The start of my third life matched the bleakness my second one had ended on.
Objectively, it was significantly worse. though for me personally, it was little different than having Being X trying - and failing - to prove its inherently illogical point.
Had I avoided a pointless death during an attack on the Russy Federation's capital - an almost beat for beat repeat of one of my feats earlier in the war - I would have still had hope to see the end of the Great War.
It would not have lasted forever. Eventually, the war would have ended. Probably in the Empire's defeat, but it would have ended all the same.
It was not a war of extermination. It might have been an existential war for the Empire's existence, but not for the people living in it or its cultures.
It was navigable - stressful and dangerous though it may have been.
Here, there was no such hope. Nobody knew why the Reapers were exterminating advanced life in the galaxy, only that they did so as part of a cycle - on average, they swept the galaxy every fifty thousand years. We didn't even know what they were actually called, 'Reaper' was the Prothean name for them. The only thing we knew for sure was that the war against the Reapers would end in our deaths.
Nothing more, nothing less. The past two hundred years resisting them had shown that.
To some degree, what remained of Prothean leadership was counting on that.
One day, the Reapers would determine that the Prothean Empire was exterminated and return to dark space to wait for the beginning of the next cycle. Once they did, the hidden Prothean remnants would emerge and rebuild, preparing for the inevitable confrontation in the next cycle.
For my part, I could respect the Protheans' tenacity. As hopeless as the situation seemed, I would do my part to resist as well.
I had died twice now resisting a being that called itself God. What was one more time?
Not that I had much choice, given the circumstances.
I had not known my parents in this life - protheans were either long past the point of family units being viable or this species never had that custom, I didn't know which.
And neither did they. Their worlds had been more or less completely cut off from each other for over two centuries. The colony of Vythorik was lucky that there were not larger or more critical holes in its knowledge base.
Even so, Vythorik didn't have many options for resisting the Reapers, aside from time.
The plan for the colony was to train up a million personnel to act as the cadre for a conventional conquest of the galaxy after the Reapers went back to hibernation. The rest of the population would be consigned to death, to sell to the Reapers that Vythorik had been scoured.
It didn't seem like a good plan to me. The sheer waste of it was abhorrent. Nearly ten million feverishly productive civilians written off as part of a strategic deception, one that didn't seem to have a particularly high chance of success.
I could be objective, however. Conventional resistance now was essentially impossible. Any chance of doing so had been lost over two centuries ago when the Reapers shattered the Empire in the opening days. If the Protheans could have attained local superiority anywhere, less wasteful plans might be viable. Unfortunately, the relay network - the FTL transit system that allowed near instantaneous travel across thousands of light-years - was completely locked down.
This plan had a much higher potential upswing, even if it were a long shot.
Of course, no one had asked for my opinion on the plan. In fact, by the time I had been born, the plan had been in progress for nearly ten years. I had been raised as a part of the plan.
I had volunteered for the Imperial Army as Tanya. Here, I didn't even have that much choice.
I had been put into a creche that eventually saw me assigned to this hibernation force as one of the overall commander's direct subordinates.
That assignment had primarily been due to my talent for command - carried over from my second life, but also because I was an anomaly.
Protheans had an innate ability to interact with the nervous systems of others - it was not restricted just to other protheans. What they called Transference was a strange ability that allowed us to share information, up to and including complex concepts or memories as visions. To an extent, information could be taken with this ability as well.
Because this ersatz psychometry was two-way, even much of their technology made use of this ability.
This did mean that protheans had a tendency to grow up fast. Both out of necessity and because sharing experience was quite literal for them.
While my specific situation was unique, it was not unheard of for extremely young protheans to have what seemed to be vast amounts of unearned life experience.
The most common reason for that were adult protheans sharing too much too fast and, in effect, creating a personality clone. Over time, the younger prothean's own personality would reassert itself, but the concept still seemed rather nightmarish to me.
It gave a good cover for my situation though.
Protheans were also able to resist this ability to some extent if they felt so inclined, so the specifics of my seemingly unearned life experience were not known, aside from the outward and indirect signs of them.
That it had also put me in a position to exercise some agency was all to the good.
Still, I would have preferred an approach that didn't essentially require being obliterated at a specific time.
***
The bunker's klaxons told me that the plan had been foiled before it could really start.
Vythorik was a colony of little relevance.
Had the Reapers followed their axis of advance, it would have been at least another decade before they reached Vythorik in any kind of numbers.
The colony's defensive flotilla was not entirely helpless and had destroyed a few Reapers that were acting independently over the years since I had been born. The thirty or so Reapers descending to the planet's surface had swept them aside with contemptuous ease.
"Damnit!" Javik said sharply, "we are not ready."
The commander was only a few years older than this body's twenty-one. At most, he was thirty. To my thinking, he was too impulsive for the responsibility that had been given to him.
Regardless, had this force arrived when it had been projected to, we would have already been in hibernation and hidden in this bunker. It was nearly a hundred kilometers away from the nearest population center and carefully constructed to be undetectable by sensor array. Victory, an optimistically named virtual intelligence, would have managed the bunker's systems while we were indisposed and thawed us out when the Reapers were back in dark space.
Javik glared at the command console for another moment before turning to us, his twenty senior-most officers. Each of us held the rank of prefect, a nonstandard rank within the Empire's military that acted as advisors to a supreme commander and represented them when they were not available.
"Victory has already sent the signal for those not already within the bunker to return. We must hold until our force is accounted for," he said.
"That will take days, Commander. Refugees fleeing the cities could find us here in that time, shall we turn them away?" Prefect Khadir asked.
Javik considered the question, "no, we will allow them entry. Our forces will have surely taken casualties in their efforts to get here. Turning them away will go towards replacing those losses."
Reluctantly, I spoke, "Commander, this is a mistake. We should preserve what forces we have and seal the bunker. If the Reapers were aware of this installation specifically, they would have attacked it directly. We risk everything by deviating from the plan."
"This attack has come years early, we must have as close to our full strength as possible," Khadir replied, "the projections are clear, one million is the minimum, otherwise our population growth will be too slow to reconquer the galaxy at the required pace." He checked the console, "we do not even have a tenth of that."
"If we commit to this course of action, we will be discovered or infiltrated," argued Seperek, "and then we will have nothing!"
I nodded in agreement. There were plenty of ways to make up our lack of numbers when we weren't under threat.
"Enough," Javik cut in before the argument could escalate, "my decision is made. We will save as many of our people as possible." He looked at each of us before he continued, "two days. We will seal the bunker in two days."
I nodded, as did the rest of the prefects. Internally, I was seething.
It seemed another pointless death awaited me.
***
"Kryneri," Javik said over the radio.
"Yes, Commander?" I asked.
"Have your soldiers assume defensive positions at the gates. I have ordered everyone else to their lifepods," he ordered.
I hesitated. Getting everyone back to the bunker had been entirely too easy. Almost all of our soldiers had made it, along with an extra one hundred thousand refugees.
I found it impossible to believe that our activity had not been noted. Yes, the militias across the planet were selling their lives dearly to give us the chance to evade detection, but it still seemed like the personnel heading here were allowed to.
Some of them should have failed to arrived, either intercepted by intention or bad luck.
Javik attributed our apparent good fortunate to the astounding arrogance the Reapers had occasionally shown. I wanted to believe that, but I could not.
If nothing else, our ability to detect indoctrination was not perfect. The signs of the Reapers' brute force mind control were usually quite obvious if one knew the individual in question or if they were at an advanced stage, but they were not always so easy to pick out.
I was very concerned that some had slipped through.
I activated my command console and sent the order to my soldiers. "It is done, Commander."
"Good. We will monitor the situation. There is not much left of the colony, the Reapers will not linger long."
"I understand, Commander."
After he cut the connection, I spent hours cycling through the internal cameras, carefully monitoring activity within the bunker for anomalies. My soldiers were far too well trained to need me hovering over them as they guarded chokepoints.
Prothean VIs were extremely limited, otherwise I would have used it for this purpose. The easiest way to make them involved using our innate ability to essentially create an engram to pattern them off of, but this had a worrying tendency to create VI's that seemed a little too close to sapience.
These VIs were crippled as a result of those concerns. Victory, for instance, monitored for indoctrination, acted as a voice activated controller for certain functions within the bunker, monitored life signs and would work to preserve the bunker while we were hibernating.
Anything outside of that scope, such as what I was doing, was almost impossible for it.
I was at the ragged edge of functional due to a lack of rest, but I finally found what I was looking for.
People, where they weren't supposed to be any.
"Victory, lock down the corridor leading to the southern powerplant," I ordered.
"Unable to comply, Prefect Kryneri, remote controls are inoperable," it replied. "Alert - outer gates are unsealing."
I restrained a curse and alerted Javik, "Commander, the outer gates are unsealing and there are personnel forcing entry into the southern powerplant."
"I am nearby, heading to the powerplant now," he replied almost immediately.
I switched to my units' channels and ordered the perimeter to prepare for contact. I then ordered my reserve force to break off into battalions and secure the bunker's four powerplants.
On the camera feed, I watched as the assailants forced the bulkhead open and head into the powerplant's control room.
Minutes later, Commander Javik entered the corridor with his small protective detail.
"Warning," Victory said, "power surges detected in southern quadrant - triaging."
Javik and his team stormed into the control room moments later.
I switched to the cameras observing the perimeter gates and saw a small trickle of Reaper constructs being steadily destroyed by my troops.
We didn't have much time before more enemy forces arrived. My technicians and Victory were working to reassert control of the outer gates, but it would likely be necessary to activate one of the more destructive countermeasures to make the Reapers believe that this facility was destroyed.
I left the control room and headed to the western gate to assist more directly.
"The eastern gate is sealed, Prefect," one of my subordinates reported. While my technicians worked to seal the western gate, the stream of enemy forces increased sharply in quantity.
The morbid constructs of the Reapers attacked us continuously for an hour. If we have vehicles and heavier weapons, we would have been able to hold indefinitely until the Reapers themselves attacked. Unfortunately, we only had biotics and small arms. That heavier equipment had been stored only as schematics. We had planned on rebuilding our industrial base after we emerged from hibernation.
As it was, we were nearly overrun by the time my technicians managed to close the gate.
Javik came over the radio minutes later to say that the southern gate had been closed.
Our efforts were rendered moot when my battalion commander at the northern gate came over the radio to warn us that they had been overrun. Javik ordering everyone to the north gate was too late to change that.
"The bunker is compromised, all personnel to your lifepods," Victory said over the bunker's intercom.
I and the soldiers with me ran to the nearest lifepods and scrambled in. Once it sealed, I could only feel the motion of the conveyor. That sensation of motion was briefly overpowered by the rumbling of the purge destroying the hostile forces in the facility.
My suits radio was quiet save for the static caused by the bombardment Victory had just subjected the bunker's internals to.
"Victory, status?" I asked.
"Commander Javik and all twenty prefects are accounted for. Additional personnel numbers approximately thirty-five thousand, four hundred fifty-two."
"... Acknowledged," I said. We had come out ahead. If we had sealed the bunker when I had recommended it, we would have had twenty thousand.
"The bunker has sustained severe damage. Critical systems are compromised. Automated reactivation will not be possible."
I sighed as the lifepod's systems put me into stasis. Never mind, we hadn't come out ahead.
I couldn't muster much surprise at how this had turned out.
***
I awoke to an idyllic blue sky, bleary eyed and entirely numb.
a/n: There is a poll up for selecting the story for secondary attention after Spite.