Do not own Mass Effect. Did not write Mass Effect.
Warning: this narrative will make you Rage. If you succumb to elaborate revenge fantasies, genocidal proclamations, or lose vision in a blood red haze of blood lust, this story may not be good for you.
Renegade Reinterpretations
AC 77-96: Benevolent Intentions
After decades of near-total ignorance, the Council's notice was finally drawn to the long-obscured conflict following the Batarian Hegemony's ambitious demand for Council membership in AC 76. In order to inform their deliberations, the Council made renewed effort of sending the STG and Spectres to infiltrate Hegemony space in a thorough investigation, and slowly began to realize the nature, if not scale, of their prior beliefs. As the Batarians had grown more powerful, even having a number of Spectres from their species, so had the scrutiny pointed at them.
While the fact that the Batarians were fighting an internal conflict in their colonization areas had not been missed, the Council had long thought (with much reason and circumstantial evidence found by the Salarian STG) that the Batarians were handling an internal insurgency, or even trying to hide a slave uprising. While the Council had been largely content to not look deeper so long as the Batarians continued to become increasingly respectable interstellar partners, the increased deployment and disappearance of Batarian soldiers aroused their concerns.
It was with some surprise that the Council began to receive reports implying that the Human slave resistance they had suspected was more of a slave rebellion. Human adoption of Batarian technology for decades had led the Council to believe that Human resistance was largely an effort maintained with stolen Batarian equipment: while the tenacity of this resistance was unexpected, the belief that the Batarians had already conquered the whole of the Human population remained until AC 88 when an STG team detected a distinctly Human fleet on the near side of Relay 314. Though speculation then turned to that the Humans had managed a successful slave rebellion and were even maintaining their own small free state, it wasn't until STG managed contact in AC90 that the Council realized the scope of the war they had largely missed due to both largely failing to fully penetrate the Batarian police-state's secrecy (a credit to the Batarian secuirty aparatus), and then misinterpreting what they had learned from those brief glimpses.
While the revelation of the independent Humanity and the Batarian attack concerned them, the Council retained its galactic perspective. Widely recognized as the fourth-greatest military power in the galaxy, the Batarians were a significant power in their own right and had been a clear front-runner for the next Council seat. While the Council did not condone what the Batarians did, they would not incite a galaxy-devastating war by intervening outright: even in defeat, the Batarians could do significant damage to a large fraction of Council space. In a familiar delima like that of the Terminus, an unquestioned victory was countered by significant galactic costs.
The Council settled on a principled compromise: while they could not intervene, or openly support the humans, they could provide secret aid. So while the Council continued to maintain public ignorance of the Batarian-Human conflict and left the rest of the galaxy to do the same, in AC 96 the Council's first FTL convoy of military support was sent to the Alliance. Guided by elements of the 63rd Scouting Flotilla, the convoy made the 'slow' FTL journey from secured Council space to the outskirts of Human space. Containing a large inventory of military and civilian supplies bought from the Hegemony itself (including items built by Human slave labor), the aid caravan was intended to help supply the Human resistance and maintain plausible deniability.
With enough equipment to supply and garrison a Terminus colony, it would take two years before the aid convoy would reach Alliance space. It would arrive shortly after the Terran Blitz in 98.
A/N: And tomorrow... you will Rage.
To help offset that, I'm going to try and write up a small little 'special' from the future that was thought about but never written down, as well as give some history/context of technologies that the Alliance has. Nothing beyond the scope of the Mass Effect universe (no anti-matter space drives, no super-ultra slipspace/hyperdrive FTL, no light sabers: there's nothing in this narrative directly inspired by Star Wars, even the clones), but you might find it interesting at how some technologies are justified or adapted. Further ahead in some, further behind in others. One interesting facet of this Reinterpretation is that come ME1 Humanity isn't ahead of the Alliance in the Mass Effect canon... it's just a rather different backstory to justify the same level, but different orientation. (The 'sleeping giant' depiction of canon ME1 is 'woken giant' in Reinterpretation).
And as an aside, I'd really appreciate it if two of you frequent reviewers would stop looking ahead at my master copy. I don't know how you hacked into this account, but stop spoiling for others! (Though I suppose your red-herrings balance it out...)