CHAPTER ONE: DRIFTING

2312. 126 years after the Reaper War.

18 light-years from the Eagle Nebula.

In the wrong direction.

Silver tendrils of interstellar gas reached out like fingers tracing across the port side viewscreens. Half an hour and 100,000 km ago, they had seemed like the branches of a distant, wintry tree; now, they nearly tapped on the windows. Dead ahead, the screens had gone opaque with polarization to block out the intense glare of radiation streaming out from the galactic center.

A tiny, insect-shaped scout ship, bristling with instruments and stabilizers jutting out in every direction, tumbled forward like a moth to a blowtorch. In the pilot seat, Olor Cathax Hora Shanerat Andrin Mosh, a young salarian, was nervous. He watched the aft scanners, and cursed.

His long, thin fingers, in white gloves with bronze-colored stripes of plating to match his hardsuit, poked at the glowing orange control panel. Outside, maneuvering jets spit and sputtered a staccato rhythm. Little vortices swirled out from a row of spaces between two of the ship's curved leg struts, causing the ship to turn lazily as it sped on toward the deadly center of the Milky Way.

"Norus," he was saying, "you will probably never hear this message, but it pleases me greatly that if you ever do, you'll finally give me the chance to tell you..." Mosh poked at the control for the maneuvering thruster again, tapping an angry, semi-random rhythm... "You are a lazy, stupid, ignorant cloaca."

The little ship continued to cut through the clouds of interstellar dust, which roiled and spun in its wake, then filled in behind it such that the trail erased itself after a few seconds. And the ship continued its slide through the haze.

"I also want you to know that I'm well aware this 'honor' you have bestowed on me is why I'm very possibly about to be slaughtered by a ship full of Pillars of Wrath fanatics. Shadow Broker or no, I know you would never have done this job yourself. Did I say cowardly before? You're a coward too, Norus." Mosh fiddled with the controls, then sighed, and took away his hand. He had made all the adjustments he could.

"I'm intentionally heading directly toward the galactic center; I am... oh, shit, only about 4 kiloparsecs from it, so in case their shields are as good as mine, and they catch up to me before my eyeballs boil and my skin melts off, let me just say: fuck you. And in the event they burn up first, but I still can't turn around in time: fuck you. Twice."

Mosh fitted his smooth helmet over the collar of his hardsuit and activated the seals. The extra plating and Foucault currents running through the hull of his small ship were a few orders of magnitude more powerful than the shielding of anything that wasn't military, and most of what was, but he was nervous nonetheless. Not that a hardsuit would be of much additional protection. "Leave a good-looking corpse," went the human expression. Humans are weird, he mused, not for the first time.

His pursuers might have turned back as much as 20 minutes ago; they might be lying in wait, at a presumably-safe distance; they might have been vaporized by now. The only way to know for sure at this point was to turn back, and he was in no hurry to do that. On the other hand... deadly radiation, enough to first turn him into a strip of jerky, and then atomize him entirely.

"Oh, and by the way," he continued, "if I do survive this, we seriously need to figure out just what-"

Mosh's ship was slowing. Stopping. Forward engines were at full-reverse.

"What the hell?," he said out loud. This was not the plan. The plan was for no engines. No emissions. Although, really, in this kind of radiation density, the odds of bloodthirsty batarian death cultists having scanners able to pick him out were not great. Didn't matter, though: mitigate every risk that can be mitigated.

So what was happening? The only thing that could possibly trigger an all-stop despite the programming Mosh had done when he set his course to play chicken with the galaxy's radiation horizon would be a proximity alert, or the collision detection subroutines.

"What. The. Hell?"

And the ship stopped, turning just enough to starboard that Mosh could see out through the port side forward quarter. The tendrils of mist parted. And there, hanging in space less than 10 km away, and utterly dominating the field of view, was a huge metal structure. It looked like a giant, elegant, curved key, with two parallel arms parting gracefully on one end, curving away around a series of concentric rings the size of small cities, then coming together again to stretch out another 10 km or so.

"Stop recording." There was a beep.

A mass relay.

An unknown mass relay.

A dormant, inactive, dead, forgotten, completely unknown mass relay.

Mosh forgot for a moment about the batarians, the radiation, his own impending death. He smiled. No new mass relays had been mapped in over 100 years.

He had no idea how, he had no particular plan in mind, but he knew one thing:

"I am going to be rich."

Mosh wanted to take off his helmet, to get out of the ship, to pace back and forth, to think. He wanted to walk on the surface of the relay, paint his name on a corner of it, maybe.

Wait. One thing at a time.

"Delete recording." There was another beep. "New recording." And another.

"Gorul, this is your cousin Andrin Mosh. We haven't met; you were born shortly before I left Olor. And if you're getting this message, then that means I'm dead. So... sorry we never met, I guess. At the time of this recording, you're a kid in school, and in another 10 years or so, you'll be a productive member of society, maybe working in your father's district, maybe something with the colonies. Or, maybe, you'll be... like me. A little less, how do I say it, maybe you'll be feeling like you're not such a good salarian."

He shifted in his seat. The slow rolling of his ship positioned the hollow, open circle of the relay's giant, perfect rings directly in front of him. He stared through the gap into the endless, dead depths of space.

"Maybe you'll take after my great-great-great grandfather, the one you were named after, the one whose story I've always liked. Anyway, Gorul, whichever way you go, you should know that even though I don't know you, I've always been fond of you. I don't know how much you might be like our forebear, the Gorul who flew on that human ship, but it doesn't matter. This way, if nobody has ever told you his story, you have a reason to seek it out. And you also have this: I'm including position data on something that I want someone - that I want you - to have the chance to turn into a huge profit."

He had now rolled enough that he couldn't see the relay, but he could feel the sheer mass of the thing, almost as if deep in his thin sunken chest, he could feel the pull of its gravity well.

"There's a relay here, Gorul. It's inactive. It doesn't show up on sensors, of course. What I'm looking at right now, no one else could have seen for at least 50,000 years, that's unquestionable. It doesn't appear on any current maps, nor any from before the Reaper War. Likely, the Protheans didn't know about it either, which means 100,000 years, or more... Nobody should be this close to the galactic center, so maybe the relay got knocked out of place? Whatever. Point is, new relays still aren't happening, and finding one is about the biggest-"

The recording paused automatically with a ping from the aft sensors, and the readout blipped a few lines of data. The ship that had been pursuing him was now three large and 31 small pieces of debris, fanning out along the previous trajectory. Mosh blinked.

The relay rolled back into view again. Mosh fired the maneuvering jets, to hold his ship steady and keep the relay in the middle of his viewport.

"Delete recording."

He triple-checked his measurements and readings, encrypted the information right there and then, and turned his ship around.