A/N: Yes, I realize this doesn't meet the official definition on TVTropes of what qualifies as a Deus Ex Machina, so I don't need to hear about it :P
Samantha Shepard was glad for the interruption on her comm indicating a secure transmission from Councilor Anderson. She hated paperwork (who didn't), but for an agent supposedly "only accountable to the Council/Illusive Man," she spent more time than she'd have liked explaining rationale for actions taken, justifying failures, or covering embarrassments in triplicate.
Anderson's weary visage appeared on Shepard's monitor, pushing mission reports behind.
"You saw that big piece of space junk on your way to the Citadel, I'm sure" started Anderson.
"How could I not?" came the reply. "We had to swerve to avoid it—it and the huge security cordon around whatever that thing is. Is there something I should know? I hate being kept in the dark."
Anderson knew revealing more information from closed-door Council sessions, especially to someone who in the public mind was associated with an extremist terror group, could cause blowback if exposed. He was relatively sure the channel was secure since EDI had apparently overridden the Illusive Man's bugging—so he took a deep breath before continuing. He also knew better than to push Shepard's buttons when she used the phrase "I hate being left in the dark." Generally speaking, anyone who did leave her "in the dark" got punched, shot, or chewed out. Clearly, none of the above would happen between fire-forged friends, but it did serve to show Shepard's irritation with the situation, which Anderson both understood and wished to minimize.
"Shepard, that big pile of metal was a ship. A ship from outside this galaxy. From what we know, this ship could take on the entire Citadel fleet by itself were it in prime fighting condition." His voice ramped up along with the significance of what he was saying. "Its shields can stop energy attacks as well as missiles or bombs. I think—"
Shepard cut him off. "What?" Thoughts raced through her mind. Such shields were hypothetical at best, the domain of geeky scientists and harmonics nuts. Despite the potential usefulness of such shields, militaries had dropped research into the subject for its three maddening properties—expensive, difficult to build/maintain, and requiring immense amounts of energy. In contemporary fiction, this was known as the "Three Strikes of Technological Impracticality." Two list items were usually enough to reglect an item to "super weapon" status—rarely seen in-story and then only for short periods of time. Anything hitting all three was simply discarded by authors as stretching willing suspension of disbelief too far. Military policy was hardly dictated by the whims of fiction writers, but the military was controlled by politicians with budgets. Budgets that were sensitive to voter complaints about "wasteful spending" on programs that would exacerbate the "star wars" state of things, breaking the fragile detente the galaxy had enjoyed until the apparent "Geth Rebellions," followed by Collector attacks on helpless colonies.
Anderson continued, "That ship's shields could shrug off the most powerful turian mass accelerators as if they were grains of sand dropped against armor plating. This schematic should make things more clear."
A warning message appeared, indicating [[ COSMIC TOP SECRET ]] and requiring a confirmation from the receiving individual that all precautions necessary for the reception of such data were in place. As the data scrolled down her terminal, the expression on Samantha's face changed from mild amusement to shock. Then to horror, and abject depression. Assuming these scans were correct (radiation from the destroyed ship's reactor might have interfered), the technology aboard this "Outsider" ship was so far beyond anything in the known galaxy that whoever possessed it could hold the entire galaxy hostage.
Its shields met every criteria for "total shielding" (as opposed to "kinetic barriers"). Blocking radiation, energy weapons, relativistic effects, physical objects, and, Shepard thought wryly, the "negative space wedgie of the week" if luck held. To feed these nearly mythical defensive screens, the reactor core had to generate immense amounts of energy—in the most literal sense, the power of a star contained in the metal of a reactor core. It was inconceivable the ship's power was all spent on shields—the schematic speculated an output of 3.14x10^25W—after all, massive bursts of energy had been seen to have been fired while shields were still operational. These energy bursts tore through kinetic-only shields as if they weren't there because, they might as well not have been! Never mind that each blast from dozens of quad turrets delivered a million terawatts (or more!) of energy to its target, melting armor, twisting superstructure and vaporizing any crew unfortunate enough to be stationed near the impact point.
Normally, a ship like this would have a weakness for someone to exploit—a poorly-shielded thermal vent, a vulnerable command deck, or poor firing arcs for its massive weapons. Maybe they would be expensive. Except, as Anderson had indicated, whoever sent this ship had something on the order of thirty more escorting a colossal behemoth battleship several times larger with presumably higher strength in every area. Or perhaps they would be slow? Nope. While the vessels were cumbersome at sub-light speeds, they possessed energy projectors ("tractor beams") capable of ensnaring fleeing vessels, dragging helpless ships into perfect alignment with weapon batteries. The builders of these vessels had also taken conventional FTL travel and made a whipping boy of the fuel-consumption, heat, and sensor problems (which current galactic civilization had sidestepped through mass relays). Non-relay propelled speeds in excess of 10,000c were normal, every-day travel to these people—military ships mounted even faster "hyperdrives" while humans in Shepard's galaxy could travel no faster than fifty times c without the aid of a mass relay. Even the Reapers could not match the fastest Republic starships—they topped out around 11,000c.
One of these ships would be able to give its commander galactic influence on the level of a Citadel race from the bridge of a single vessel. A fleet would have the Citadel races cowering in terror. An entire navy's worth would make Reaper attacks preferable. Reapers…
Sam slammed her fist into her desk, followed shortly by her head. Here she was, fighting tooth and nail to get the galaxy in fighting shape against the Reapers, and some fleet from who-knows-where appears with enough firepower to send the Reapers packing. And she now had a lovely bruise on her forehead to go along with everything else. It almost wasn't fair. It was as if someone had actually found the mythical "vaults" left behind by strange precursors well beyond the borders of explored space, claims no one had verified or looked into since a few scout ships with highly experimental quantum-entangled communication devices were flung into the void toward a galaxy known as "G-3," another member of the Local Cluster (Shepard's own galaxy carried the moniker "G-6"). In instantly-arriving dots and dashes from an ancient mariner's code, fantastic tales of buried wealth, teleportation, and women (only women) capable of making the most advanced biotic look tame were logged by skeptical analysts.
Shepard remembered hearing these stories as a child. The comic books (and later video series) "Persephone's Predators" were oft-swapped discreetly under desks or via omnitools when teacher attention focused elsewhere. Feeling like a rebellious chore-avoiding, homework-hating kid again, Shepard loaded one of the old vids instead of doing "what she was supposed to do."
How these tales came about was anyone's guess—they were rumored to be "based on true stories," but that always meant some embellishment here, a changed name there, airbrushing an inconvenient individual out, and the like. A few intrepid traders made regular runs between G-3 and G-6, but that meant either one or two trips in a lifetime on massive trans-galactic supercarriers (short trip out, very lengthy journey back due to lack of mass relays at the other end) or experimenting with wormhole technology.
Such experiments were rumored to lead into dimensions with hostile life-forms; many who used the devices never reappeared. The few who survived refused to use the ships again, preferring to remain as far away from space travel as possible. Whatever these traders saw was that scary.
Amusingly, there wasn't much worth trading for in G-3 anyway—lacking a central government and coherent economic policy, G-3 was that unwanted stepchild shuttled between guardians. Most planets were borderline anarchistic, or controlled by large corporations. Some were both, and corporation-on-corporation warfare was considered completely normal despite a theoretical ban on the practice by the Local Cluster's membership in the Federated Cluster Union.
"Federated Cluster Union" spat Shepard (she hated mushy romance scenes—as one was playing out now her thoughts turned elsewhere). "More like Fluffheaded Cuckoolanders United." Briefed on the existence of multi-galactic governments upon becoming a Spectre, she found out that for all the secrecy surrounding them, there really wasn't much of a practical side to the whole concept. The FCU theoretically governed some seven "local clusters," but rarely did anything of consequence. Local Clusters were created with the intent to prevent galactic-scale warfare (after single galaxy in the A-cluster fought off a religiously-motivated, anti-technology invasion by a species in the E-cluster that had completely destroyed its own galaxy millions of years ago). Blathering philosophers she thought. Since that age-old conflict, galaxies had tended to keep to themselves, mostly due to inter-galactic travel taking extreme amounts of time and/or being hideously expensive. How that happened after millions of years in which such travel was commonplace generally was attributed to some kind of technological dark age. No one but historians tended to give it much thought.
Liara T'Soni had given Sam a purple fire-gem she'd gotten from a G-3 trader years ago. It shone with what almost seemed to be an interior light—even in a pitch-black room, it glowed brightly. Trinkets, really—that's all that one could find from the few traders making the journey between G-6 and G-3. Like the submachine gun on her desk that used actual ammunition rather than thermal clips or an internal nano-shaving system. It was supposed to use incendiary rounds (with a name like "Hellfire," how could it not?) but Shepard had yet to be able to figure out how to operate it. As a result, it was used as a desk decoration and paperweight.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the holovid she'd left on.
"But Hera, that journey will take decades! Are you sure you want to go?"
"I must" replied the green-haired, asymmetrically-tattooed woman. "The crime duo of Freddy and Jason must be stopped—even if that means traveling to an unknown galaxy."
Of course, in the vids "hyperwarp" meant galaxy-to-galaxy travel took weeks, not centuries. That was science fiction for you.
Negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement between the Trans-Galactic Republic and the Citadel Council began hours after true, mutually-understanding first contact (as opposed to previous aggressive negotiations). For one, Republic forces had no idea how to leave the place they found themselves in. A second key point followed that the Citadel races had no desire to be flattened by a clearly superior force—so it was essential that order be established.
Unfortunately, aside from those two items, practically everything else stood as a point of contention. Despite attempts to keep discussions private, leaks occurred that only exacerbated the situation. An intrepid reporter by the name of Eddie Snowman managed to reveal the existence of high-level talks in the first place, which set off a chain reaction.
Once it became apparent that these "Outsiders" were both real and in possession of stupidly powerful military technology, every race with a Citadel embassy wanted to be involved. This stood in stark contrast to the usual state of affairs in which the four-race Council was trusted to decide most galactic issues. The reaction of each race followed predictable patterns: asari wanted to talk, salarians wanted information (through whatever means necessary), humans were (over)eager to meet their apparent brethren, drell (hanar too) expressed little interest as the events were far from the homeworld, elcor were content to "wait," volus ears pressed to the ground in an attempt to discern any possible economic benefits, and itchy turian trigger fingers made everyone nervous.
Turians stood deeply suspicious of the outsiders who were, for all intents and purposes, humans. Insane theories know no bounds of species, and in only a few hours wild conspiracies alleging a secret pact between the Systems Alliance and the Outsiders swept the turian-dominated portions of the extranet. Salarian spies ran headlong into reality: when your target possesses computer technology orders of magnitude more advanced, using unfamiliar interfaces, languages, operating systems, and hardware even the best hackers will get exactly nowhere. Primitive cave-dwellers would have had a better chance understanding Citadel systems, if such a ridiculous situation were ever to come to pass. As a result, half a dozen STG agents were captured—no damage done and no information extracted—by amused TGR personnel.
Given no credible threat against the Terra Nova force from the comparatively primitive weapons of the Citadel races, Grayson attempted to negotiate from a position of benevolent strength. He thus insisted on holding combined talks with all Citadel races rather than just those represented on the Council or striking individual treaties with each species.
It didn't take long for him to curse his choice.