THE FIRST CONTACT WAR (2157)

April 30th, 2157.

Humanity finally encounters what it has feared for more than a decade; sentient alien life, hostile, technologically advanced, and unwilling to negotiate. Along with the need to fairly coordinate the colonisation of the stars, the Systems Alliance's founding purpose was to counteract the threat of conflict with alien civilisations. That the children of Earth were not alone in the universe had been definitively proved in 2144, although it took some years for the truth to be known publicly.

Extensive preparations for the inevitable were planned. The additional discovery of the mass relay system exacerbated the situation, to the point that many humans believed that they would face a war of truly existential scale. Some believed such a war could not be won. None believed it could be avoided. If the aliens were anything like humanity itself, they would fight for their place.

By contrast, the Turian Hierarchy was in the midst of both a golden age and a crisis of identity. The Krogan were defeated centuries before, the geth never left the Veil, and the Terminus was less of a threat than ever before thanks to the expansion of asari interests via Ilium and Omega. Turians enjoyed an ever improving standard of living, yet their society remained braced for wars that did not come.

Tales of valour and bravery were instilled into the education of every Turian child, yet there were no opportunities for the same glory in the Hierarchy of the pre-human era. Between 1900 CE and 2157 CE, millions of turians left for the Terminus Systems, seeking fame and fortune, joining a steady stream of batarians, krogan and asari. Turians would be the second largest group in the Terminus by the time of the Relay 314 Incident.

However, a new opportunity arrived suddenly and without warning, a threat just large enough to cover the turian people with glory and small enough to not require centuries of bloodletting to overcome:

Humanity.

The 22nd Century would have been the human race's most deadly even without the discovery of the mass effect.

It started in the midst of three major wars. The Third European Civil War began in 2098 until 2102, a brutal conflict in the Mediterranean, between the European Union and separatists in North Africa and the Levant objecting to EU sanctions due to political repression.

In 2102, months before the end of that war, the Unification War began in Asia. Tensions between India and the Middle-East Coalition had been growing for decades, and with war seeming inevitable, the Indians turned to the Pan-Asian Coalition. They joined the Russians, Iranians and Chinese in the PAC and together swept across the Middle East in a great tide of war. The MEC fell in a year, and with that complete, the Pan-Asian Coalition turned its attentions to South East Asia, conquering everything from Burma to Papua New Guinea by 2107.

In 2106, ten years after the bombing of the Statue of Liberty by secessionist terrorists, the Union of North American States collapsed into civil war after protesters were shot in Montreal and Tijuana. The intense fighting lasted only six months before the European Union and African Union threatened to intervene to restore order. Canada, Mexico and the United States were restored as independent nations along their pre-union borders, with Mexico and the US maintaining close ties.

By 2110, there were no active wars anywhere on Earth, as the huge power blocs consolidated their positions. However, the first signs that something else was greatly wrong began to show. From 2112 onwards, the climate got colder. Permanent glacial flows moved deep into previously inhabited territories by 2119. United Nations climatologists announced that a subtle change in solar output has placed Earth into the beginning of a new Ice Age.

At first, the world powers rallied to provide humanitarian assistance to affected areas, and it appeared as if the common threat would unite the species. However, unrest soon began, particularly in the highly populated Siberian provinces of the Pan-Asian Coalition. Previous global warming allowed the mass settlement of the region, but by 2123, the ice and snows made life increasingly impossible there. The PAC responded with force to riots in camps for those forced out of their homes, the only response it knew to such situations. Condemnation of the act was widespread throughout the rest of the world.

The move towards war became inevitable as the climate got worse. Europe's population was shielded from the direct glacier flows by the mountains of Norway, northern Sweden and Scotland well into the 2130s, although Finland had to be evacuated entirely in 2136. Crop yields almost everywhere fell, the exception being in the EU's agricultural heartlands on the Mediterranean coasts. Pressure on governments everywhere increased drastically. The climate was not the only soure of conflict, however.

The US economy suffered a significant stumble when Eldfell-Ashland Energy successfully demonstrated helium extraction from Saturn, smashing their monopoly on fusion reactor fuel from Luna. In South America, pan-Latin nationalism was booming and the weakness of the US was seen as an opportunity. In Africa, the continent least affected by the climate situation, the sense that the federation should become the watchdog of the world against global conflict was growing. The demands for action grew.

2137 saw the last effort for peace dashed. After months of negotiation, US-backed deal on energy and food between the PAC and the EU failed when European citizens refused it in a continent-wide referendum. War in Eurasia became inevitable, and the next two years were dominated by semi-secret war preparations and further diplomatic summits to buy time.

The Cold War finally began in 2139, with PAC assaults on the EU's Minsk Defensive Line. Africa joined on the European side, honouring its alliance with the EU and fulfilling the deep desire of its people to punish the aggressors. By 2141, the Minsk and Brandenburg Defensive Lines had been breached and PAC forces had reached the borders of France, but the Suez Front remained static and the glaciers finally flowed into Central Europe via Finland and the North Sea, leaving PAC gains more or less useless for agricultural purposes.

The same year, the South American Federation extended an ultimatum to Mexico and the small Central American states; join or be invaded. Central America capitulated. Mexico refused and called for US assistance. Despite lingering enmity over secession, the US agreed, and the American front of the Cold War opened. The American and Mexcian economies had been lifted and prepared for war by arms exports to Europe and Africa, and the SAF found themselves in a war they had not expected, gravely overestimating the weakness of the US.

By 2144, the PAC had conquered most of mainland Europe, but struggled to make any progress against North Africa, Italy, Spain and those parts of the British Isles that weren't under the ice. US progress in South America brought Brazil into the war on the South American side. Everywhere became a stalemate, with titans clashing in the skies. Starvation set in globally, the first real worldwide famine in the planet's history.

The population of Earth was static at ten billion before the arrival of the New Ice Age, and the great dream of colonising the solar system was in its infancy of realisation. In every country, but in the PAC especially, people began to die. Hunger was not the direct cause of any of the deaths, but the weakness brought on by extreme rationing and the neglect of antibiotic research before and during the course of the war allowed common diseases to become extremely contagious and deadly. The Siberian Flu would become the number one killer of the war, and it was far from alone.

The Cold War was also the first human war to have battles on other planetary bodies. The SAF briefly employed missiles against US mining colonies on the Moon, but these were ineffective due to point defences set up to deflect smaller asteroid hits.

Much more significant, for both the war and the course of human history, was the conflict on Mars. The Red Planet had settlements from the PAC, the EU and the African Union already established by 2139. These were small, consisting of no more than ten thousand people, most of whom were scientists working on practical problems in the way of greater settlement.

By 2144, the EU knew it would be able to push back the PAC and retake Europe, but morale across its armies and especially among the displaced populations was low. The previous year, they had managed to land specialised military equipment on Mars for the protection of Lowell City, the EU's major settlement. The colonists were overcome with patriotic feeling, touched that they had not been forgotten. Determined to do whatever they could, the engineers modified many of their rovers and founded the 1st Martian Armoured Regiment, to date humanity's only formal military unit founded on a planet other than Earth. This news greatly boosted EU morale that year, and the Joint European-African High Command saw an unique opportunity.

The 1st Martian was ordered to drive to and seize the PAC's own colony at Vladivostok-On-Mars, a journey of two months but well within the capabilities of the colonists to achieve. It is not known whether or not the attack would have succeeded, but the offensive ground to a halt when rover fell into a pit. What was found when the rescue team arrived to help changed everything.

The Prothean Ruins on Mars was the most excellently preserved site in the galaxy, save for the singular exception of the Archive at the Temple of Athame on Thessia. It contained huge data troves that seemed extremely easy to access, courtesy of adaptive translation programmes written into the base VI. It also contained raw materials intended for base maintenance, including a large stockpile of refined element zero. Most importantly, it held a secret that had eluded human physicists since Newton; the mass effect.

It was the Holy Grail. The scientists on Mars informed their superiors and decided that their efforts were better deployed in figuring out how to use the new alien technology to win the Cold War. News of the discovery was kept absolutely secret in European circles. Even the EU's African allies were kept in the dark. Although the PAC spies intercepted some of the transmissions, they assumed that the reference to alien technology was some sort of code and that Lowell City was being used as a relay point for secure communications. In the mean time, the war continued.

In early 2145, the integration of the mass effect into human technology began. The science teams concluded that the quickest and most effective way to use the discovery to win the war was to upgrade existing orbital strike capabilities. They came up with a design for a modification that could be easily added to existing attack-satellites. On Mars, the refined eezo was shaped into the correct pieces and sent on the months-long journey back home. On Earth, several satellites due to be launched received railguns and upgraded fusion reactors. They were launched from French Guyane without incident. In April 2145, the five satellites were mated to five eezo-enhanced barrels with primitive kinetic barriers in geostationary orbits over Eurasia. The first test firing, a kinetic strike against a PAC titan over Milan, produced stunning results.

Throughout the summer of 2145, PAC titan forces and facilities were systematically reduced by EU orbital strikes hitting with many times the force of their previous capability. Attempts to shoot down the satellites, as was possible before, fail entirely. The EU rolled back the front all the way to the original EU-PAC border in a matter of months. The PAC stood on the brink of collapse, its military success no longer propping up the stability of its regimes. The EU and Africa offered a full peace in return for disarmament and reparations over two centuries. It was rejected. The alliance began an invasion of Asia in response. Only now were nuclear weapons deployed by a belligerent, withheld due to fears of worsening the climate situation through nuclear winter. Unfortunately, the EU's anti-ballistic missile systems have long been advanced enough to deflect such an attack. Orbital strikes on open missile silos proved extremely effective too. Several ICBMs' fuel pods were detonated in their silos, destroying the missile bases.

The European response to this attempted genocide was restrained, but utterly ruthless. Previously off-table targets such as civilian government facilities and political figures were given the attention of the new orbital weapons arrays, the original five joined by ten more in October 2145. The PAC's ability to rule was destroyed building by building, politician by politician, general by general, until finally the surviving members of the government, all junior, agree to an unconditional surrender on November 11th to European forces in Asia and African forces in the Middle East.

The next day saw the European Union join the war in the Americas on the side of Mexico, targeting Brazil's titan forces and the SAF's manufacturing facilities from orbit, breaking the stalemate in that theatre. Both the South American Federation and Brazil call for peace talks, a request which was granted despite US protest. North and South American forces maintained their existing lines, but the war was over.

The extent to which the Cold War influenced the future of humanity among the stars cannot be understated. Due entirely to the events of the conflict, humanity discovered the mass effect at the highest technological level of any known species. The asari discovered it before they had even achieved powered flight, having natural biotic abilities and an abundance of the substance itself on their homeworld. The turians, batarians and salarians discovered it in their golden ages of early space exploration.

By sharp contrast, humanity's conflicts pushed technological advancement to the furthest point possible without use of the mass effect, making the integration of element zero technologies a simple process. Furthermore, the power plays made in the aftermath of the war shaped what would become the Systems Alliance for decades afterwards.