drawing together to transform the Citadel from a five-armed star into a long cylindrical tube. Once the arms were closed, the station was all but impregnable.
The final layer of protection was provided by the Council Fleet, a joint force of turian, salarian, and asari vessels that was always on patrol in the vicinity. It only took Anderson a few seconds to pick out the flagship, the Destiny Ascension. An asari dreadnought, the Ascension was more than just a majestic symbol of the Council’s power. Four times the size of anything in the human fleet, and with a crew approaching five thousand, the Destiny Ascension was the most formidable warship ever constructed. Like the Citadel itself, it was without peer.
Of course, the ships of the Council Fleet were not the only vessels in the area. The Serpent Nebula was the nexus of the galaxy’s mass relay network — all roads eventually led to the Citadel. Traffic here was constant and crowded: this was one of the few places in all the galaxy where there was a real threat of crashing into another vessel.
Congestion was particularly heavy at the free-floating discharge stations. Generating the mass effect fields necessary to run at FTL speeds caused a powerful charge to build up inside a ship’s drive core. Left unchecked the core would oversaturate, resulting in a massive energy burst being released through the hull — a burst powerful enough to cook anyone on board who wasn’t properly grounded, burn out all electronic systems, and even fuse the metal bulkheads.
To prevent such a calamity most ships were required to discharge their drive cores every twenty to thirty hours. Typically this was done by grounding on a planet or dispersing the buildup through close proximity to the magnetic field of a large stellar body, such as a sun or gas giant. However, there were
no astrological bodies of sufficient size in the nearby vicinity of the Citadel. Instead, a ring of specially designed docking stations allowed ships to link in and release the energy in their drive cores before continuing on using conventional sub-FTL drives.
Fortunately, the Hastings had discharged her core when she’d first arrived in the region over an hour ago. Since then she’d been in a holding pattern, patiently waiting for the clearance they had only just now received.
Anderson didn’t need to worry about the crew’s performance on a routine approach like this; they’d done it hundreds of times before. Instead, he just shut his mind off and enjoyed the view as the Citadel drew slowly closer, looming ever larger in the viewport. The lights from the wards twinkled and shone; their piercing illumination a counterpoint to the hazy, swirling brightness of the nebula cloud that served as the backdrop to the scene.
“It’s beautiful.”
Anderson jumped, startled by the voice coming from right behind him. Gunnery Chief Dah laughed. “Sorry, Lieutenant. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Anderson glanced down at the bandages and walking brace that encased her leg from the upper thigh all
the way down to her ankle.
“You’re getting pretty good on that thing, Chief. I didn’t even hear you sneaking up on me.” She shrugged. “Medic said I’m going to make a complete recovery. I owe you one.”
“That’s not how it works,” Anderson replied with a smile. “I know you’d have done the same for me.” “I like to think so, sir. But thinking it and doing it aren’t the same. So… thanks.”
“Don’t tell me you came all the way up here from the infirmary just to thank me.” She grinned. “Actually, I came to see if you’d give me another piggyback ride.”
“Forget it,” Anderson replied with a laugh. “I nearly threw my back out hauling your ass out of there. You really need to shed a few pounds.”
“Careful, sir,” she warned, lifting her braced leg an inch off the floor. “I can deliver a pretty good kick with this thing.”
Anderson turned back to the viewport, grinning. “Just shut up and enjoy the view, Dah. That’s an order.” “Yes, sir.”
It only took a few minutes for Anderson to clear customs after they landed. They had touched down at an Alliance port, and military personnel were given top priority whenever they came in from a mission. The Citadel security officers checked his Alliance ID and verified it by scanning his thumbprint, then gave a cursory check of the pack carrying his personal belongings before waving him through. Anderson was pleased to see they were both human; last month there had still been a few salarian officers assigned to the Alliance ports due to species staff shortages. C-Sec had promised to recruit more humans into
their ranks; it looked like they’d been true to their word.
Leaving the ports behind, he stepped onto the elevator that would bring him up to the main level. He yawned once; now that he was off duty the fatigue he’d been holding at bay during the entire mission began to wash over him. He couldn’t wait to get back to his private residence in the wards. Considering how much time he spent on patrol, it could be argued that paying rent for an apartment on the Citadel
was an extravagant expense. But he felt it was important to have a place he could call his own, even if he was only home one week out of four.
The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and Anderson stepped out into the pandemonium of light and sound that was the wards. Throngs of people filled the pedways, individuals of every species coming and going in all directions. Rapid-transit cars zoomed by overhead on the monorail, each one filled with commuters, students, and general gawkers taking the high-speed tour. The lower streets were packed with smaller ground-transport vehicles weaving in and out of the designated thoroughfares, each driver in more of a hurry than the last. It was always rush hour on the Citadel.
Fortunately he didn’t need to flag a driver down or head to a transit stop. His apartment was only twenty minutes away by foot, so he simply hiked his gear up over his shoulder and fell in with the mob, jostling and shoving with the rest of the maddening crowds.
As he walked, his senses were under constant assault from an endless stream of electronic advertisements. Everywhere he looked there were flashing holographic images, futuristic billboards promoting a thousand different companies on a hundred different worlds. Food, beverages, vehicles, clothes, entertainment: on the Citadel, everything was available for purchase. However, only a handful of the ads were geared specifically to humans; they were still a minority on the station, and corporations preferred to spend their advertising dollars on species with a larger market share. But with each passing month Anderson noticed more and more of his own kind among the hustling, bustling masses.
Anderson knew that it was important for humans to integrate themselves with the rest of the interstellar community. What better place to do it than the Citadel, where all the disparate cultures in Council space were on display? That was the real reason Anderson kept his apartment in the wards. He wanted to understand the other species, and the quickest way to do that was to live among them.
He reached his building, pausing at the main door to speak his name so the voice recognition system would let him in. His apartment was on the second level, so he eschewed the elevator and lugged his pack up the staircase. At the door to his personal quarters he again gave his name, then staggered into
the room and dropped his gear in the center of the floor. He was too tired to turn on the lights as he made his way through the small kitchen to the single bedroom at the back; barely registering the faint whoosh as the apartment door automatically closed behind him. When he reached the bedroom he didn’t even bother to undress — he simply collapsed on the bed, exhausted but glad to be home.
Anderson woke several hours later. Night and day meant little in the perpetual activity of the Citadel, but when he rolled over to check the clock by his bed the digital readout said 17:00. On human colonies and out on patrol the Alliance still used the familiar twenty-four-hour clock based on Terran Coordinated Universal Time, the protocol established in the late twentieth century to replace the archaic Greenwich Mean Time system. On the Citadel, however, everything operated on the galactic standard of a twenty- hour day. To further complicate things, each hour was divided into one hundred minutes of one hundred seconds… but each second was roughly half as long as the ones humans were used to.
The net result was that the twenty-hour galactic standard day was about fifteen percent longer than the twenty-four-hour day as calculated by Terran Coordinated Universal Time. Just thinking about it made Anderson’s head hurt, and it played havoc with his sleep patterns. This was to be expected, given that he’d been preconditioned by several million years of Terran evolution.
Three more hours and the day would roll into tomorrow, when he was supposed to present himself to the ambassador for a debriefing on Sidon. He didn’t have to be there until 10:00, however, which meant that he had
