IA IA disclaimer fhtagn!
Author's Note: The Reapers are probably going to show up around chapter 12. But that is neither here or now. At the moment, the ASB and Council are busy arming up. In the ASB's case it's intended to put the hurt on the Reapers. The Council just wants deterrent so the 'crazy AI lovers' don't try something. To sum it up, the ASB is too busy with more important stuff to shoot at the Council. However, the Council doesn't know that and just sees the ASB making a huge military buildup. Also a bit of non-codex (because this is something the Council doesn't know about.)
Also, you may or may not have noticed, but I am really horrendously bad at characterization (damn high-functioning Autism screws with my ability to handle social stuff, at the very least I got awesome math skills out of the deal). Does anyone feel like helping?
ASB gate network
The Gate network is a project initiated by Bump to get around the fact that most ASB ships are simply too large to use the Relays, and not fast enough at Warp to match a Reaper's strategic speed. It uses wormhole links at specific 'hub' areas containing multiple wormhole links to connect the galaxy. The Gate network is arranged around the galactic core in what can roughly be considered a multi-layered 'spiderweb' formation. This formation is designed such that while in the Milky Way galaxy a ship is never more than 250 light years from a gate hub, meaning that someone in the know can get to any location in the galaxy in a day at most.
Each gate has a traversable diameter of 80 kilometers to allow some of the larger ship classes through, possibly multiple ships at once. Worth noting is that these gates require a quite ludicrous amount of element zero to construct. This has led to large-scale eezo-mining being deployed at hundreds of neutron stars, as those are the only locations enough eezo can be practically mined from for gate construction. This has led to a project to create synthetic eezo.
The co-ordinate system of the Gate network is simple. First, state the rotation around the galactic plane in degrees (to 3 decimal places), then the distance from the core, and finally the "up/down" co-ordinates within the galactic plane. Each Gate hub can 'dial' any other gate hub, thanks to the WormComm network being able to move the microscopic paired ring singularities involved before they get inflated to a usable degree, in addition to just being an information transfer system. Each Gate hub is equipped with 5 gates in case of heavy traffic.
Notable locations on the Gate Network include
-ASB home sphere (0 degrees, core distance ~22,500 light years, vertical 800 light years)
-Citadel staging point (58.129 degrees, core distance ~21,750 light years, vertical 450 light years)
-Sur'Kesh staging point (29.856 degrees, core distance ~17,500 light years, vertical 125 light years)
-Palaven staging point (33.121 degrees, core distance ~35,000 light years, vertical 823 light years)
-Thessia staging point (68.534 degrees, core distance ~31,250 light years, vertical 1006 light years)
ASB gate network (co-ordinates 17.896 degrees, core distance 21,000 light years) (POV: Captain Yelena Val Emerson of the ASBCSV [Combat Space Vehicle] Squid Remover)
One of the most problematic things about having to deal with the Reapers is that we didn't really have any way of detecting them at the galactic scale. This meant that we wouldn't be able to see them until they were already in our systems and wrecking our stuff. Strictly speaking, yes we could just fill the galaxy with WormComm equipped sensor probes for effectively FTL sensing, but that was intensely impractical at best. Making a radar-like active sensor that functioned using gravity waves was, strictly speaking, possible, but the signals were so faint that with our current level of technology we'd be better off just using radar. Therefore, something entirely different was being attempted.
Element zero made accelerating an object to near the speed of light (or just adjusting the speed of light) almost trivially easy. When something was moving close to the speed of light, or just sitting there with enough mass increase, time dilation occurred. When time dilation happened between one end of a wormhole and the other, going through it would lead to shifting one's location in time as well as space. Therefore a wormhole could easily be converted into a time machine. And that, integrated with our sensor systems and computers was what I'd been assigned to test.
The idea was simple, If we knew where an opponent would be before they got there, we could arrange for them to run into a Warp missile roughly head-on. And even better, this system would allow entire regions light-months wide to be secured. Ultimately, we were arranging for genuine precognition to become one of our capabilities, along with practically infinite processing power. The initial test was simple, a missile equipped with a mass effect drive would be launched to pass within 1 kilometer of the Squid Remover, passing at maximum speed of 3,000,000 c.
We were also limited to 1 remote sensor probe. All systems were active, chronoputer included, and we were now waiting for the FTL missile to be inbound.
-rewind-
Light wake detected 1 km galactic down of present location, determining vector.
-rewind-
Vector confirmed as possibility 1.
-rewind-
Firing warp missile at inbound munition. Contact failed.
-rewind-
Firing warp missile in head-on collision trajectory with inbound munition. Contact successful. Inbound munition destroyed.
-timeline kept-
Motherlode System, Large Magellanic Cloud (POV: A Turian mining engineer named Decilio Paetnius)
I was currently in shaft 89 of the North Pole Quarry, or at least the remote drone I was operating was. You see, the Motherlode System was a neutron star, with the radiation to go with. The only reason we were here at the moment was because apparently there had been a gas giant in just the right place that when the star blew up it had left a lump of 68% pure eezo a bit over 2,000 km in diameter. Yes, that is absurdly unlikely. No, that wouldn't stop us from exploiting it.
Currently, I was at the processing station 2 light-weeks out. Our cargo shuttles could carry up to 10,000 cubic meters of eezo ore (10 cubes, each 10 meters on a side), and we had hundreds of the things coming and going weekly, meaning that progress was going extremely quickly. Current estimates were that our activities where driving the cost of eezo back in the [Milky Way Galaxy] to under a tenth of it's previous cost. This basically meant that for the time being at least eezo scarcity just wasn't an issue any more. That was leading to a lot of big ships being built, along with an economic boom that was mostly going towards Research and Development. The Salarians at the very least had developed a lifespan extension treatment, The Turian Hierarchy was experimenting with some exciting new weapons along with an interesting device to get around thermal shock. Even the mostly stagnant Asari were getting in on the act, though they weren't telling anyone what they were working on.
Anyway, I came off my shift. That meant it was time for me to go have a few hours of R&R before I went to sleep for tonight.