Chapter 8

"Shuttles were seen running from the quarian flotilla in space, down to the surface of the planet at regular intervals. It is my belief that the quarians are settling upon this human world," Captain Vamaf Jaerlan's voice rang throughout the Council's inner chamber. "Based on the number of shuttles per trip, and the amount of trips, we'd estimate anywhere between fifteen thousand and twenty-three thousand quarians on the planet."

Marock dismissed the message and pulled up another one, from one of their other STG teams in human space.

"The Migrant Fleet has been in the system for two weeks now. Their ships are docking at the human shipyard, and appear to be making repairs. Scans show shuttles moving between ships in the Migrant Fleet and the few human ships in system."

The message was dismissed before it could go any further. Another message was pulled up.

"Five quarian ships arrived in the system eleven days ago. Two of the quarian ships landed at the naval shipyard in the system, and have remained there since. The day the two ships docked, shuttles left the shipyard and docked with the remaining quarian ships, which promptly turned and left the system. It is our belief that the two ships left behind were given to the humans, for what purposes we can only guess at, though it seems likely -"

This message was dismissed as well, cutting off before anymore could be heard. Tevos and Sparatus sat there with pensieve looks on their faces.

"It appears the humans and quarians have officially entered into a partnership, if not an outright alliance," Sparatus stated.

"As we suspected after we discovered their initial meeting," Marock added.

"Our embassy on Earth also passed along a message that they believe a quarian embassy had been opened nearby to them, and that they will send a message once they have visual confirmation."

Sparatus stood from his seat and began to pace the room. The Relay 314 Incident, while a seemingly minor conflict for most turians, weighed heavy on the minds of the turian leaders and the Hierarchy. Tevos suspected it was because they didn't like losing any battles, especially to a civilization that had been so technologically inferior to their own. Now that civilization, who refused to join their galactic community, was going to be rapidly catching up on the technological front. There were still those in the Hierarchy who viewed the Systems Alliance as a threat, and this information wouldn't go over well with them.

"The humans are far craftier than we originally anticipated," Marock said.

"Yes," Sparatus agreed. "Their ability to initiate a partnership with the quarian without us realizing until it was too late was very … salarian of them."

"Data on humans is limited. History provided suggests they are a civilization prone to warfare. Nothing to suggest this level of deception."

"If you were introducing yourself to billions of aliens you just discovered outside your doorstep, you'd make sure they knew you were good at killing. You wouldn't let them know how underhanded you could be," Tevos pointed out.

There was nothing to be done about it now. The reports were just confirming their suspicions. In a few days time there would be discussions on if they wanted to increase the restrictions on the Migrant Fleet for forming such a partnership with the humans, even if they never came outright and banned such a thing from happening. It would send a message to the other races, as Tevos believed the volus would jump at the chance to increase their economic power by integrating themselves into the human economy. There would be little need to justify such restrictions, since most of the general populace cared little for the quarians. The debate would just be on whether such a thing would come across as petty, and whether punishing the quarians would push them further to the human's side.

"How is the asari efforts to colonize along the edges of the Terminus System coming along?"

"Slow. The amount of defenses needed for each individual system is more than originally anticipated. It might not be worth it."

"The more systems we control, the less systems there are for mercenaries, pirates, and slavers, to hide out in."

"Yes but convincing enough of our citizens to leave the major population centers is the biggest problem. The republics can't be committing these types of resources to protect planets whose populations are barely a few thousand."

"You aren't alone in the effort. The batarians are colonizing from their side of the galaxy, although they can be just as bad as the outlaws."

They could be worse than the outlaws was a thought all three had but none of them voiced. Relationships with the batarians seemed to be slowly drifting towards the edge of a cliff, and they had to be delicate with how that relationship was handled. The numbers suggested the Hegemony to be the second strongest military in the galaxy, and its use of slave labor helped boost up their otherwise middling economy. Last thing they needed to do was have conflict arise with them, at least not until things improved on the human front.

And it appeared the Hegemony knew this. They had been aggressive in its current colonization efforts, settling two new worlds since the discovery of the humans. The standard process, the one that had been in place for over three thousand years, was that any government looking to colonize a world would petition the Council for the rights. Even though they had been aggressive and defiant since before they joined the Citadel, the batarians had still followed the procedure. Now was a different story, as the Council had only found out about the colonization of the two new planets after the colony ships had already been stocked out and sent on their way.

The batarians were also up to something else. What exactly was hard to say. There were a few Spectres operating on the edge of batarian space, trying to discover what was going on. A recent report suggested it had something to do with the vorcha, but that couldn't be accurate. The vorcha were temperamental and quick to turn on their superiors if they detected weakness, not exactly traits you'd look to ally yourself with. Right?

Barbed wire crisscrossed in the air two feet over a mud pit. Inches above the barbed wire, automatic turrets fired live rounds. The steady crack of the turrets pounded into the ears of everyone in the area.

"Move it maggots!" the drill instructor shouted, his voice somehow being heard over the gunfire.

Crawling through the mud were children, one hundred and eighty-seven of them, ranging from the age of nine to twelve. The drill instructor who was yelling at them was one of five, but he was the only one who held a rifle in his hand.

"Come on! Move!"

The drill instructor fired a shot near the head of one of the children. The round slammed into the ground, splattering their face with mud. The child yelped in fear and picked up their pace, and they weren't the only one. Not wanting a bullet fired next to their face, the other children also picked up speed, kicking themselves into another gear they didn't think they'd be able to achieve in their tired state.

Dr. Catherine Halsey watched the children go through their daily drills from a distance, not wanting her presence to cause a distraction. They had come so far in eight months and this was only the beginning. They still had years ahead of them, years until their first real test in which they would be put through the ringer physically, mentally, and emotionally. She just hoped they were ready for it all.

"Doctor," Déjà's voice sounded in her ear. "I thought you would like to know the results from the latest personal kinetic barrier tests have come in and they are all positive. The tests were a success."

Catherine knew they would be. With the partnership finally secured with the quarians, meaning access to the alien technologies, how could it not? The real question they now had to ask was how strong could they make those kinetic barriers? Stopping two or three bullets was one thing, but could they stop ten bullets? Or twenty? Could it stop a sniper using 50 caliber armor piercing rounds from taking off a limb?

The children were only part of the equation. In roughly six years those that didn't wash out would be the best fighters the Alliance had to offer, and while they worked toward that goal, it was her job to make sure they had the best equipment to work with. And the first part of that process was the armor.

"Thank you Déjà. Can you send the results to my personal server? I'll review them later today."

"Of course doctor."

After crawling through the mud pit, the children stumbled to their feet and then booked it to a twelve foot climbing wall with a pair of ropes hanging down the side. The older children were performing better, which made sense given the rapid growth that could happen over the course of three years. Some of them, mostly females, had already started going through puberty, given them even more of an edge.

She would have to monitor the changes that puberty had on the children, to see how the increase in hormones affected their behavior. Teenagers tended to be moody, confrontational, and intentionally disobedient. She would make sure none of them exhibited such behaviors, and those that did would be disciplined to stop the behaviors from becoming a habit. She'd also have to look to see the types of effect certain hormone blockers would have on their developments, and whether the introduction of those hormone blockers would do more harm than good.

"What did you teach the children today?" Catherine asked.

"We started chemistry today, and I continued our lessons on urban warfare."

"And how are they doing in their lessons?"

"Good. Your idea to use combat footage, while graphic, is more than enough to keep the attention of all of them. And the number who puke during the more gruesome videos has declined 73.2% since we started."

"Are there any signs that the use of graphic images and videos are desensitizing them? We want them to be able to stomach those kinds of things, to not crack upon seeing the brutal realities of war. We don't want to make them machines incapable of feeling sympathy for their fellow humans, or worse, for them to get pleasure out of it."

"I have been monitoring facial expressions and eye movement during the lessons. Based on the psychological research you uploaded into my database I will make sure to adjust the lessons should there be any indication something like that is happening."

Catherine turned from the children as they continued their afternoon drills. She had only come out here as a quick break from her other work and had already spent more time than she had planned watching them.

"Hmm. I'll include monthly psych evaluations in their training to be on the safe side."

Captain Rael'Zorah vas Alarei stared at the giant warship in front of him.

"Is that a dreadnought?" he asked, trying to keep his voice level as he did his best not to question the legitimacy of the human military. The ship had the size of a dreadnought but as his eyes scanned the hull, he was unable to pick out a spine mounted main gun or any broadside guns. What good was a warship that couldn't shoot back?

Captain Capaldi chuckled. "No, though I can understand how its size would make you think that. That is a carrier."

With two actual docking slips available to the Migrant Fleet at a shipyard, the Admiralty Board had thought it best to linger in the Hubble System. They had thousands of ships in need of repairs, actual repairs and not the half-assed repairs they had done while out in space. Though it would likely take months, all of the ships that were in desperate need of expert care were to dock and make sure the patchwork fixes that had been performed were undone and fixed properly.

The Alerai was one such ship, and while it was being worked on, Rael'Zorah found himself observing the nearby dock, where a large human ship was being worked on. Captain Capaldi, whose SSV New York was part of the task force guarding the system, had decided to take a shuttle to the Naval Station de Ruyter to join the quarian captain. After all, new Alliance policy dictated they interact with, and build relationships with, the quarians whenever chances allowed.

"A carrier?"

"Yes," she answered as if that explained everything. It didn't.

"What is a carrier?"

"Just like its name suggests, it carries; eighty interceptor fighter craft and forty-five bombers. With all that space needed to store them, there's no room for a spinal mount or broadside guns, or the engines needed to power them. Carriers aren't meant to be in the middle of a fight though they do have point defenses to ward off any fighters and to intercept any torpedoes or missiles."

"It is a support ship," Rael guessed.

"Yes. They also carry an eighteen hundred marine armored regiment, their APCs and tanks, and the shuttles needed to get all of that to and from a planet."

"So it supports both space and ground operations."

"You are correct. The one you see in front of you is being fitted, not just with the new shielding we've developed since our species partnership, but also with a new type of technology we've been testing called Single Occupant Exoatmospheric Insertion Vehicle, otherwise known as a drop pod."

Despite the words sounding fancy, Rael had a guess as to what exactly these pods did, but he needed it confirmed. "What does a drop pod do?"

"Orbital insertion, launches a marine from the ship to the planet. Fastest way to get boots on the ground."

There were advantages of being launched from space to planet side, the most obvious being the speed in which one could be in the action. The biggest drawback would definitely be the risk to the people in the pods. Entering the atmosphere on a slower moving shuttle had its dangers, he could only imagine the kind of dangers a vehicle shot like a torpedo at the planet would have to face. There were over thirteen billion humans, so losing a handful by doing something as ludicrous as shooting them at a planet wasn't an issue. The quarians didn't have the numbers to be doing something like that. Even with a new colony and, for the first time in three hundred years, space within their fleet, their population would take several years before it reached over twenty million.

And to get to the numbers of the other species? That would take hundreds of years plus the taking back of Rannoch. Even the krogan, who had been suffering from the genophage for over fourteen hundred years, had a population that numbered in the billions. In fact only the drell, whose homeworld had been sucked dry of resources before they had reached spaceflight, and had been the site of brutal wars that saw billions killed, had a smaller population than quarians, numbering somewhere in the low millions.

"I'm guessing the Migrant Fleet doesn't have carriers?"

"No," Rael said, looking the carrier over again. "As far as I know, none of the other species have anything like this. How did you humans think of such a thing?"

"Our homeworld has large oceans that separate the landmasses. Two hundred years ago, the powerful nations thought the best way to show that power was to have a floating air base that could travel all over the world and that fighter planes could launch from. Actually, a lot of those nations still use them, and we adopted the idea for space warfare."

"You took tactics you were familiar with and adopted them to a new type of warfare. From a military standpoint I can see why you would do something like that, and I can see the value of this carrier in a ground support role as it's basically an overly armored troop transport. What I fail to see is the benefits of such a thing in a space battle."

Captain Capaldi grinned. While it was easier to get a read on a human, and the other non-Volus races, because they didn't have an exo-suit covering their faces, much of the human body language and facial expressions were unknown to the quarians. Still, despite those shortcomings Rael could identify her grin as rather predatory.

"Wait until you see the bombers take out the cruisers of a task force without issue because the frigate escort is too busy trying to deal with the interceptors."

The MarsGene Delta Eezo Testing Station, referred to as Det Station by those who worked and lived at the facility, had been built within the past few months into one of the asteroids of the belt in the Bellum System, which was located in the Horse Head Nebula. The station's location had been chosen due to the asteroid's relative proximity to the gas giant Lapis, and the ExoGeni element zero mining stations that extracted the element from Lapis. While most of the mined eezo was shipped back to refineries in other systems, per a contractual agreement, a fraction of a percentage of what was mined was shuttled over to Det Station.

MarsGene wasn't using the element zero for what most of the universe used it for, FTL starship travel and the like. One of the things Alliance space had been made aware of after their introduction to the Citadel races was biotics. Exposure to eezo created biotics in some of the other species, like turians, drell, and krogans. The working theory was that since it happened to other species, it would also happen to humans. MarsGene was going to test that theory.

They had the researchers, the volunteer test subjects, and the eezo, now it was just a matter of coming up with results. Since they started the only thing they had managed to do was make some of the test subjects sick.

"Sir, you're going to want to see this."

The head of the facility was given a datapad by the head of security.

"What am I looking at?"

"Ship drives. Four of them. Scans picked them up about ten minutes ago. Based on their speed and location, we estimate they entered the system about an hour ago, and they're heading right to us and the mining outpost. ETA is probably 45 minutes."

"Is the outpost aware?"

"They're the ones who alerted us. The drives of those ships don't match any known Alliance signatures. I've sent a distress call to the nearest Alliance ships to be on the safe side. Though, if these new ships are hostile, I don't think reinforcements will get here in time."

The head of the facility looked at the information he was given. Piracy was an issue long before the First Contact War but now it was more than just human piracy they had to worry about. There were reportedly dozens of star systems held by alien pirates, and they probably saw human held systems as ripe for the picking.

When another security officer came in and distracted the head of security, the head of the facility used the opportunity to forward the information of the approaching ships to another section of the Alliance military. As the head of a private research facility he was richly rewarded, but he had a secondary employer; one that was an arm of the Alliance and interested in making sure humanity came first. He knew that the illusive man who was in charge of that group would want to know what was happening as well.

"I want this station on high alert."

"My men are already armed and armored, and setting up defenses in key positions. I'd advise gathering your scientists and test subjects, and holding up in a secure room."

It was a few hours later on Arcturus Station that the Prime Minister was interrupted in the middle of a meeting with his cabinet.

"What's going on?" the Prime Minister asked the Major who had interrupted the meeting and now stood at his side.

"There's been another disappearance in the Horse Head Nebula sir. A mining outpost and a research station in the Bellum System sent out a distress call after detecting unknown ship signatures on approach. When an Alliance task force arrived in system, they found both the outpost and the station completely empty of people."

"Son of a bitch," the Prime Minister growled.

It was bad enough he had been in power during the violent first contact with an alien species, he now had to deal with entire groups of civilians living and working in the far flung areas of human controlled space being taken. It was a good thing his cabinet was already in the room.

"I want to put out an order in council directed at every public and private corporation, they are to withdraw all employees who are not currently in one of the colonized systems to Alliance navy occupied space. They have one month to comply and any corporation found to be in violation will be facing heavy fines; fines that will be greater than the loss of profit they'll be bitching about. And get Alliance Military Command in my office in twenty minutes. Whatever they're doing, isn't as important as this. I don't know who is kidnapping Alliance civilians but I won't stand for it."