Chapter 7
The Phoenix Massing, Salahiel System, Ekuna
July 4th 2825
It had been truly odd to set foot on this world for Tali'Zorah nar Rayya. It was here that the quarian estrangement from the Citadel aligned races had truly begun. Two hundred and eighty years ago, her people had come to this place seeking it as a new homeworld. They had petitioned the Citadel Council fully expecting their right to colonization of it to be ratified as a mere formality, and had begun settling on it. Then unexpectedly, when there were already a few hundred thousand quarians on the surface beginning to set up a colony, the Council declared the occupation an illegal act.
The Council turned a deaf ear to her people's pleas for reason, but the bosh'tet Council of the time obeyed the letter of the law and bureaucracy, and they didn't know the meaning of compassion. They had instead given this world to the elcor, (who they were trying to woo into the alliance at the time) who could obviously withstand Ekuna's four point one standard surface gravities far better.
The quarians had been given one standard month to leave or face an orbital bombardment from a turian cruiser squadron backed up by dreadnought support. The rush of her people fleeing from that threat was still visible on the planet's surface to this day, with all sorts of dismantled starship junk and ancient rusting habitation modules cluttering the horizon. She had initially chosen to begin her traditional pilgrimage here, because she wanted to see those hulks in which her ancestors had fled Rannoch and explore them for anything salvageable – she doubted there was anything – between the elcor and other salvagers over the centuries there was only bones of those ships left, but the amount of junk was truly phenomenal and there might be a 'nugget of eezo' somewhere in there.
Even if it came of nothing it was a worthy first world to visit. The elcor had a local population of over two hundred and twenty million and their capital city, Durawunafon, was a sight to see; it held the record for being the biggest in terms of surface area covered. Elcor culture was built on small, tight knit groups and their large size and evolution on wide open spaces meant they found enclosed spaces such as starships and the typical skyscraper construction of other species 'cities stifling. The tallest building Tali had seen thus far was a mere four floors and the open space between them was truly huge, easily averaging point eight clicks.
The high gravity also meant that there were no real mountains or tall flora, and right now Tali was cursing that fact.
It meant that hiding places were few and far between, and cover was practically nonexistent.
She was experiencing a nightmare come true.
It had all begun so innocently. She had been welcome on Ekuna – the elcor were that way – and they had been sensitive to the unpleasant quarian history on this planet, the local governor had even welcomed her personally and invited her to his family's table. She had mentioned her desire to explore the boneyards of ancient quarian starships and he freely admitted that there was currently an effort in progress to clean up the junkyards closest to Durawunafon.
This had surprised her, the sheer cost of such a cleanup operation usually stopped such efforts in their tracks, but it seemed that the local Ekuna government had been saving up for generations to be able to afford the labor and equipment costs and it had finally begun.
Tali joined the operation the next day and it was truly a sight to behold the many elcor 'workers' digging the accumulated dirt away and carefully cutting through the massive dismantled bulk of an ancient quarian cruiser. Of course, the elcor weren't really 'working' in a manner that a bipedal species would recognize. They were either standing next to the hulk, or on hovering platforms, and mounted on their huge backs were tailored mechanical arms with various tools on their ends that did the actual cutting, lasering, and attaching the thick duralloy lines to the big pieces, which dangled from huge cargo tugs that hovered in the air above. It was a very slow process and dangerous in the heavy grav environment.
She had immediately offered to join the work, and the site foreman had put her on helping to keep an active watch on the VI programming of the equipment, as a malfunction or glitch would be very fatal in the delicate work.
Then in the second week… a find that had sent the project leader into raptures of excitement, well for an elcor anyway. In digging around the hulk to unearth it from centuries of sediment, there had been discovered a large actual Prothean artifact of some sort, set in a circular structure that clearly resembled the prothean architecture she'd seen pictures of. Tali had been working right next to the elcor digger that had uncovered it.
It had felt so good to be part of what could be history in the making. The elcor had promptly informed their homeworld and the Citadel of the find, calling in the best scientists to study it. Tali had naturally also sent the information on the find to the Admiralty, and encrypted her Omni-tool scans of the prothean device so thoroughly that she doubted even the vaunted Salarian STG could crack it for two years at least (she hoped so).
The elcor scientists had arrived and began their study, but it had hardly been two days of further excavation around the prothean structure when a massive dreadnought sized ship right out of some nightmare appeared out of the sky, shaped like an aquatic creature of sorts, hovering about a few clicks away from the dig sight. The thing was even bigger than a Covenant Potemkin Class Troop Cruiser, and it could keep itself perfectly stationary just above the ground, Tali wouldn't be surprised if the damn thing could land. She had tried to do mental calculation of the strength of the Eezo core necessary to accomplish that feat…
If that wasn't bad enough, smaller cruiser ships, seemingly made to emulate the design of the nightmare dreadnought began to descend and rain death.
Death in the form of the very legacy the quarian people had given the galaxy.
The Geth.
Tali could now boast another honor, the first quarian to fight their own creations since the Morning War ended.
She leaned around the corner of the building she was using as shelter and triggered her shotgun to blast directly into shields of what looked like the standard bipedal model of geth. The sheer close range force was enough to blast it away and the elcor warrior behind her snaked a sinuous arm of his weapon rig around the same corner and blasted the geth to scrap with the heavy rifle mounted on it. The scrap fell to the earth with a heavy loud thump.
This triggered an immediate response from the geth networked intelligence.
Tali was suddenly surrounded by the five strong team of elcor warriors, protecting her on all sides with their own near-vehicular grade shielding, armor and their very bodies.
"Urgently, stay behind us," Captain Gralannan, the leader of the elcor unit subvocalized over the tacnet.
Tali did her best to ignore the near constant energetic whine of geth phasic rounds being streamed into their direction, ignore the thud those rounds made against the elcor fireteam's armor, as the bullets were only partially being stopped by barriers. She put her Machinist's fascination at the phased bullets (something she had thought was only theoretical) aside and focused on her Omnitool and her link to the VI-controlled elcor battle rigs.
Their lives were in her hands, literally. The geth was flooding the area with a sophisticated ECM that fouled the auto-targeting of the battle rigs at long range and since combat on this high gee world was all about long range, with standard engagement ranges measured in half a click, it was reducing the response time of the elcor fireteam to a torpid pace relative to a battle situation. The elcor's battle rigs had thousands of strategies and tactics pre-programmed into them – compensating for their slow, conservative psyches, which were not suited at all to the fast instinctual decisions necessary for combat. Their VI's could normally react faster than any non-cybernetic aided organic could even perceive it happening. This had seen the elcor through many a foe over the centuries.
Not the geth it seemed.
The elcor VI's had no answer to counter this form of jamming, but Tali had been trained, as all quarian machinists were, in every aspect of the geth – information that not even the Council possessed with regard to the geth network architecture and runtimes. She had in her personal database, an adaptive program, that she had been fiddling with since she was thirteen. It had started as a pet project meant to please her father in his efforts at finding an answer to the geth problem and perhaps reclaiming the homeworld one day.
It was this program that she was now interfacing with the battle rigs.
And just like that, she saw her personal radar snap back into life and display the multiple angry red blips of enemy eezo cores that surrounded them. The red dots of the enemy began rapidly winking out, and with the aid of her helmet's optical zoom, saw the entire geth squad that had been attacking them drop to the ground in various states of destruction.
She had to shut the program down at this point, to minimize its exposure to the geth as much as possible, now inputting new Lidar and radar modulations for the battle rigs to operate on.
"Cautiously, move out."
The elcor squad moved as quickly as they dared into a diamond formation around her and they resumed their trek towards the prothean beacon. Tali checked her grav compensator belt, which prevented her from suddenly weighing over two hundred and forty weight units and being crushed to the landscape – thankfully there was no damage and its charge was holding constant. Even so she kept her pace careful and measured, collapsing her shotgun and putting it in the small of her back and drawing her Covenant issue Laser sidearm.
A holo crosshair appeared on the HUD of her purple tinted facemask, helpfully showing where the sidearm's beam would hit.
It was the only real long range weapon she had.
She looked around her and felt a surge of horror and what she knew was probably misplaced guilt as they passed a number of dead elcor. They had not been any kind of warrior or soldier, just civilians at the wrong place and the wrong time. The air was filled with the din of distant gunfire and streaks of light as AA fire lanced into the sky, seeking out the geth dropships and gunships that cruised over the area. The sun was close to going down, blanching the sky in an angry dark orange color.
"Disbelievingly, this situation is…" Gralannan trailed off in a monotone. Tali's translator pinged as it interpreted what her senses couldn't see or hear, and wasn't surprised that the captain was doing his species equivalent of 'freaking out' as a human would say. She didn't blame him; she was in the same starship, so to speak. "Query, why would the geth be after the artifact?"
Tali shrugged her shoulders helplessly and only just remembered not to take her eyes away from the surrounding area and keep her laser in a ready to fire position, "I don't know, from what I saw of the prothean device… it's clearly some form of communication technology. The only thing I can think of is that the geth maybe found another one in their space, that was damaged or not functional but clearly offered a benefit if studied and reverse engineered. So when this device was found... it's all speculation, I'm sorry. The quarians might have made them, but their possible upgrades they'd applied to themselves up to this point has been a mystery."
"Grudging admiration; it's clear that their research into capital vessel technology has been far superior to even the turians."
"Yes," Tali gave a brief glimpse to the monster dreadnought in question. Her suit's optical scans had been constantly on since she had gotten over the shock of that things arrival, saving and encrypting the data, just in case she was killed. The Admiralty would have a record of what happened here when whoever they sent in response to her distress call arrived. "We're within a click of the dig site…"
Her suit blared a warning as the whole squad was hit with hostile targeting radar. Six hundred meters away, distant streaks of smoke shot up into the sky and Tali felt her heart skip a beat with fear. Her facemask's optics zoomed in and identified a geth squad carrying hand portable compact missile launchers. They fired three times and just like that eighteen anti-materiel missiles were homing in on their position. She had never worked an omni-tool so fast in her life as she fired up the geth adaptation program.
The elcor battle rigs trained their sinuous arms that carried low caliber mass effect machine guns – meant for suppression of the enemy – into the sky and carried out their other purpose. A storm of grain sized metal slugs streaked out.
Missiles exploded in small groups as they encountered the fast moving wall of metal thrown by the defenders. One of the elcor trained his primary cannon on their assailants and threw shells downrange as fast as his weapon could cycle. Her own omnitool calculated that the enemy was just barely within effective range of her laser pistol and helpfully laid out a targeting reticule for her to aim at. She knelt down for a more stable firing platform, held her breath and exhaled, depressing the firing stud on the handle.
The invisible beam traced itself across the distance and ignored the barriers around her target and hit it in the upper right shoulder. The purple painted armor sizzled red before vaporizing, and arm became useless, remaining barely attached. Tali berated herself for her last moment twitch, having once again anticipated a recoil that wasn't coming. She tried her best to relax before firing again. This time scoring a hit in the lower abdomen that cored straight through her target, finally rendering it non-functional.
The shockwave of a missile explosion bouncing off an elcor kinetic barrier nearly sent her flying out of the elcor squad formation. As it was, she collided with another elcor and had the wind driven out of her lungs from the impact.
The elcor in question took his sweet time help her to her feet and his battle rig handed her fallen laser pistol back to her with its fine manipulation arm.
"Thank you," she offered weakly before resuming the fight, sending only two more laser shots downrange before the geth squad was finally destroyed.
The final click to the dig site Tali would recall as longest walk she'd ever had. It felt like lifetimes were passing in mere moments. The fear and sadness as an elcor soldier was killed right next to her, the terror as yet more missiles and now even passing geth dropships would target them, either directly or by raining down armed geth platforms. It was a testament to the designers of the battle rigs and the elcor that they made it to the dig site at all, though with two elcor killed in the process.
Tali crawled up the small hill and let her omni-tools mini-fabricator flash create an expendable yet simply camera drone, and threw it over. Better to loose fabricator mass and energy than a head, was what her instructors had constantly told her. The results made her heart sink.
She stood up without fear and regarded the ancient circular structure below with nothing in it.
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Bipedal geth platform #23231 moved fluidly without pause in its advance to investigate an anomaly that a passing dropship's sensors had found. The dropship couldn't give more data due to the need to remain in motion to evade the elcor air defenses. It's proximity to the dig site that had contained the device that Sovereign needed had caused the local consensus to detail '231 towards the strange EM fluctuation. Processing power was currently prioritized with combat of hundreds of bipedal platforms and dropships – meaning this task had fallen to '231, who just happened to be the closest to the anomaly.
'231's pulse rifle was raised when it entered effective visual range of the location of the anomaly. It was a small gray device partially buried in the earth, which its sensors registered as pulsing an oddly modulated EM signal, reminiscent with a…
231 was the closest a collective AI intelligence could be to 'surprised' when its programs were hurriedly broadcast out of the failing platform with the last remaining backup power supply.
The platform had been destroyed when four pulse laser beams tuned to be invisible in the atmosphere of Ekuna had promptly reduced it to a glowing scrapheap from a kilometer away.
Ethan Shepard didn't bother to confirm the kill and neither did his twin sister, Katherine. The two elite Omega ranked Blackhearts and their two lower rated Sigma class teammates, Donny Richmond and Cassie Henderson, had lowered their Mauser 960II Laser Kinetic hybrid assault rifles and were already bounding away at a constant twenty six kmh in their Paragon Power Armors. Engaging in the age-old practice of relocating after firing a long range shot, which proved prudent when shells started to rain down on their previously occupied spot.
"Networked intelligence, nice response time," Donny commented over the line of sight laser com link that connected the four Blackhearts into a completely secure and relatively undetectable tacnet.
The Blackheart unit approached the only building closest to the dig site and using it to gain some cover and observe the situation. Their primary objective was still pinging a signal briefly on the channel she had mentioned in her distress call, and its location was seemingly smack damn in the middle of a geth siege.
Twenty three bipedal platforms, armed with a mix of kinetics and missile weapons, were peppering the digsite with fire. There were two elcor soldiers with their impressive battle rigs dug in the criss-crossing trenches and their weapon arms were poking randomly out of cover to return fire. Then on occasion a red beam of a Covenant laser sidearm would strike out at the attackers.
"Good, our objective is still alive," Ethan commented.
"How are those elcor being so effective at fighting the geth?" Donny wondered. "We've passed nothing but massacred troops."
"I'm sure Miss Zorah has something to do with that," Katherine answered, "they're holding their own for now, but it's only a matter of time until they're overwhelmed."
"Then let's get them."
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"Grimly, we are being overwhelmed, our heat sinks can't keep up. Missiles are expended."
Tali only nodded as she squeezed off two shots from her laser that felled another geth, bringing her tally for the battle thus far to twenty two, but the red flashing light on the back of the sidearm noiselessly told her that the last of her charge had been expended. Ducking back into cover of the dig trench she collapsed the sidearm into its compact form and primed its self-destruct. It would only go off when her omnitool detected her heartbeat flatlining. She brought her shotgun to the fore and could only keep an eye on the hostile emissions getting ever closer to their position.
Fifty meters was its useful range, and the ring of geth was still two hundred meters out and closing. The only effective fire was now coming from Captain Gralannan and his subordinate. Their battle rigs had not come through the fight thus far unscathed… the geth were machines after all, and their marksmanship was spot on. Many of the rigs various arms were useless with damage.
Every time they had whittled down the attacking geth, another dropship would simply come around and drop another volley of bipedal platforms to replenish their numbers. It had soon felt like they were just delaying the inevitable and her fighting spirit was leaving her steadily. In that moment, she cursed her own decision to go on Pilgrimage. It was a dying tradition, one with no clear benefit except for the experience gained and possible Intel sent back to Noyvi Sad – the unofficial quarian 'colony' in the Sigurd's Crade cluster (though an ever increasing number of quarians referred to it privately as the new homeworld). Now she was going to die for it.
The first geth crossed into her range.
She popped up and fired in one move, exactly as she was trained by quarian and human drill instructors. Its shield flared but didn't go down. She sent another shot downrange and cursed as her gun overheated, but didn't let it deter her as she raised her left arm and sent a directed EMP from her omnitool that violently overloaded the geth's shields. The geth was suddenly crumpled to the ground and she noted with satisfaction that she must have gotten the platform's grav compensator doing that.
She didn't linger, and moved along the trench, waiting until her Overload recharged and popped up. She released another Overload on a geth, and followed it up with a spread of shotgun slugs that wrecked it. Phasic slugs hit her barriers at this point and she yelped in pain as the slugs were only decelerated and not stopped cold. It hit her low profile armor with the force of a heavy punch and knocked her off her feet.
She shook her head to clear it of the cobwebs and checked her upper chest. The deformation was there but thankfully no penetration, though her left lung was protesting with pain. Tali gritted through it and wearily got her feet under her again. She had had thick elcor armor to protect her before from those horrid rounds, no longer.
"Concerned urgent worry, are you all right, Zorah?"
"Fine…urghh… I'll live, I think…"
"Factual statement, you would be more productive at this point working with our battle rigs…"
Tali nodded and wearily hobbled over to Gralannan's position. She gave a cry of alarm though when she saw a diagnostic of his battle rig on her omnitool. It's weapons at this close range reverberated through air and vibrated her body sympathetically with each shot. "It's not going to last much longer! Your heat sink efficiency is dropping and you're ripping through your ammo block on the heavy and assault rifles way beyond…"
"No choice."
Tali shook her head and scrolled to the other surviving elcor soldier's rig, who was keeping the other section of the battlespace secure…
Time seemed to slow down so much, she'd thought that somebody had installed an ocular synaptic processor in her head when she was asleep. There was no time to scream a warning to either Gralannan or his teammate. She could do only one thing and dialed Gralannan grav compensator way up, enough that his mass was reduced to practically nothing… and dove for his flank, knocking him down and deeper into the trench.
The world turned white as the power regulator of the elcor soldier's battle rig 'gave up the ghost' as a human would say.
But it was not the end…
Her envirosuit's sound pickups screeched before the VI muted it automatically but it left Tali near deaf anyway. Her barriers had been drained halfway to stop the overpressure from the explosion, and by her suit's time, only a minute had passed. She pulled herself away from the collapsed Gralannan, who still seemed conscious, thank the ancestors. A look at her radar showed that the geth closest had clearly been destroyed or damaged, but there were still active signatures out there, which were relentlessly closing.
If only to add insult to injury… she heard yet another geth dropship approaching.
"Keelah! Bosh'tets! Fuck!'" she screamed in frustration, even adding a human expletive. Like a program fulfilling its function, more geth troopers were dropped from it.
She looked at her shotgun clenched in her hand and back up to the enemy. She might not yet be an adult in the eyes of quarian law, but she'd be damned if she was going to die cowering in this ditch with geth towering over her.
Tali double checked her weapon, adjusted her grav compensator to make her weigh only a few kilos relative, and charged, sprinting as fast as she dared, screaming in anger. She ate up the distance between her and the geth line in seemingly moments, firing shot after shot as fast as her heat sinks could cycle…
The nearest geth troopers dropped to the ground… if she had been in any rational state of mind she'd have seen that it wasn't her shotgun achieving the kills…
An explosion overhead dropped her unceremoniously on her buttocks and snapped her out her madness… a large dark shadow was looming over position…
Her mind instantly recognized it as a Covenant ship… highly modified Titan Class, just under two hundred meters long, sleek aerodyne wings and ailerons mated to a large bulky body, the thick hull seemed to be changing color in front of her eyes.
The crash of debris falling to the earth let her see the pieces of what was a geth dropship fall to the ground. Then the ship began to fire at the geth troopers – with what had to be the human LB-5x cluster munitions autocannons that were set in over-under barrel turrets all along the wings of the ship - with full fury in a storm that swept aside the enemy like the hand of an angry God.
"Miss Zorah!"
She was startled at the sudden intrusion of the voice into her helmet and saw a sight that almost caused her to slump over in relief. Four humans in the latest Paragon Power Armor rushing over to her position, yet more hardsuited soldiers doing grav belt assisted combat drops from the ship and hurrying over to Gralannan.
"Are you injured?" the deep distorted yet clearly male voice of the leader of the squad, who she saw wore a B-Omega symbol on the armor with the rank insignia of a Commander. 'Dad, really? You didn't!' she thought to herself in exasperation.
"Fine for the moment, though I hope you have a good Doctor on that ship, Commander."
"There is. Our orders are to secure you to safety, Miss Zorah."
"And retrieve my scans of the prothean artifact, if not the artifact itself."
"That would be ideal."
Tali nodded and let herself be led off to ascender cables that was hanging from the ship above. She was clipped into a self adjusting harness and was whisked in the air and swallowed by the infantry drop hatches.
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453rd Galactic Encyclopedia
Humans (Terrans)
Originating from a dense cluster of colonized worlds and their homeworld, Terra, deep in unknown space, thousands of light years beyond the Crossroads Mass Relay, humanity is the newest notable race to enter the galactic stage. They are wholly unique, in that they are a spacefaring civilization, but had no knowledge or conception of element zero physics or mass relay technology until First Contact with the quarians.
Biology
Humans are a highly adaptable species with a robust physiology. Their internal makeup and reproductive processes exhibit typical characteristics of a bi-gendered bipedal mammal. Their genetic diversity is also much greater than any known species, showing large varieties of skin tone, eye, and hair color. This diversity also manifests on other aspects, such as intelligence, strength, ability and other characteristics. Most notable of human physical abilities, that with proper training, their stamina can defy belief; allowing them to run vast distances that would see other races using an aircar. In general they are physically stronger than a turian, but less agile than an asari and slower than a salarian.
The average human lifespan is constantly being revised, due to their program of self-imposed genetic engineering and a steady pace of new medical advances. The current lifespan that human geneticists claim is roughly one hundred and eighty years. Humans reach physical maturity at eighteen years of age, at which point they have finished their academic education and either directly enter the workforce or begin training a profession.
History (Credit to DarkAtlan for this part)
The famous asari Citadel historian, Arian Leshas, when analyzing human spacefaring history, is quoted as stating: "Eight hundred years of stupid mistakes, easily bruised and bloated egos, a crippling fear of genuine unity and peace, and poor long term planning."
Humanity left its homeworld, called Earth or as it later became known, Terra, more than seven centuries ago with the advent of the Hyperdrive (See below) – as a fragile and corrupt alliance of nations with radically different cultures and goals, born in the aftermath of war.
Its first attempt at civilizing the explored galaxy, the Terran Alliance, was poorly thought out and died – first by the star nation itself surrendering five sixths of its worlds because it was unable to respond to their rebellions quickly enough, and then by military coup. The successor nation, the Terran Hegemony, was a much smaller nation which dominated its neighbors by fear of force – a force enhanced by high technology. The major star nations were loosely allied in a government known as the Star League, and even had a federal military, but all still retained their native militaries.
A comedy of errors, slow interstellar communications, and poor judgment began the Reunification War, in which the combined might of two thousand worlds spent two decades trying to conquer less than three hundred non-aligned worlds on the periphery of human space – three hundred of the least developed ones at that.
Most of human history has seen constant, low-level conflict, punctuated by larger wars. Small scale skirmishing is seen as the norm, and various rules (See Aries Conventions) exist to ratify and regulate such behavior. A nobility, based on birth, has come to hold most power, and tend to demonstrate their position by piloting BattleMechs. Despite the clear nature of the BattleMech as a component of combined arms strategy, it has come to dominate the human psyche, and fill out all roles in war – even ones they are not remotely suited for. (see Scout Mech and LAM)
The Star Covenant, born from an idealistic self-imposed exodus of the now defunct Star League military, an escape of the constant warfare of their species, has so far refrained from such skirmishing. It did, however, begin the largest war in two centuries within fifteen years of discovering galactic civilization by defeating the Batarian Hegemony – after the latter foolishly attacked Covenant shipping with the intent of gathering slaves and technology.
Despite this violent history, though, humanity is just as capable of producing works of high culture and art that rivals anything seen in the galaxy thus far. (See Mozart, Shakespeare, Henley, Follet, Da Vinci, Pollack) And there is a resurgence of the arts as the Covenant settles down and comes into its own as a society. They are idealistic, expansionistic and regard piracy, slavery and related crimes with a passionate disdain and a disease to be purged from galactic civilization with extreme prejudice.
The Hyperdrive and The Great Galactic Expansion
Humanity, having no concept of mass effect or discovering element zero, has achieved space faring and other technologies wholly unthought-of by any race. In some cases, their technology is so out of context that it is incomprehensible. The most famous of which is the human method of FTL – the Kearny Fuchida Hyperdrive. (See link for a more detailed theoretical discussion), which uses levels of high dimensional mathematics as its basis that even the best asari and salarian physicists have trouble working with. Even among humans it is rare to be able to conceive the theory behind it. The only Citadel species who has shown they are capable of understanding the math, are the hanar. Understandable, as an aquatic species, they live in a constant three dimensional environment and their thinking as a result can make the leap to understand high dimensional math.
But the results of the Hyperdrive are undeniable, allowing a ship to move itself up to fifty light years in a subjective instant, leaving no light wake or indication that a ship had passed through the intervening space. With accurate enough recon navigation, a human ship could simply, without tripping any early warning sensor net or frigate picket, put itself into orbit of any world it chooses. Its range is also free from the limits of fuel reserves, as the drive can be fed with harvested solar energy from a star.
The reasons the Hyperdrive hasn't supplanted conventional mass effect FTL drive, besides the difficulty in understanding it, never mind building it, is that it requires five days of careful recharge before using again. This time reduces its utility in comparison, as the fastest FTL ships can move sixty light years in that time. The drive itself has to form the core of the ship and can take up to thirty to forty percent of its available mass.
Covenant ships though has taken the best of both forms of FTL and combined it to produce 'Mass Effect Cruise Jumping', a technique which lets a Covenant ship cover ninety eight light years in five days. Eight light years per day faster than the fastest ships in Citadel space.
The second significant innovation that humanity has brought with it is the Core Static Dissipation (CSD) technology. Previously, starships were forced to find gas giants or planets with strong EM fields to discharge the huge static buildup in its eezo FTL core. No longer. The static is now channeled away as it forms before it can build up in any way and expressed as heat within the fusion reactor, which can be removed from the starship as heat is normally vented. This minor technology, like a pebble that starts an avalanche, has caused a vast expansion in explored space over the past thirty years. More untouched garden worlds and significant resource lodes have been discovered and claimed in this short time than in the previous three hundred years combined. The CSD has also ushered in an era where conflict over previously limited resources is no longer as much of an issue.
The next evolution that the species brought with it is in the practicality and use of energy weapons both on a personal scale all the way up to completely changing how species builds dreadnought warships. The days of the gigantic linear mass drivers with ships built around them have passed due to the Covenant's capital scale energy weapons which outranged all dreadnoughts of the time (as the Batarians found out in the Covenant-Batarian War) and most species navies are phasing them out in favor of the Missile Dreadnought – which fires eighty ton tele-operated disruptor missiles which can accelerate to an average of five percent of light speed in the multi light second ranges such ships can engage each other at. (See Link for more detailed discussion on the Missile Dreadnought, Space Combat in the modern era and Capital Energy weapons)
Finally, humanity has revolutionized how any civilization engages in its most ancient practice – mining. One of the biggest exports that the Covenant has is its specialized Mining Mechs. Manufactured specific to each species which puts in an order, the Mining Mech reduces the labor and time cost of asteroid mining to levels which sees it surpassing the productivity of standard groundside mines to the point where any mining corporation which didn't upgrade its operations found itself facing liquidation and bankruptcy.
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