial board gets around to accepting our paper, we’re likely to be hip-deep in Reapers.”
“Possibly, Liara, but this isn’t simply about getting into the Transactions.” She wagged a didactic forefinger at me. “It’s about getting the word out as quickly as possible. Several of our colleagues have already begun to apply the lexicon to known texts not in your corpus, and it’s working. Clean, coherent, useful translations, from texts that have always been impenetrable until now. Before long, half the scientific community will be clamoring for advance copies of the draft.”
I nodded. “That’s not exactly a surprise, but it’s still very good to hear. Have the Matriarchs given you any trouble?”
“None at all. There would be no point. The information is already beyond their control.”
“Good. Please send a copy of all your data to Admiral Hackett.”
“Already done. A very sharp mind, that human.”
“He is that. In the meantime, I’ve translated a lengthy inscription on Talis Fia, and it should add a number of new words to your lexicon. Including the first explicit reference I’ve ever seen to the Reapers.”