"All ships take up defensive positions and defend that shuttlecraft." The admiral yelled on the bridge of the carrier. The shuttle was still ten thousand kilometers out, the other ships closing in fast on it.

"Sir, they are firing on the shuttle." The ship's Smart A.I. informed him, the holographic display showing discharges moving between the approaching ships and the shuttle.

"Ahead full, warm up forward batteries and prepare to engage." The admiral's orders where in vain, as the shuttle was smashed to pieces long before they reached firing range.

"Sir, they are targeting us."

"All ships, fire everything. Send these bastards to hell."

Chapter Four: The Birds and the Bears

Contact.

It was a single word, yet the power it held when it was spoken in 2847 was if it where the echo of a gunshot rippling through the Alliance. For a long moment humanity collectively paused at the idea that what we had come across was intelligent life in our universe not born of Earth.

A billion questions ran through the minds of the people of the Alliance, wondering what they of people they were, what they looked like, how they acted, what was their history.

And before a proper diplomatic envoy could be sent, another report of contact was made. For so long we had searched for life in our universe, and now we had two in such rapid succession that we had not had time to proses it. Relations with the first species we found where hard to establish. Initially believed to be a twenty second century equivalent, however it was only after the uphill battle to get a line of communication open that we learned this was not the case, and that their technology was closer to the twenty sixth century, though with the inexplicable absence of space travel up to and including satellites, equipment which was at first unthinkable in its absence from such a society as Earth's own progress had that line of technological development be critical for over eight hundred years.

Things where looking brighter once we did manage to open communication with them, the Raloi as they called themselves, however news of this open line of dialog between our peoples was overshadowed by a different problem.

They had been easier to open contact with, their civilization in the stage of interstellar travel analogues to our own before the discovery of the Relay network, though they seemed to be aware of it as the system we made contact with them had no habitable planets and indications of at least two Relays being used for traffic regularly. We thought they would be a more advanced civilization, one which like us had been on the verge of interstellar travel when the great death fell upon the galaxy, that they would as us be looking for another voice in the darkness, a light to gather around.

We were wrong.

The Yahg quickly showed themselves to be as dangerous as they were ugly, both of which they had no short supply of. Violent and short tempered, the diplomatic envoy had needed to fight their way out of the ship they had used for opening relations, an act which was all for naught as their shuttle was shot down before it could return to its fleet. Said fleet repaid them in kind, destroying the Yahg's ships to the last with only the loss of a single frigate.

The response to the crisis was swift. An emergency session of the Alliance Parliament met to vote on the course of action. For days debate raged on behind closed doors, thousands of voices making cases for different actions. On the fourth day the public had its answer. By an overwhelming majority vote the Alliance had decided on its course of action, one which had never been taken before since the foundation of the nation. War.

Alliance military was mobilized, only mothballed ships reactivated and given skeleton crews as they returned to life. Cerberus, unbeknown to the public, began launching ships from its hidden bases and increasing materials production. A fleet of a thousand warships from across Alliance space gathered at the system where contact had been made, the rage of a billion angry voices demanding rightful vengeance upon those who had struck the hand of peace and friendship.

During this time a Raloi diplomatic team had been transported to the heart of Alliance territory, and though they had never made contact first hand with the Yahg they requested restraint on our part, the knowledge of the campaign impossible to hide from them due to the ubiquity of the knowledge in Alliance space of its impending arrival.

We didn't listen, and began what we would later, when our collective minds where clear, consider to be a mistake. Whether or not this holds true is a controversial issue to this day, but one cannot change the past, only learn from it.

It lasted months. Their ships where weak, fragile and couldn't hope to possibly win in a one on one engagement against our forces. The problem was they had numbers. Eight to one it is estimated their military outnumbered our expeditionary force, a close margin when considering that the technological gap made engagement on even footing require them to outnumber us ten to one. We had the advantage, but it would still require prudence in both strategic and tactical deployment to win. We learned that the hard way, as our initial underestimating of the brutes caused several major defeats at their hands. Five or six to one they managed to fight us off in the first battles, their cunning having been hidden for our first contact under the vail of their brutality. Had the entire campaign gone with similar results through local superiority of tactical maneuvers, Cerberus likely would have directly gotten involved, something which in retrospective made the need for improvement more dire then was initially believed. The turnaround came as a result of the Battle of Relay 738, which saw a decisive Alliance victory through the first use of a Smart A.I. with unimpeded command of an Alliance fleet. Through the use of baiting by playing to the perceived thought pattern of the Yahg based on all information available on them, the first wave of their offensive fleet was eliminated as it entered a system which had been liberated days before. By the time the rest of the fleet had entered the system, a detachment of Alliance forces ran right past them and through the Relay into their territory, cutting off their only line of retreat. It wouldn't stop them if they had tried there and then to run, but they didn't, and we had been anticipating that. As their offensive fleet was broken to pieces with the use of a half-moon formation, it was only after the possibility of a successful retreat had escaped them that they attempted it. Thousands of ships had left their held territory in an attempt to retake what had once been theirs, seven managed to break the blockade we had built.

The loss of their offensive fleet to our expeditionary force had come at great cost, a full half of our own fleet lost over the course of the campaign until that point. But with their ability to project power cut down to only the systems they already held, the war became a system hopping campaign through their space. As we went further into their territory, we discovered something which was unexpected. Unlike the Alliance to humanity, the Yahg where not unified under one banner, but instead five, each one based around one of the garden worlds their species held. The first glimpse of this we got was from when our fleet approached one of said garden worlds, and instead of defending in a united line, part of the fleet broke off in retreat while a small contingent stayed to fight off the ships which attempted to destroy the retreating, a full fifth of their defenders either dead or wounded from infighting before we had entered weapons range.

The alliance of convenience their worlds had was falling apart under the Alliance advance, two of their twenty seven systems abandoned without being contested as the fleets dashed back to their homes. We hoped this would lead to a willingness to negotiate a settled peace. For two of their garden worlds, including what we would later discover to be their homeworld, this was the case, and the attempts at opening a new dialogue ended in an uneasy audio communication between ships representing the three worlds. An armistice was declared between the Alliance and the twin worlds, their collective holdings of fourteen systems plus two from other clans being declared theirs, while all remaining Yahg space declared that of the Alliance, on top of pre-existing Alliance territory. No mention was made in the treaty of unclaimed space.

The remaining three worlds of the Yahg did not go down without a fight, their fleets fighting just as valiantly as our own would should our garden worlds be at risk of attack. This did little to help them in the grand scheme of things, their diminished numbers and fractured command structure being unable to stop the inevitable, which was delayed more by the thinly stretched Alliance supply lines more than anything else. When the inevitable did occur, it was swift, with a surprise attack on the fleets of all three worlds completely ignoring those in systems around them, using the long way of reaching them by using ship faster than light to bypass the Relay network entirely. It was a risky move, putting most of the Expedition in transit for three full weeks without the possibility to quickly respond to a development in the strategic situation of the war. It paid off however, as the bulk of their fleets where expecting us to use the Relays, the Yahg never having developed faster than light due to the need being absent. By the time they returned to their home systems from across the network, they found a fleet waiting for them between they and their homes, and the remains of the token forces they had playing honour guard a cloud of trillions of broken pieces. Calls for negotiation fell on deaf ears, but the tragedy did not come from the massacre of the forces protecting the three Yahg worlds. No, the tragedy came about from the orbital bombardment which occurred once the worlds had been stripped of their defenders. At first it was a few ships, shooting industrial and military targets with the intent to beat them into submission, continuous messages that it would end with a simple message to negotiate an armistice.

We didn't understand the culture of the three worlds or the mentality the Yahg had as a species. Their retaliation with Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles is something we could have predicted with time and understanding, but we had neither, and our ships had to defend themselves. The missiles never stood a chance, their contents high in the atmosphere when they were released. Though not nearly as bad as if they had gone critical, the fallout poisoned the atmospheres of their worlds. When the call for peace finally did come through, tens of millions had already crossed the point where death was inevitable. After eight months of fighting the drums of the first war humanity had with an alien species came to an end, the drums of war drowned out by the sound of a thousand haulers retrofitted for transportation ferrying those who survived to their remaining two worlds.

Relations would never change between humans and the Yahg, we would never forget the impression that they left on us, and they would never lose their xenophobic views towards aliens.

Thankfully during this period the Raloi where more than happy to open diplomatic relations and open exchange of both trade and culture. While the war raged on in the frontier systems, closer to home news was dominated of deals being made with the planet bound race. To the public it appeared as though due to compatible values and a mutual want for relations to work. On the surface it seemed as though the aliens would be considered for membership within the Systems Alliance, after all there was nothing which said it was a purely human Alliance.

Beneath the surface, however, was a very different story. Behind closed doors between members of the two governments revelations where being made which would shake Alliance leadership at its very core. Data on the history of the Raloi was being given freely as a warning to our government, one which would answer many of the questions we had wondered for over a century, answers which many wish we did not need to know, but accepted where critical nonetheless. A single word which would become the dread of the military and government, the thing which Cerberus would use every fiber in its being to combat upon learning of it.

Reapers.

The data was hard to believe at first, that a mechanical species which absorbed life could exist and was responsible for the great die-off of galactic civilization. It fit the physical evidence we how, however, and it did explain how such a vibrant society could disappear so suddenly. A planet bound civilization vanishing is understandable due to natural disasters, but something the size of a galaxy spanning one disappearing could not have been through such means.

The Raloi government had managed to censor the information from their people, the bulk of their population having never known how close they had come to being culled. Their sharing the information was not out of the kindness of their hearts, however, as it was soon revealed that due to their laws preventing exploration into space their development of such technology had stagnated to the point where the simple act of reaching the closest object to their homeworld within their own system would require years of perpetration without our help. With their government concluding that enough time had gone between the Reaper culling and our contact for them to have begun a new cycle, an alliance being formalized and radical changed to their society being made was deemed necessary for their long term survival.

As a means of achieving this goal, five months after diplomatic relations had begun a secret agreement was signed which would see the Raloi integrated into the Alliance over the course of decades, until eventually an open ratification of their world as an equal member within the Alliance and their as people full legal citizens would occur. This secret agreement would be almost universally seen as a positive move, however initially Cerberus would have its reservations. The organization was dedicated to the survival of humanity, not of some alien species we made friends with. Debate as to what should be done raged within the organization, until it culminated into a power struggle which would see it consumed by fire before being born anew.

Next Chapter: Shadow War

Author's notes: Well, that's probably the only chapter this story will get for some time that has the whole thing happen in a single year. The Alliance's outlook is going to be quite different now that it has history books giving some information on the old races (the ones we know and love from the games) as well as having to play diplomat with aliens for the first time. It may not be as equals (after all given the nature of the Yahg it's unlikely the tech gap will not continue to widen over time) but it's still a radical change for them.

And hey, I managed to actually make a timely update. Who would have guessed? Certainly not me.