Do not own Mass Effect, this work has already been written in full, will spread out updates because I'm a lazy person/it's a bit big for a single dump, etc. etc...

More notes at the bottom, as will be tradition.


Renegade Reinterpretations


AC 1-40: The Dark Times

Side: Humanity


If there was ever a period in which a species would be humbled, the Dark Times was undoubtedly the cure to any Human presumption of superiority in intelligence, in capability, or even aptitude in the art of war. It was a cure brought about by massacres and catastrophic defeats, an awareness of the struggles at 40-to-1 ratios, and a realization that the most effective strategies against the foe was to simply charge forward in melee like ones barbaric ancestors, not because this worked well but simply because it failed less than the alternative. These are all humbling facts.

To say that the Alliance's own mass effect technology development was in its infancy would miss the point: in all respects during the first decades of fighting, Alliance mass effect technology might as well have been non-existent. For while the Alliance could make a ship or make a gun that were far superior to anything without the e-zero fields, the Alliance had only a few decade in its attempts to study the Prothean Ruins, whereas the Batarian Hegemony had simply begun with hundreds of years of its own study of technologies and had long been feeding off of the wider galaxy's thousands of years of research and development.

The difference was simply too large to comprehend: in the beginning, nothing short of Alliance heavy vehicles could hope to take down Batarian infantry at range, and yet their own infant Mass Effect barriers would be torn to shreds in seconds by any galactic-standard weaponry. In space, even a broken-down, leaking Quarian freighter could have likely devastated an Alliance frigate. Only the most extreme of ratios, of dozens-to-one or more, could hope to match and overcome the Batarians at the beginning… and the Batarian Hegemony outnumbered the Alliance many times over.

Had a just surrender been an option, the Alliance would have attempted it. The Alliance did attempt. But every attempt at surrender met the same fate as Shaxni: the sacking of the colony, the brutal enslavement of the populace, and the massacres that resulted from any resistance. In some cases the Batarians stayed, claiming a colony for their own. In other cases they would leave with their slaves, let the Humans repopulate only to raid again. They were uninterested in ending this arrangement. War, for all that tore the heart out of the Alliance and human species, was not simply preferable to defeat, to slavery, but was what the Alliance found itself with regardless of desire.

And so as it struggled to fight, the war effort began. Colonies were freely and frequently ravaged, but colonies were needed all the same to mine the resources, increase the industry, fight the Batarians, and buffer Earth itself from the Batarian attentions. When volunteers were lacking, for both war and colonization, the Alliance turned to its Earth nations to implement mass conscription for both. Even in the face of the riots, the unrest, and outright revolts, these were necessary to protect the whole of Humanity on Earth.

Or to protect the whole of Earth from the worst, as not all threats could be blocked at the Charon relay. In the year 23 AC, the First Batarian Flu pandemic ravaged Earth. Beginning in the refugee camps and spreading to the slums of many of the major cities, the first Human case of a cross-species disease was typical of the First Contact War: devastating, merciless, and murderous, and Batarian engineered. This virus could not even be called a bio-weapon, but a slaver's tool, developed to 'cull' Human slave populations on captured worlds, to remove the weak and infirm until only the strongest and healthiest were left. One rescued slave brought it to the Human homeworld, and many more soon died. The Batarian Flue would kill over 1.2 billion people on Earth before it was contained and a vaccine developed: casualties not simply from the disease itself, but from the unrest, the Plague Riots, and even, in the case of some countries across the globe, civil wars sparked by the pandemic.

Though the Alliance was ineffective in the war and at home, it can never be said that it was inactive. From the start, the Alliance made every reasonable effort, and quite a few unreasonable ones, to strengthen itself by whatever means necessary. Though battles were judged by how many civilians could be evacuated before Batarian supremacy was asserted, victories were counted by the amount of technology recovered. Special Forces organized around Task Force Cerberus, relying on unorthodox tactics to circumvent kinetic barriers, focused on retrieving technology for study and use. And though reverse engineering of the Batarian technology was slow, for the same reasons that simply holding the small Prothean cache did not enable instant Prothean-level understanding and capabilities, the ability for cross-species usage of the same technologies meant that an ever increasing small percentage of Alliance special forces and soldiers could be equipped with scavenged and stolen Batarian equipment. While this equipment, often purchased from the lower end of the galactic market, ranged widely in quality and ability, it was still centuries ahead of the Alliance's own abilities to produce.

With the support of Task Force Cerberus, the Alliance started many other projects that would become its hidden war effort. Research in the risky, poorly understood was not simply desired, but required: in a war in which the costs of delay frequently surmounted the costs of hasty action, Cerberus was tasked to pursue every line of thought that could produce progress, from Biotics at the infamous Teltin Project to attempts at stealing and raising Batarian children to be infiltrators.

Though many projects were impossible from the start, or produced less than decisive results, the research arm of Task Force Cerberus was not without success, and in some cases brilliant breakthroughs. Besides the eventual development of 'shackled' AI to assist in research and coordination, it was Cerberus that was ultimately responsible for the most influential genetics breakthrough of Human history: practical mass cloning. Though early generations were unstable and short lived, they succeeded as the necessary 'disposable infantry' to overwhelm Batarian positions, and soon the project would expand in scope and effectiveness as a solution to the steadily decreasing Human population was at hand.


Author Notes:

Narrative continues. For the duration of the First Contact War, the narrative's perspective will switch between the significant factions. You'll understand better next update.

One of the major weaknesses of the Mass Effect universe is its back story, specifically its time line in which Humanity goes from barely reach Mars to interstellar colonization in two years, and matching the Turians in a little more. The lack of any infrastructure buildup or real tech development is annoying on a number of levels, including the 'Humans are special' in which Humanity is just a major power for no good reason.

In a dog eat dog world, you aren't powerful because you're human. Power has to be earned and taken away from others. This is a lesson Renegades should well know... but it will be a long time before Humanity can claim to be strong. The Dark Times purge the old arrogance of Human Exceptional-ism. We are neither innately smarter or innately batter at war than anyone else.