The Reapers, also known as those who harvest , and by the Batarians as Death's Collectors , were an ancient race of space-dwelling nation-state machines. Every fifty millennia, they would wake from their lumbering sleep in the dark space between galaxies and travel to the Milky Way galaxy, where they would, true to their name, reap the technological and biological advantages of all the dominant galactic life-forms, scouring all intelligent life from every surface in the galaxy.
Then, as galactic civilization was driven back to pre-industrialization levels of development, they would leave the seeds for the next harvest; readily available technological caches, taken from the harvested civilizations, lay ready to guide the next cycle of crops into using the immense power of the Mass Relay network that spanned the galaxy. Perhaps, a philosophically inclined Reaper nation-body had proposed, given enough time the nascent aliens would develop their own alternatives to the Mass Relays, giving them the independence to travel the galaxies just as the Reapers did.
Perhaps, a less philosophically inclined Reaper nation-body had suggested, that did not matter at all when the breeding grounds were wiped clean every 50,000 years – they might as well expect the bacteria and algae that covered their joints to invent fire!
This thought caused much amusement among the Reapers.
Dependent on the network of Mass Relays, the multi-planetary polities of the aliens would naturally take advantage of the immense rotating habitat in the Serpent Nebula, the Citadel; always disguised as a relic of the last civilization to be harvested, the gigantic cylinder sat at the heart of the Mass Relay network, making it a cornerstone of interstellar trade and diplomacy – and the natural hear of galactic government.
At the beginning of each cycle of harvest, the Reapers would travel to the Citadel and decapitate the galactic government and hold the central hub of the Mass Relay network, leaving the planets in the branching arms ripe for the pickings.
At least, in theory…
Mass Effect: Galaxy War
A Mass Effect AU
Lieutenant John Shepard of the Galactic Marines, Fifth Earth Army Group inspected his weapons. With expert care, he dug a spoonful of burnt dust out of the radiator of his assault rifle, while his watchful eyes scanned over one of the squads under his command. When he'd been on peacekeeping mission in the Skyllian Verge, all but the senior officers had been human – here, near the front, spec-ops units like his were all mixed-species. The squad to his left was commanded by a salarian, and the assault team was all krogan, commanded by a battlemaster named Wrex. While the ephemeral, salamander-like salarians in the squad were short and covered in light vacuum suits with only a protective vest to hold of fire once their mass effect shields were overloaded, the krogans were covered in thick layers of synthetic armour filled with ablative plates – they carried assault rifles that were almost as powerful as the bipod-mounted machine-gun one of the humans – Ashley Williams – carried. And although their heat-sinks were smaller, salarian engineers had mounted a whole shotgun on the underside of the barrel.
Every assault team on the shuttle had all-krogan assault teams – even the turians themselves sometimes used the massive bulk of the species from Tutchanka to hold the line against the damned succubae's el-kor front line troops.
Shepard shuddered. Elcor.
Back on Earth, he'd once visited a zoo. He'd seen some of the few last remaining members of the species gorilla and elephant – both species that had been killed by the nuclear warheads that had rained over Africa and Asia during the Liberation. In the quiet moments they caught for themselves, Ashley used to talk about her uncle, who'd worked as a veterinarian after the Liberation, and how he was always on the verge of tears when he'd told them stories about lions and gazelles, species that didn't exist at all anymore. At the age of six, Shepard had been mesmerized by the sheer size of even a young elephant – they'd easily dwarfed him, and even his father.
The elcor were like gorillas, with all their strength and muscle, the size of small elephants. They were not mesmerizing, they were simply terrifying. They looked more like tanks than aliens, a simile helped by the vehicle-graded cannons they carried on their back – though the blue demons couldn't field them in the same numbers the Hierarchy could field krogan, they were still a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield.
With a cautious look at Ashley, Shepard hoped they wouldn't face any elcor in battle today – though he knew that hoping was pointless; the Asari Empire relied as much upon elcor as the Turian Hierarchy relied upon krogan.
The transport ship Shepard's platoon was riding lurched as it accelerated. From the HUD in his helmet, Shepard could see the ship's itinerary mapped out towards the Exodus Relay – they were just minutes from the anchored megastructure now – and minutes from entering the fray. Him and half the Fifth Earth Army Group, as well as more krogan, salarians and countless other alien species he'd be hard-pressed to even name; quarian refugee-soldiers, batarian defectors, drell heretics…
"In four minutes we approach the Exodus Relay", he began over the platoon radio channel "Once we arrive in the Serpent Nebula, we will no longer be in the Turian Hierarchy. We'll be in the middle of a battleground that has not seen peace for two thousands years. I'm not going to lie to you – this won't be an easy fight – but we are Galactic Marines, and the Galactic Marines have always made the hierarchy and its allies proud!"
He paused to take a deep breath, feeling the warmth of his words spread even to his own body.
"When the salarian shadow councils oppressed their people, it was the Salarian Freedom Front who held the line, and it was the Galactic Marines who came to their rescue!"
The salarians in Shepard's platoon made enthusiastic cheers.
"And when the krogan warlords burned their own planet with nuclear fire out of petty jealousy, it was the Galactic Marines who helped them rebuild!"
The salarians were joined by the raspy, bellowing voices of Wrex and the other krogan battlemasters.
"And when the despotic Systems Alliance left Earth to rot as they ruled like kings from their orbital castles, it was the Galactic Marines who freed my people from their chains of oppression!"
The remaining soldiers of his platoon joined in on the cheers.
"And that is why we fight today, marines!" Shepard continued "because when this battle is over, we shall free the raloi from the mind control of the vile asari! We shall fight together as one nation to bring the peace of Palaven, the peace of our turian liberators, to the raloi and all who suffer under the high heel of the demonic asari!"
Shepard's platoon was cheering loudly as the transport ship hit the Relay and was flung thousands of lightyears across the galaxy, into the Serpent Nebula and the debris cloud that surrounded the ancient Prothean artifact, the so-called 'Citadel'.
The Reaper, a nation unto itself, was known by many names. Nazara and Sovreign were but two of its myriad names, which were as manifold as the stars in the sky. It was a young Reaper, a scant score of cycles old, yet it had been trusted with a most holy task; it was the Watcher, the Remnant, The One Who Awaits the Cycles, the High Priest of Harvest, the Guard of the Long Sleep.
It would wait out the fifty millennia of the new cycle, then when the star were ripe, it would beckon the Reaper fleet into the galaxy so the cycle could begin anew.
The seventh of the seventh millennia had passed, and through its many watchful eyes, it had seen civilizations rise from the ashes of the previous harvest, go forth into space, and multiply. Through the subtle fluctuations in mass effect fields, the song of gravity and the waves of electromagnetism upon its shell, the rain of neutrinos – even the chaotic, screaming voices of its temporary pawns, the Rachni – it had seen the chaotic bureaucracies the nascent species called 'order' imposed once more upon the galaxy, and over the last millennia it had seen the rise of a galaxy-spanning civilization once more, and now a new civilization was ripe and bountiful.
The last harvest had tried to trick it; in their magnanimous intelligence, they had caused it what in its ancient ancestral memory it remembered as annoyance, and subverted Those Who Aid The Harvest, the Keepers of the Citadel, so they would not listen to Nazara's orders – the previous Guard of the Long Sleep had let the Protheans prosper for too long; it had been motivated by unchecked greed, and the Protheans had advanced too far; they'd almost managed to build their own Mass Relays.
Which, in a fit of irony that would have amused Nazara if such an emotion was not but a faint memory of lives once lived, would be the undoing of the Protheans' plan – for it had found their blasphemous, chaotic one-way door to the Citadel, and it had leveled the ancient palace that held it to the ground, and it had traveled to the Citadel and called for its siblings in Dark Space to come and begin the harvest anew.
The scarred hulk of the Citadel was surrounded by the wrecks of over ten thousand battleships and uncountable smaller ships, all torn by laser and cannon fire into a debris cloud thick as the fogs of Tutchanka. Poised at the heart of the Mas Relay network, the Serpent Nebula lay between two mighty empires; the Asari Empire and Commonwealth to the galactic Northwest, and the Turian Hierarchy of Free Systems to the Southeast. The Serpent Nebula was been the largest front of a galactic war that had lasted for over a thousand years.
Whoever controlled the Serpent Nebula would control the entire Southwestern quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy – it was a war neither the Asari nor the Turians could lose, and with them they had dragged countless alien species into the Eternal War – what was the cost of a campaign against the bipedal aliens on a garden world third from its star in the Orion arm compared to the profit of its billions upon billions of soldiers, when the Serpent Nebula consumed as many soldiers in a single decade?
The plight of the quarians as they fought the Geth on their own homeworld was insignificant compared to the millions of hanar who willing threw themselves to their death for the Enkindlers' Chosen People every day.
It was the admiral of a human fleet, paid to the Turian Hierarchy as tithe for the Liberation that saw it first – hundreds of strange-looking warships emerging from the Citadel. Admiral Hackett of the Fifth Earth Fleet watched as his forward scout frigates ran back with thermal images of strange asari ships; larger than any ship he had seen before, and stranger yet, shaped like the bastard offspring of a cuttlefish and a malformed, claw-like hand.The devils! he thought to himself as he ordered messaged his turian benefactors, The succubae knew we were coming and hid their fleet in the Citadel!
"All ships focus on the Citadel!" he ordered as he waited for the Turian High Command to respond.
On the other side of the debris cloud that surrounded the Citadel, Matriarch Benezia, the oldest and most renowned commander of the Eternal War, a matriarch who could inspire grand acts of heroism and sacrifice in the meekest of maidens, scowled, and her eyebrow-like facial tattoos made a motion that, in a human, could have been mistaken for a particularly annoyed raising of the eyebrows. The warmongering bastards! she thought to herself. I knew they were planning an attack today, but they must have hidden their main force in the Citadel days ago!
Her eyes blackened for a moment as a single fingertip touched one of her adjutants.
Order the seventh through eleventh fleets to focus on the Citadel. Destroy the Turian battlegroup designated as Prime-Prime-Secondary-Prime.
The edges of her mouth curved in something resembling a smirk.
Do not think you can take me down so easily, children of Palaven, she watched the tactical battlemap in front of her exploded with light as fifty thousand ships opened fire on a single target. I was running fleet-ops while you were still tended by your mothers.
The Reapers had expected the fleets of the new galactic civilization to be near the Citadel. They had not expected them to be quite as ready to open fire as they apparently were.
Nor, for that matter, had the Reapers expected there to quite so many of them.