Prospector ship Gold Rush
The bridge was quiet as usual, not that Dan was bothered by that. He had long grown used to the long periods of quiet which came with the work. The six month tour in the Kuiper belt had his work mostly limited to sitting in his seat most of the time, the travel between different locations being the bulk of his duty. The work wasn't very demanding, the dozen crew more than adequate for maintaining the century old ship as it went from one target to the next determining how much ore it the asteroids and planetoids had or which gasses where to be found in comets. Dan didn't mind the quiet, the pay was good and the view out of the bridge could trap him for hours in the beauty of the stars beyond, punctuated only by the occasional rock they were scanning or the sun which looked like but a slightly brighter bot in the distance compared to the countless others.
"How's burning the midnight oil going?" A voice asked, bringing him back to reality. He looked back to the entrance to see Zack. He paused to check the ships internal clock.
"It's not midnight for another two hours." Dan stated.
"Does it matter? Midnight only really means something to you Earthers anyway." Zack replied. Dan wanted to remind Zack that the same applied to the other solid planets and to stations in orbit around said planets, but he knew it was futile since to a belt-born it was all the same to them.
"Is there a reason you're here early, it's not like you to jump at the chance to do more work."
"What, can't just come up here to enjoy the view?" Zack asked in fake innocence.
"You spent an hour last week ranting about how looking at the stars was a waste of time." Dan stated back.
"Alright, so I'm bored, it's not like there's much to do."
The statement was one which many who spent long periods on ships came across on the months-long missions ships went on. In his younger days Dan had gone had a particularly bad case of cabin fever while working on a hauler on the Jovian run. Thankfully means of dealing with such issues had become standard practice for centuries.
"How long until we reach our next target?" Zack's impatience was unsurprising to Dan. Still in his early twenties, this was his first tour, and prospecting was particularly harsh in comparison to other duties. Haulers where much larger, some measured in kilometers. The belt and interplanetary runs also had many stops on their tours, some in the higher density areas having more stops then there where days, not that a day meant much to those on a ship.
"We're already in the gravitational pull of the next target, or should I say targets. Should have the targets scanned sometime between the beginning of your shift and the end of whoever has it after you."
"I just don't get it, we have plenty of asteroids back in the belt that haven't been touched yet, why we coming out here?" Zack's question had been asked more than a few times during the tour; so much it had begun to become an annoyance.
"It's cheaper to mine some ores out here for outer planet stations then it is to transport then from the belt." Dan stated, giving him the same answer he did every time he asked.
Zack stayed for another twenty minutes of idle chitchat until he lost interest and returned to the innards of the ship. Dan didn't mind, the chats he had with the young man broke the monotony of the work. By the time his shift ended he was quite tired, having been awake for twenty hours due to the irregular schedule rotation. Entering his private cabin, one of the few things prospector ships had most others didn't, he expected to get a full night's sleep given how his next shift was in sixteen hours. He wasn't pleased when he was awoken only halfway through his sleep by the beeping of his terminal.
"What is it?" He groaned, not getting up from his bunk.
"We're getting some weird readings from one of the rocks." Zack replied over the comm. system.
"What type of readings?"
"No idea, the system is just saying 'unknown material' for the core of an iceball."
"Probably just some iron the ice formed around a billion years ago." Dan replied half-heartedly.
"Impossible, mass and gravitational pull are too high for it to be anything on record. If it's anything…" Zack paused for a moment. "Ok, that's funny."
"What's funny?" Dan sat himself on the side of his bunk, accepting the fact his sleep was coming to an end weather he liked it or not. "Just got a signal bounce from the core."
"Probably just a sensor echo."
"This isn't an echo, signal's too strong and clear."
"Fine, I'll be there in a minute." Dan didn't bother to change, his sleeping shorts and plain shirt falling well within the lax regulations prospectors had for dress code. Entering the bridge, he found that Cathy, one of the other bridge heads on rotation, was standing next to Zack, who was seated at the captain's chair.
"Finally here, eh?" Zack asked while looking at his monitor.
"I wasn't exactly expecting to be called up for a standard scanning."
"This is nothing but standard Dan." Cathy stated, looking closer at the data being spat out from over Zack's shoulder. "This doesn't make sense though."
"What doesn't make sense?" Dan asked, taking a look at the data for himself.
"The core seems to be sending out a signal for a basic math problem, the type you handle in high school." Zack informed him, trying to understand the reason behind what he was looking at.
"Well if it's a simple question, why not answer it?" Dan asked. The two looked at him, not having thought of that course of action. Zack didn't take long to form up the signal needed to answer the apparent question. The moment the signal was sent, new data started to stream into the prospector's sensors.
"That definitely did something." Cathy stated, the sensors being maxed out in their data input.
"Oh shit, that can't be good." Jack stated as he watched cracks start to form on the surface of the iceball they were orbiting. Before his eyes trillions of credits worth of natural resources broke apart and disintegrated into space. "I am so fired for destroying all that ice."
"Maybe not, there's something that's still there in once piece, and it's giving out a lot of power." Cathy wasn't sure where the power was coming from, only that the sensors where detecting an output at least on par with a standard habitation station. It was at least that level as the system was not built to detect a greater level of output, so how much it actually was producing was an open question. "What's the eyes showing?"
Dan, who was controlling the 'eyes', didn't respond as he looked at the monitor displaying the ship's camera systems.
"Dan?" Cathy asked again, walking next to him to see what he was looking at. The moment she did, she understood why he had frozen. The object being displayed was truly alien, massive curves of unknown metals centered on a glowing midsection of rotating rings. Whatever it was, it wasn't human, and the once dormant object was active.
"I think what we've got here is worth more than the ice we just lost." Dan told Zack in a quiet voice.
On November 29th, 2742 C.E., the Charon Relay had been activated.
All Alone in the Night
Chapter one: The Lonely Universe
The discovery of what would be known as the Charon Relay was a moment in human history which saw change unseen since the first settlements off Earth had begun to see life. Discovered by accident by a prospecting ship searching for natural resources, the relay's discovery had immediate effects on the geopolitical landscape of the solar system. The first response to the discovery was the deployment of fleets by the three populated worlds of the inner system, Earth alone sending over one hundred military vessels. Mars and Venus where much more retrained, sending only thirty ships between each other. Initial fears that the fleets would begin to open fire on each other as they approached the Relay proved to be unwarranted as the governments of the three worlds hammered out an agreement long before the fleets entered combat range of one another. The scars of the Valentine War had made the worlds, particularly Venus and Mars, weary of the idea of another stellar conflict, especially in the face of a potential threat to all mankind.
This fear of the common unknown was only solidified as the Relay's purpose was discovered. While there had always been issues the different parts of the human race spread out around Sol disagreed with, sometimes to the point of taking arms, being the part of an alien network of transportation systems gave humanity collective pause. With faster than light travel always having eluded the science of mankind, and as a result our species remaining trapped in our home system, the opportunities present pushed the three worlds and countless stations and settlements to forge a new path for humanity. For centuries the human race was loosely connected, worlds separated and stations independent in every meaning of the word. With the risks and opportunities presenting themselves to our species, a new system was needed, an alliance of the system which protected the collective interests of the whole of humanity. The Systems Alliance was born from this new need.
Not all joined initially, as the independent, and at times isolationist, spirit of many stations and settlements in the asteroid and Jovian belt made initial amalgamation a long proses. By the time the first extrasolar expedition was assembled, a full half of the settlements and stations beyond Mars remained independent, something the Alliance saw no problem with. Economic soft power would eventually win over many of these settlements however, and by the time of the third expedition only an insignificant handful of settlements had not joined the Alliance, mostly comprising of religious isolationist stations on the fringe of the system.
In 2748 C.E. the first extrasolar expedition made the bold dive into the unknown. Made up for over one hundred and fifty Alliance navy vessels, the expedition went forth to discover a system which was so devoid of alien life it was disappointingly anticlimactic. When a single courier returned to Sol to signal the all clear, the floodgates opened as thousands of privately owned prospectors, haulers and other civilian ships made their way into the new system with a wide variety of intent.
As the expedition and civilian ships explored the new virgin system, new Relays where discovered, the system an apparent nexus of Relays. Arcturus, as the system came to be known, would later become the staging ground for later expeditions as its strategically valuable location became realized over the years of exploration and expansion.
The early age of expansion would also see a reshaping of human society and the economy. With the long lasting service life of ships, some dating back as far as three centuries, new ships had been on low demand as the space lanes reached equilibrium for shipping was reached. With the new explosive demand for new ships, long dormant shipyards returned to life. New haulers where needed to supply new stations for settlement and other purposes in the new systems while also keeping the people of those stations fed and clothed. New prospectors where needed to find the new riches beyond the Relay, new transports needed for the massive waves of immigration to the new frontier, and new warships to defend it all. With whole new worlds begging to be explored, and billions trying to answer the call, supply could not keep up with demand in the initial years. The drive also pushed forward technological development. Ships from before the Relays discovery where simply too slow for the demands placed on them by crews. While a round trip between Earth and the Relay being a month was acceptable for a civilization which had both points being the furthest ends, with each system adding a month of any potential trip the military needed rapid change, as did many of those wishing to push the boundaries of the frontier even further. Trillions where poured into finding a way to move faster, great strides being made as a result of the sudden investment.
By 2772 C.E. a dozen worlds fit for human habitation had been discovered, tens of millions trying to find homes on prized pieces of terrestrial land, one of the most sought after resources for explorers and settlers. Dozens more worlds fit for terraformation had also been found, all of which saw private entities race to make their claims on the potential that Mars and Venus had shown to have massive returns on the sky-high investments needed for the proses. As the golden age of economic growth and territorial expansion went on, which saw many explorers, settlers and scientists become rich overnight through sudden expected or unexpected discoveries, one question remained on the collective mind of humanity.
Where were they?
Despite the discovery of Relay after Relay in the systems explored, all other evidence of aliens had remained outside of our reach. The evidence for the existence of aliens was clear as could be, but nothing other than the Relays could be seen. With nothing else to show the existence of the unknown race, speculation arose on what the meaning behind it was. Some believed that the aliens had destroyed all other evidence of their own existence, while others that the Relays had been built in advance by robots and that for whatever reason the aliens themselves had never reached our system. Some of the more radical thinkers believed they were a gift for humanity to spread throughout the galaxy, though this belief was mostly confined to the more religious of the settlers.
Many of these theories changed in 2776 C.E. when the Shanxi colony uncovered an apparently alien settlement. It was small, housing an estimated few thousand, but alien it most definitely was. Initially kept a secret for security reasons, the settlement gave very little in the way of preserved artifacts, but there was one object which, though it told us nothing about their history or culture, was a breakthrough in and of itself. The object was a corpse. Found under the remains of what was believed to be a house, the corpse was the skeletal structure of an alien which had long decomposed. Though that meant the aliens which built the Relays remained mostly a mystery, the four eyed, multi-nostriled beings with multiple cranial ridges and a large upper skull gave the first glimpse into the image of the builders. When the corpse's existence went public months after its discovery, a new religious sect rose around the alien, believing it to be the image of god itself. Some, both within and without of the scientific community, openly wondered if the aliens may have had an influence on the development of humanity, as the alien was clearly a bipedal humanoid.
Due to the discovery, Shanxi became the go-to destination for tourism, archeology and religious settlement. As a result of the demand by all three and industry to cater to them the colony became a boomtown the likes of which had been unseen since the discovery of the first garden world. As the eighty fourth expedition launched through Relay 314 deeper into what was hoped to be alien settled space, humanity once again felt hope that the life responsible for the golden age would be met face to face.
On the highest levels of government and military, however, the secret knowledge of the alien's body least known piece of information remained sealed under lock and key: that its death was determined to be only five centuries prior.
As humanity entered the Skyllian Verge with renewed hopes, our collective wish to find intelligent alien lie would be granted.
As we found their bodies broken and cities burnt in a galaxy filled with death.
Author's Notes
Well, that was a start. In a world where the Prothean ruins on Mars never existed, I figure discovering the Relay would take at least a few hundred more years then what it did in canon given how Earth would need to develop the technology to just reach it without the use of Mass Effect or the independent discovery of it. As was implied by the ending of the chapter, the Reaper culling is long past, with Humanity having just missed it and have started to discover the (relatively) still burning remains.
Next time: humanity enters former Citadel space in "Ash and Rust".
On a side note: for those who are following my other stories, sorry for not updating those first but I've had a major case of writer's block, and nothing clears that up faster than taking some time to cool off my head with another story. I'm still working on them; I just need to think things out with them.