The images on the vid changed, now showing the face of Commander Shepard. The first human Spectre, Shepard had been instrumental in defeating Saren and his geth… or so the official reports claimed.

The Illusive Man couldn't help but wonder how much those official reports left out. He knew there was more to the attack than a rogue turian Spectre leading an army of geth against the Council. There was Sovereign, for one, Saren's magnificent flagship. The vids maintained it was a geth creation, but only the blind or the foolish would accept that explanation. Any vessel able to withstand the combined power of the Alliance and Council fleets was too advanced, too far beyond the capabilities of any other ship in the galaxy, to have been created by any of the known species.

It was clear there were certain things those in charge didn't want the general public to know. They were afraid of causing a panic; they were spinning the facts and distorting the truth while they began the long, slow process of hunting down and exterminating the last pockets of geth resistance scattered across Council space. But Cerberus had people in the Alliance. High-ranking people. In time, every classified detail of the attack would filter down to the Illusive Man. It might take weeks, maybe even months, before he knew the whole truth. But he could wait. He was a patient man.

Yet he couldn't deny these were interesting times. For the past decade, the three species seated on the Council — salarians, turians, and asari — had fought to keep humanity at bay, slamming door after door in its face. Now those doors had been blown off their hinges. The Citadel forces had been decimated by the geth, leaving the Alliance fleet unchallenged as the galaxy's single most dominant power. Even the Council, fundamentally unchanged for nearly a thousand years, had been radically restructured.