Mass Effect: All That Remains

by Errationatus2

I'll see your Apocalypse and raise you an Armageddon. The Reapers are gone but it's a big universe... MShep, Jack, Miranda and a host of others, plus a few OC's of my own. Standard disclaimers apply. Contains profanity. Critiques welcome. NO LONGER BEING UPDATED. SOMEDAY I MAY RETURN TO IT. THANK YOU FOR READING IT ANYWAY.

8. Lost Travellers

ASARI REFUGEE CONVOY INCIDENT

THESSIA

PARNITHA SYSTEM

APRIL 2188

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OFFICIAL REPORTS LISTED THIRTEEN SHIPS, including five heavy transports full of refugees from Thessia, five thousand passengers in each, all last seen making their slow way to the system's Relay junction, one of many convoys plying the route between Illium and a still-devastated Thessia, returning supplies and people to serve in the rebuilding efforts. As the ships hit the Relay, each entered the stream and vanished, to reappear later in the Parnitha System. The five heavy transports, however, were not in the convoy, were found several hundred thousand kilometers further afield, drifting.

The ships were empty. Extensive scans showed that every living thing aboard, down to microbes, had vanished. Instantly warnings went out to avoid the Parnitha Relay, until it could be determined how such a malfunction could have occurred. It would hamper Thessian Reconstruction, but there was no choice. After two weeks of extensive examination, tests of remote drones through the Relay, traffic was finally allowed to resume. There were no more incidences of missing people, yet somehow twenty thousand refugees had simply vanished as if they had never been, in an accident that had never before happened with any Relay on record. It was baffling and unnerving, yet the Relay was essential, and had to be risked.

Then, on Thessia, reports came in that the refugees were where they were supposed to be, families that had been told of their disappearances were reporting that their loved ones were arriving home, no worse for wear, none however remembering just how it had happened. All were in perfect health and psyche scans showed no abnormalities.

There was one discrepancy, but this would not be seen until much later.

Out of those twenty thousand asari refugees, every one over the age of seventy-five - maiden, matron or matriarch - were soon to discover themselves pregnant.