The Council door slammed open and a young turian rushed in, nearly tripping over himself. He panted, running into the chamber, a datapad in his hand.

“Councilor Vakarian! Councilor Vakarian.

The turian councilor looked away from the hologram that he and the other council members were addressing, and then sighed in embarrassment.

“What is the meaning of this?” said the salarian councilor, angrily turning toward Garrus. “This is a closed session- -”

“Councilor Vakarian!” wheezed the younger turian. “A mass relay…it…oh wow,” he bent over, putting his hands on his knees.

“Calm down,” said Garrus. “What is it?”

The younger turian stood erect. “Sir, a report just came in…mass relay M67, it’s been…it’s been destroyed, sir.”

The Council was silent for a moment. Then the salarian spoke. “Forgive us if we find that difficult to believe.”

“I have the report from long-range surveillance,” said the turian, transferring the file from his datapad to theirs. “Direct from the Relay Surveilance Network. It was just there, and then…gone.”

The asari councilor shifted in her heavy robes and looked toward Garrus. In the dim light of the Council chambers, Garrus caught the reflection of the wisps of Reaper technology that crossed her face. “Is not M67 one of the relays in geth space?”

Garrus groaned and put his face in his hand. “Crap…Va’Geth is going to have my head for this…”

“Excuse me,” said the salarian councilor, as perturbed as ever. “That sort of language is not appropriate for the council chambers!”

“My apologies,” said Garrus, not to the salarian but to holographic representation of an asari that they had been talking too just prior.

The young turian turned to his left, for the first time realizing that he was standing next to a life-sized rendering of an asari in a low-cut shirt. She looked down at him, not especially pleased.

“Intern Balius,” said Garrus, “meet Aria T’Loak.”

The turian intern’s eyes widened and he stepped back suddenly. “A- -Aria? Th- -THE Aria? Queen of Omega?”

“‘Queen’ implies I can be deposed,” she replied, her voice measured and distorted slightly by transmission halfway across the galaxy. “So I’m not a queen. I am Omega.”

The intern blubbered for a moment, clearly terrified and unable to react in any way that was remotely appropriate.

Balius,” said Garrus, carefully. The intern looked up at him, the only familiar turian face in the room. “Thank you for this information. You can go now.”

“Y- -yes sir, Councilor Vakarian.”

“Next time, knock. And get some exercise! When I was your age, I was chasing criminals all over this place, not getting winded from a two hundred meter sprint.”

“Y…yes, sir.”

The intern turned around and tried to walk out of the chambers calmly, only to resort to a kind of awkward running, as though he had just barely managed to escape some horrible fate.

“My apologies, Aria,” said Garrus.

Aria shrugged. “At least he’s trying to help. I just had publically execute a third of my staff for blatant disloyalty, so it’s good to see someone at least TRYING to do a good job.”

“Please forgive us, Aria,” said the asari councilor, checking the information pedestal that stood before her and quickly reviewing the information. “But the potential destruction of a mass relay demands our urgent attention.”

“Not a problem,” said Aria, crossing her arms over her chest and looking slightly disappointed. “I said what I came here to say.” Her gaze shifted toward Garrus. “Until next time, ‘Councilor Vakarian’.”

Her hologram fizzled and faded as she cut it from her own side, not waiting for the Council to disconnect her.

“Such a rude little thing,” said the salarian councilor.

“Yes, so rude. Don’t you just hate rude people, Diagalor?”

“Indeed.”

For just a moment, Garrus saw a thin smile cross Councilor Falare’s face before she pretended to be adjusting her hood and suppressed it. Garrus fell into step with Falare as Diagalor lead the way toward the Council’s inner chamber. For some reason, Diagalor insisted that she always be the first to enter any room unless protocol strictly forbade it. Garrus did not much care, seeing it as just another bizarre example of salarian political posturing. Diagalor was, after all, the only one of them who had actually spent much time being a true politician.

“Today has not been a good day,” said Diagalor, her voice clicking rapidly between words in standard staccato salarian speech. “First T’Loak comes to her bi-monthly report with stories about talking horses, and now we have to deal with a rumor about a damaged mass relay. Not good at all.”

“That’s just how it goes,” said Garrus. “At least something interesting is finally happening.”

“You would say that, Vakarian. But this job is not about unexpected things. Unexpected things are always bad.

“As long as we deal with them instead of trying to suppress the truth. Can’t think of a Council that ever tried that one, though.”

The salarian grumbled, or made a sound that was the salarian equivalent of grumbling. She tapped the hologram interface on the inner chamber door and opened the door to the large conference room that served as a place for private deliberations. The room, as always, was immaculately clean and perfect. The air was fresh and scented exactly as one would expect a large government office to smell. Garrus had no idea how they made it smell so stuffy.

As the two other councilors took their seats around the round, central table, Garrus braced himself for another long, boring discussion where Diagalor would mostly talk without stopping about boring procedural things for hours. It was days like this where Garrus wondered why he had ever accepted this position. At his age and with his history, he could have retired or even taught on Palaven. Some days he wished he could just sit and do calibrations instead of dealing with the life of a politician.

“You should really train your staff better, Vakarian,” said Diagalor. “M67 is a minor relay far in geth space. Aria would never have known if your intern had been more discrete.”

“Do you really think something Aria would not have found out?” said Falare, tilting slightly toward Diagalor. Diagalor recoiled just slightly, but enough for a trained investigator like Garrus to notice. Falare was generally soft-spoken, but for some reason- -a reason that Garrus was all-too familiar with- -almost everyone was terrified of her.

“Aria is…I never thought I’d be the one saying this, but she’s our ally,” said Garrus, feeling sick at having to say that. “She’s our main contact for leveraging reconciliation with the baterian government.”

“That does not mean we need to be liberal with critical information. Not until this rumor is either confirmed or determined to be unfounded.”

“It is hardly a rumor.” Falare displayed the information as a hologram in the center of the table. “We did not simply lose contact with the relay. Internal diagnostics indicated that it underwent cataclysmic damage before failing.”

“And these readings will need to be reviewed before conformation can be made. There is still a possibility that the report is in error. A failure of the surveillance system.”

“A failure?” Garrus leaned forward. “Didn’t your people design the system?”

Diagalor’s large, reflective black eyes flitted toward Garrus. “Salarian engineering is beyond reproach, but flaws are still possible. I recommend further study.”

“Falare, the relay should have taken a scan before it was destroyed.” Garrus opened his own omnitool and accessed the file. The floating information over the center of the table shifted and was replaced by a number of small model ships. Garrus instantly recognized a number of them as geth. What stood out, though, was a swarm of unidentified vessels pouring out of what seemed like a massive carrier.”

“What is that?” said Diagalor, her voice dropping as her natural salarian curiosity overcame her obligatory caution.

“The bigger question,” said Garrus, leaning back in his chair. “Is what the hell kind of a weapon is powerful enough to destroy an entire mass relay?”

The room fell silent for a moment, and the three of them just stared at the hologram of that single enormous ship.

“This…this is unprecedented,” said Diagalor at last.

“Is it?” said Falare. She turned to Garrus. “This is not the first time unknown vessels have arrived from darkspace.”

Diagalor’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean- -”

“Not even the Reapers destroyed mass relays, though. They needed them to move between systems, just like we do.”

“You’re not implying that whatever that is can move long distances WITHOUT a relay?”

“I’m not implying anything. But how did it get there? Don’t you think the geth would have noticed something like that sooner?”

“The geth may have constructed it.”

“No,” said Falare. “The geth would not build something that fights their own fleet and destroys their own relays. This is something else.” She opened a different file, a grainy piece of security footage given to the Council by Aria. It showed a grimy, unpleasant hallway on Omega. At first it was just a hallway, and then a pair of quadrupeds appeared. One was small and winged, while the other was larger with a prominent horn. They appeared to be talking.

“What is this?” said Diagalor. “This has nothing to do with the destruction of the relay!”

“A new alien race appears on the galactic outskirts, according to Aria as identifying themselves as part of a navy. Not three days later, an unfamiliar vessel appears out of apparently nowhere and destroys a mass relay. This may not be coincidence.”

“There is no such thing as coincidence,” said Garrus, watching the loop of the quadrupeds on repeat. They were, arguably, adorable- -or at least the small one was- -but he could not overlook the possibility that they were linked. “This is exactly what the Relay Surveillance Network was designed to detect. I know we are all thinking it. This is an incursion, and possibly even the start of an invasion.”

“We don’t know that!”

“I’m not going down that road again,” said Garrus, harshly. “I saw the same thing seventeen years ago. We had warnings. Sovereign, the Collectors- -and the Council refused to act until it was too late.”

“But we can’t rush action! We don’t have enough information! If we move now, without knowing, we could make the situation infinitely worse!”

“I recommend we speak to our Benefactor,” said Falare, immediately freezing the argument between the other two.

“Seconded,” said Garrus.

“I do not believe that we need to bother him with something so…nebulous.”

“Really? Okay, then. Who else here knows how to rebuild a mass relay? Anybody?”

Digalor fell silent. “Fine.”

Garrus opened his omnitool and looked to Falare. She very gently nodded, and he started to enter the information necessary to open the quantum channel.

The lights in the room dimmed slightly, and the hologram in the center of the table vanished. It was then promptly replaced by a new one, a number of abstract geometric blue lines scrawling their way across the surface of the table, eventually resolving into a shape resembling something like a large insect. Then, in the center, a pair of lights ignited. A pair of staring, unblinking eyes.

“Connection established,” said a deep voice, one that appeared to echo with the voices of hundreds if not thousands of others beneath it. “Why have I been contacted?”

Falare stood and addressed the hologram. It did not turn; with the way the eyes were projected, it stared at them all simultaneously. “We have received information that a mass relay has been destroyed by an unknown force.”

The Benefactor paused for a moment. “It has,” he confirmed. “That relay is comparatively minor to interstellar travel, but I will begin repairs as soon as possible.”

“So you had nothing to do with its destruction?” asked Diagalor, feigning confidence.

“No,” said the Benefactor, somewhat annoyed. “We have no reason to destroy a relay. However, it is disconcerting that one has been lost.”

“That’s the problem,” said Garrus. “We believe we found the ship responsible. So far, we have no idea what it is.”

“I have seen it as well.”

“And?”

“And I cannot identify it either. We do not recognize it. Which implies that it may be of extraglactic origin.”

“Extragalactic- -you can’t be serious! The technology to reach other galaxies simply does not exist! The relay that one would need- -”

“Would be the size of the Citadel?” suggested Garrus.

“The vessel in question did not arrive through a mass relay,” said the Benefactor.

“That is ludicrous!” cried Diagalor.

“And irrelevant,” said Garrus. “I don’t care how it got here. I want to know how to get rid of it.”

“Still the same Garrus,” said the Benefactor. “So very practical minded.”

“Can you remove it?”

“I could. But how do you think the galaxy would react to see my fleet moving through space? You would have a panic. No. This requires engaging with local vessels. Mobilize the Council Defense fleet.”

“I believe that decision is ours to make, not yours,” said Diagalor.

The Benefactor turned his full attention onto the salarian, who recoiled in fear. “It is my decision. This Council only exists because I allow it to exist. You were only elected because I CHOSE you to be elected, and you only remain on MY Citadel because I allow you to. This institution exists to allow me to control the galaxy, because you have shown yourselves incapable of doing so. Or, if you insist on doubting me, would you like the salarian seat on the council to end up as the human one did?”

“N- -no, Benefactor. My apologies.”

The Benefactor turned toward Garrus. “And you. I expect you to stay here. Continue to govern. I know it is hard, and boring. God do I know. But I don’t want to see you leading the charge against these aliens.”

Garrus smiled. “What would ever make you think I would do that?”

“Because I want to do the same thing right now. And because even under that face paint and expensive robes, I know that deep down, some part of you is still Archangel.”

“You bet your ass it is.”

“Unfortunately, it seems I no longer have one.” He turned to address the Council as a whole. “We will not engage unless we have to. Treat this with the utmost care. A galactic war could hang in the balance.”

The hologram flickered, and then vanished as the Benefactor cut the channel. The Councilors looked at each other.

Garrus sighed. “Seventeen years of peace. I wonder if that’s all we get?”
 

Author's Notes:

Sorry, folks. No ponies in this chapter.