Summary: It has been a hundred and fifty six years since the end of the Reaper War. The galaxy has been thrown into chaos, old alliances are dead and the Council is shattered. Threats both new and old are emerging from the dark corners of the Galaxy and an old king is moving back to claim what is his.

Authors Notes: Hey guys, wow it has been a long time since I posted anything I'm kinda embarrassed about that but I've got this all nice and lined up for you. Don't let the title fool you this isn't a Mass Effect 4 story of 'what ifs' or 'could bes'. The title was inspired loosely by the Story of Andromeda in Greek mythology. With the leviathan's hubris bringing about the reapers and all that… I said loosely.

Okay it's nothing like the Greek myth but I like the name.

So this is the prologue just basically summing up the major events after the Reaper war and it gives you a loose idea of what happened during the war as well. I'm leaving certain details blank on purpose so that they can be treated as myths in the story.

This is more of less the short version of what they would teach the kids in the schools.

Anyway please enjoy. Be sure to comment if you feel I left any gaping holes in the set up.

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Prologue

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The reaper war was over. After months of intense fighting and at the cost of billions of lives the war came to a sudden end. The Galaxy's troubles though were just beginning.

In 2186 the war ended and the reapers left, just left, leaving only their broken remains, the shattered bodies of their fallen soldiers and a single large data burst to the fleet orbiting Earth. They simply dropped everything, recalled their ground forces and jumped to FTL, on every planet, in every system. They left billions dead and untold levels of destruction in their wake but those were things that the Galaxy could recover from, given enough time.

The first problem of this new era was both as obvious as it was devastating to the civilizations of the Galaxy. The energy wave emitted by the Crucible had not only overwhelmed the Citadel and the Crucible, crippling both, but destroyed the mass relays. All of them, the entire relay network was gone, leaving entire clusters cut off from one another.

With the relays gone galactic communication came to a standstill. The sudden disappearance of the reapers combined with many key leadership figures being in the Sol system supporting the final battle led to a disorganised, ineffective response from the majority of the Galaxy. Sol, being the only system to know what had happened, was the only system that was able to properly organize after what had happened.

While the rest of the galaxy wasted their time flailing, Earth, with the combined efforts of every race present and with plans transmitted by the withdrawing reaper forces, began the construction of their first Mass Relay. They had the designs, if they canalized some of their fleet they would have the resources and thanks to the reaper data packet they had the location of every relay that had been in the network.

The leaders at Earth clearly understood the damage that could be caused to the galactic community if there was a total communications blackout for too long but even with their worry and desperation speeding them along, it still took almost three years before the mass relay in the sol system was ready for use.

Every manufacturing plant in the system had been destroyed and Earth itself was no more than a steaming pile of rubble now. This meant that they had to begin from scratch, stripping ships down not only for the raw materials they needed but also so they could build the machines needed to make use of them. The process wasn't fool proof either, more than a few accidents and mistakes befell the allied forces as they constructed the relay.

After their eventual first success the next relay was easier to build and the one after that even easier, however it wasn't the technical complexity of the relays that started causing problems.

Once the relays leading out of alliance territory were completed the different races started bidding to have the relays to their own systems constructed first. With their resources limited to the number of ships they were willing to take apart and their production capabilities so limited they could only afford to build one relay at a time. Even so soon after the war relations started breaking down between some species.

It took nearly another decade before the primary network used by the galaxy was repaired and by that point relations between the various races within the allied fleet had worsened. This was not just from the tensions caused by the relay problem however with the war over and the tension of impending death gone soldiers and civilians were starting to point fingers at each other over the actions and secrets that the war had brought to light.

It was an open secret among the allied fleet that Commander Shepard had discovered a working Prothean beacon in the heart of Thessia's capital city and everyone knew that the Asari refused to attend the initial war summit gathered by Commander Shepard. The war summit that agreed to cure the genophage and bring the Krogan into the war effort. It would not be an understatement to say that the Asari had gone from being one of the most respected races in the galaxy to being the pariahs of society.

Not all relations soured however, the Geth, Krogan, Turian and Terran relations remained very strong as each of these four races had been major contributors to the war front start to end.

The years following the repair of the relay network went from bad to worse and saw the death toll of the war rising even years after the reapers left. Many systems and planets, feeling deserted after so long being isolated seeded from their host nations. Planets like Noveria, Ilium and Santeri who had always kept a neutral front truly became independent. Others though, didn't survive their extended isolation dozens of outlying colonies were lost either due to starvation or because they couldn't get specialty equipment or resources that they were dependent on.

A year after the network was repaired the council was officially disbanded and council space abolished. The various Territories fell back into the host nations hands.

The Salarians pulled back into their own territory, almost pulling out of the galactic community altogether. However unknown to the rest of the galaxy the Salarians were cleaning their house. The union did not approve of the Krogan being given a cure but many dissident elements opposed the ruling body, and what they viewed as dated and archaic stances on the Galaxy.

That wasn't the only change to come to the galactic community though. The Volus Protectorate separated itself from the Turian Hierarchy and for the first time since taking to the stars became an independent state.

Not long after the Hierarchy, shaken by the loss of the Volus, fell into a civil war. Many wanted a revolution, they thought that the Hierarchy had become too set on maintaining tradition. There were strong feelings that the military had become too soft. Primarch Adrian Victus, the once praised hero died in the brief bloody civil war. Where the leader was once praised he was quickly denounced on both sides as the Primarch that retreated from Palavan, lost their protectorate race and allowed the Turian people to take up arms once again against each other. The civil war saw a splinter group of dissident Turians split away from the Hierarchy naming themselves the Valluvian after the ancient Turian priests who used to guide their people. The Hierarchy reformed itself and its structure but kept their name becoming the New Hierarchy.

The Turians were not the only ones facing a crisis however, the Salarian Union while initially intending to quickly and quietly remove some dissident factions from their ranks found themselves on the defensive as several clan Dalatrassess were quietly assassinated. It wasn't as public as the Turian civil war but it quickly became just as bloody.

The Asari were having difficulty as well, though on a significantly less violent scale, while they were unified as a race their government relied almost solely on open communication to run. With so much damage done to their worlds the wheel of the Asari republic was turning slow indeed.

Humanity stood united more than ever before, despite the total loss of their government and the near complete destruction of their homeworld several factors brought mankind together. The first was their shared suffering at the loss of their homeworld and the second was Shepard. Even dead the hero flocked millions to the cause. With the destruction of Arcturus Station Admiral Steven Hackett became the commander and chief of the Alliance and Humanity. Gathering thousands of survivors to their 'Local' Clusters to regroup and rebuild.

Surprisingly, when compared to the major races the minor races recovered far more quickly. The Elcor and Hanar had self-sustaining economies before the war and despite the damage caused by the war and the communications black out they were well on their way to healing several years after the war.

The Geth were hardly affected in the aftermath, as they had no concept of an economy. The synthetic life forms simply repaired the damage the war had done to their military forces and territory and simply waited. They kept open lines of communication with all nations however.

The Krogan pulled back to their homeworld and under the leadership of Urdnot Wrex began to repopulate and rebuild their homeworld. It would be several decades before the Krogan came to realise that the genophage, while not leaving them with piles of stillborn to bury was not a completely cured. Padok Wilks had cured the Genophage but the damage to the shroud and the Salarian's lack of prior experience with the disease meant that the Krogan birth rate was several times lower than what it had been generations past but every Krogan was now fertile.

By the wars end the Batarian race had been reduced to a population of less than a million spread out across the galaxy. The hegemony was no more, Batarian territory was an entire area of space that had become scorched earth.

The Quarians were even worse off, at the finale of the battle of Rannoch the Geth were unable to get an accurate count of the number of ships escaping the decimated migrant fleet but they put the numbers as no more than twelve. Meaning that there were at most a thousand Quarians left.

Despite the galactic nation's best efforts, the Turian civil war and eventual split, the Salarian cold war, the stagnate Asari, the clearly struggling Alliance and the loss of so many garden worlds and colonies lead them to a point where they couldn't hope to hold out. There was just too much damage, too many wounds that were still too fresh and oozing precious life blood. The matter was only made worse when the pirates of the terminus systems came back in force. Driven into desperation by many of the same problems the Nations of the Galaxy were having.

The galaxy was falling into chaos, outer colonies that hadn't died or seeded away were simply abandoned and what was left of the military was pulled back to protect the inner systems.

The worst had yet to come.

In 2208, twenty two years after the war's end, after suffering under four years of constant and damaging pirate attack the major galactic powers began rationing food and water on a massive scale.

The reapers didn't just target planets of military importance during the war, many garden worlds whose sole purpose was the production of food were hit as well. Those damages, coupled with the still crippled galactic economy and increasing pirate attacks which forced governments to withdraw from leading garden worlds led to a serious decrease in food production.

The situation was the same all across the galaxy, food once so easy to obtain was becoming scarce. While the different nations rationed to save what they could the pirate attacks increased desperate to take what they could.

The situation quickly spiraled out of control until riots were becoming more and more frequent. People were beginning to starve all across the galaxy.

That was when the Andromeda Corporation appeared.

The Andromeda family had been a long time wealthy human business family for several generations. However their monetary standing only grew to epic proportions after they began to support Cerberus. The Andromeda family was just one of several families and business to support Cerberus but Mathew Andromeda quickly rose to prominence under their support.

It was when, the then young heir of the Andromeda family took over that things began to change. Carlston Andromeda didn't agree with the same extremes as his father had but he still believed in Cerberus' ideals.

Carlston was the head of the Andromeda when the Reaper War began and survived to witness its conclusion. As a senior member of Cerberus Carlston was able to quietly consolidate most of the organizations financial assets before the war was over. By the end of the war Carlston Andromeda was set up to become a very wealthy man.

He reclaimed his wealth when the relay network was repaired and started supporting various relief efforts across the galaxy partly out of a desire to help and partly out of guilt.

In 2207 when the threat of food rationing was becoming a very real possibility Carlston starting making preparations.

The Turian Hierarchy never decommissioned military naval equipment, every ship, every fighter, every bomb was stored. The entire historical Turian naval force was kept in cold storage. The storage sites were meant to be classified but Cerberus had access to them so Carlston knew about them.

The head of the family approached the New Hierarchy, who had retained the sites after the schism and subsequent exile of the Valluvian. The new government was hesitant to sell, admittedly outdated but still lethal, ships of war but were desperate for the lump sum income that Andromeda offering.

Carlston spent close to his entire fortune, buying everything from the old Turian dreadnoughts and carriers to troop transports.

His plan wasn't to fight the pirates and impose any kind of order however, no Calrston took the hundreds of ships, most heavy Capital class, into Geth space.

Once there he began intense negotiations with the Geth, his plan was to convert each of the ships that he had produced into massive food production factories much like the quarrian live ships.

The Geth were hesitant at first, the modifications would be a significant investment for them however the Geth were eventually swayed by two main factors. The first was that the Geth had no real way of interacting with Organics, despite the good will their contributions to the war had brought them many still distrusted them and feared them. The opportunity that Carlston was presenting them would ensure that the galaxy saw them in a positive light. The second was that they had been taught by Legion to value organic life and if they did not do something to assist many lives would be lost.

The Geth pulled the vessels apart and worked tirelessly for a year, they were limited only by the number of platforms that they could assign to each ship which was not a small number.

At the end of the year Carlston had just under a hundred ships that had been codenamed ARC. The vessels were two kilometers long behemoths, larger that Alliance and Turian dreadnoughts, with twelve decks, nine of which were used solely for food production. Massive greenhouse areas with optimal conditions for plant growth. Water treatment and food processing plants took up most of the final three decks.

The Geth, having been given complete control over the production of the ARC class, had created the ARC carriers to produce basic survival rations. Despite the best efforts of the Geth and Carlston an ugly fact reared its head. Even a thousand ARC Carriers wouldn't be enough to feed all the people in the galaxy. It was a start however.

When the Andromeda Corporation was announced the response was dramatic. What Carlston thought of as personal wealth before was nothing compared to what he was being offered by the governments around the Galaxy. With nothing but Geth and himself in the actual company and no actual headquarters Andromeda operated solely from their Arc Carriers.

The company exploded with desperate contracts however. Carlston had the food supplies ready to be delivered but no way to transport it. In a matter of weeks Andromeda had gone from being a no name company to being the most well-known organization in the galaxy.

There was a limit to what Carlston and the Geth could do however, even with the ruthless efficiency of the Geth and the ARC carriers producing millions of rations they had to be selective. There was no way they could feed them all but they could relieve the pressure a great deal.

The next few years brought about a massive change to the Galaxy, with Andromeda taking the food pressures off of the government, life was becoming a little more stable. Andromeda was growing by the day as more and more ARC carriers were being built.

The Geth were finally greeted with open arms for their part in the production and protection of the ARC carriers. Individual Geth platforms were being accepted across the Galaxy just like true organic life. Carlston Andromeda died at the age of one hundred years and left the company in the hands of his son Richard Andromeda. While his father had dedicated himself to simply keeping the galaxy from starving Richard charged into his career with a vengeance. The second generation Andromeda began mass production of ARC Carriers all over the Galaxy.

For years he pushed the company making it a new superpower. Andromeda was the first and only port of call for foods and produce.

Richards ruled for sixty four years before he died leaving the company in the hands of his eighteen year old son, Malcolm Andromeda.

This is the story of how Andromeda's third generation shook the Galaxy.

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Author notes: Okay so this entire chapter is basically my summary. I hope you guys are looking forward to this because I am.

Review equal hugs and love. I need both.