Chapter 12

Alec found himself in his quarters reading through a research paper on the capabilities of artificial intelligence if it didn't have the shackles and limitations placed upon it out of fear. There seemed to be an overwhelming belief that AI would become way too powerful if given free reign, even worse than what had happened with the geth given human reliance on it in their warships, defensive systems, financial markets, both private and public scientific research projects, and even things like controlling the combines that harvested crops, but Alec wasn't so sure. There could be a lot of benefit in humans and AI working in a more mutually beneficial relationship. What level of intellect could the human brain achieve if it was connected to an AI that boosted its capabilities? What could the human body become if its synapses were firing faster or the production of growth hormones and testosterone during puberty was increased, allowing humans to grow larger in terms of both height and muscle mass, both things that an AI could make possible?

The SSV Leo Tolstoy, or the MSV Johnny Walker as it showed up on Omega docking data, was still docked at the asteroid turned space station. It had been maybe ten hours since Alec and Tof had come on board with the omni-tool the so-called Queen of Omega wanted them to hack. He had ordered his team on one man guard duty, rotating four hour shifts. While the batarian who had met them when they first docked, who may or may not have been the one to give them the omni-tool, had indicated there was some type of laws and policing done on Omega, Alec didn't have faith in them being strictly enforced. Not to mention he just didn't trust batarians, after all they were raiding human systems to capture slaves. He wondered if the ones on Omega had any idea what their government was doing, and whether or not they supported it.

"Lieutenant Commander?" Kirill's voice sounded from the speaker in his omni-tool.

"Yes Kirill?"

"I have finished hacking the omni-tool."

"Excellent. Tell the team to meet me in the CIC."

The benefit of having such a small ship was that within a minute everyone was gathered in the cramped CIC. Kirill's image appeared in his holo-tank, his face showing its usual lack of emotions. Appearing over the operations console was some type of crest showing a white sword pointing down with what looked like orange wings, all over a black circle background.

"The salarian this omni-tool belonged to was part of their Special Tasks Group," Kirill explained. "For those who are not aware, the Special Tasks Group, or STG as it is commonly referred to, is the main branch of the salarian special forces, who are often co-opted by the Council for purposes of espionage."

"So either the salarians or the Council sent an agent to Omega to gather information."

"Correct. And the salarian was able to download a lot of sensitive information before they were killed."

An image popped up of Omega but this time it was different. Clearly marked were the locations of defensive turrets, anti-air guns, thick metal barriers that could be erected to cut off parts of the stations, and multiple fall back bunkers, including one labeled as a command bunker.

"No wonder Aria did not want us copying anything," Tof stated, eyebrows raised.

"That could come in handy sir," Raul pointed out.

Mira snorted in amusement. "Yeah, if the SA decided to forget about the batarians and jump half-way across the galaxy to lay siege to a coked out asteroid."

"I'm sure as the SA expands its influence in the galaxy, we'll start dealing with Omega and Aria more, but right now it's of no importance to us."

"So we're just going to let it go?" Josh asked. "Look at this sir. If Aria ever causes problems with the Alliance we could storm her little asteroid and have it within a week."

"We need Aria to connect us to this Shadow Broker in order to gather the intel we've spent the last two months attempting to gather. And once we hand this omni-tool over to Aria, she'll likely spend the time and money necessary to move a lot of those gun placements, at least if she has any brains she will. That all being said, while I don't want to copy the data in case they can tell if we've done so or not, there's nothing to say we can't record the data from another source. Kirill?"

"Surveillance feeds have been recording this entire time, Lieutenant Commander."

"Out-fucking-standing Kirill," Alec said. "Tof, let's go bring this thing back to Aria."

Tof grabbed the omni-tool and disconnected it from the holo-tank, the image of Omega vanishing. Looking the omni-tool over, Tof gave Alec a thumbs up. The two of them disembarked from the ship, walking down the metal platform that connected their ship to the rest of the station. Now they just needed to find someone to give the omni-tool too, preferably the batarian who gave it to them in the first place.

The metal door at the end of the platform slid open and standing on the other side was the batarian from earlier, back with the two krogan bodyguards. At least Alec thought it was the same batarian. It's not like he was an expert, he had only ever met one of them, or potentially three of them, it was hard to tell.

"Are you heading back into Omega to browse, or did you complete the task?" the batarian asked.

"We completed the task," Tof answered, holding up the omni-tool.

"Do you know what's on there?" Alec asked, an eyebrow raised.

"Aria has an idea. Did you copy anything?" The batarian's tone somehow dropped even lower, coming out in a growl.

"No," Alec answered. "But the fact that the salarian was able to get all that information isn't a good look."

"We're already dealing with that particular breach in security."

One of the krogans stepped forward, towering over Tof as if the huge human was a teenager. Alec put both the krogans at seven and a half feet, and probably close to five hundred pounds of natural heavy plating and dense muscles. Now the question was, were these two krogans average size for their species, or were they either smaller or larger than the average? He shuddered to think of what it was like going up against an army of them.

"Now I believe you have information for me."


Recruitment numbers across the Systems Alliance were up. Ever since the First Contact War there had been a jump in people looking to serve humanity against alien threats, and the batarians raiding outposts for slaves had done nothing but continue to drive the surge in enlistments. There were hundreds of thousands of new men and women joining the ranks of the Navy and the Marine Corps.

Basic enlistments were for five years active duty and two years reserve service, and while only 19% of recruits turned into lifers, that was still a massive influx to their numbers, especially since they hadn't taken too many casualties in their conflicts with the aliens yet.

"Perhaps we're being too stringent with the N-school requirements," Rear Admiral Komen stated. The admiral held a tumbler of vodka within his massive hand, the other clutching a Cuban cigar. They had already been talking about potential options for thirty-six minutes.

"You want to increase the size of our special forces?" MP Haugseng asked. Haugseng was tall, but as a politician he lacked the muscle mass of the military officers he shared his position as a Director of the SAIS Division 3, and that included the two women. It often made him feel small compared to the others, not that he'd ever let that show.

It had been a few weeks since they had all last gathered in the underground room on Reach. They were going to set up a communications array in the room, with direct connections to the various ships each of the members were stationed on, as well as one to Haugseng's office on Arcturus. That way, even if they were spread through Systems Alliance space, they'd still be able to meet.

Haugseng was fresh from a Systems Alliance Parliament Committee of Armed Services meeting, where the main topic had been the military budget and the increase in recruitment over the past 15 months, and the fact that for the first time there were not enough open spots to fill when training ended for newer classes. Ships that would have been decommissioned when new ones left the docks were kept in service, and an entire new division of marines had been created. Alliance Command was pleased, but the Committee knew they were going to go way over the original fiscal budget and so had an emergency meeting to increase the budget by another half a trillion dollars.

"Why not?" Komen countered with a shrug. "All we have are the Jaegers, the Ares, and the Knights. Hardly anything, and given we have an entire galaxy to operate in, shouldn't we have more to counteract these Spectres and Blackwatch and STGs we know the other races have, on top of whatever they have that we don't know about?"

Jaeger Teams were a nimble, elite military force suited for all aspects of unconventional warfare that was under the command of Systems Alliance Intelligence Services. They were primarily tasked with gathering intel no matter the means and would often be sent to hunt down dangerous war criminals that planetary and SA police forces were not capable of handling.

Ares Squads were heavy infantry units primarily involved in counterterrorism and direct action, often against high-value targets. They operated directly under Alliance Command, and were generally sent in when negotiations fell apart and it was time to kick ass and take names.

Knights, which was a nickname given to the Flagship Special Forces Battalion, were mixed infantry platoons that were assigned to the flagship of each of the fleets. They were largely configured for reconnaissance, counterinsurgency, sabotage, and power-projection missions. The individual platoons were under the command of the Admiral in charge of the fleet, with overall command of the full battalion being under Alliance Command. Each individual platoon was called a specific color; for example the 1st FSF Platoon, assigned to the SSV Everest, flagship of the First Fleet, were known as the Gold Knights, the 2nd FSF Platoon, assigned to the SSV Fuji, flagship of the Second Fleet, were known as the Silver Knights, etc.

There were twenty five-man Jaeger Teams, twenty-six thirteen-man Ares Squads, and eight forty-man Knight Platoons, for a total of 758 special forces. Those numbers were nothing compared to what the nations of Earth had in their special forces, even after the Jovian Accords had slowly been reducing the size of national military budgets in order to shift more money to the SA, and therefore the reducing the size of those nations militaries themselves, and there were two reasons for it. The first was because until the First Contact War, the Systems Alliance was a loose affiliation of the 18 strongest nations on Earth that had only come to be the power it was by the combining of those nations' space faring navies and marines, so there was still a long way for it to go as a military organization. The second was because of the difficulty it took for one to enter special forces training, as it was usually reserved for officers and NCOs who excelled in combat and showed exceptional abilities, and were invited to join the program.

"I concur with the Rear Admiral," Major Kyle said. "Especially if we're going to keep getting into fights with the other species, we're going to need every advantage we can get. Numbers should be in the tens of thousands, not under a thousand. It's an area Command has been neglecting."

Admiral Cremer nodded her head. "If we lower the qualifications from a minimum of E-5 to E-3, and we make it voluntary instead of invite only, we'll probably get a few thousand looking to join N-school, and N7 is so hard to reach the achievement won't be diluted. Though I don't think the Villa will be able to handle them all."

"We're still expanding the military compound here," Major Kyle said, referring to Reach. "We can easily open up a second N-school."

"What type of special forces does the military need, outside of what we already have?" Haugseng asked. He wasn't entirely familiar with those types of military forces. He had head of the more famous ones in the Earth armies; US Navy SEALS, French Commandos Marines and Russian Spetsnaz, but that was through heavily propagandized books and movies.

"Long range reconnaissance patrols," Major Burgos said. "Probably some type of fast response units. Units who specialize in fighting in zero gravity environments and who specialize in boarding ships and space stations."

"We, as in the SAIS, specifically need field agents," Komen said. "People who can be our eyes and ears out in the field, might need some on ships and in bases as well. We'll probably need others to handle the less savory things like interrogation, infiltration, assassinations if needed."

"That doesn't sound like special forces," Haugseng said with a frown. "More like spies and hitmen."

"Special forces can come in all shapes and sizes. While the Marines need a boost in numbers, we need more help as well. Once enrollments in N-school go up, we'll cross train select candidates in Z vocations."

"Are we waiting for the new government to take over before we get the ball rolling on this?" Cremer asked.

"Don't need to," Komen said. "Military budgets already been set, and training new special forces falls under Command."

"Are you nervous about not being reelected?"

The four military officers looked at Haugseng. The last thing any of them wanted to do was deal with bringing a new MP up to speed on what SAIS Division 3 did.

"No, I already know the King is going to select me as one of the new Senators. Though it might make sense to bring in a MP to make sure we have mouth pieces in both chambers."


The Prime Minister of the Systems Alliance at first was more like a ceremonial position than anything else. The Alliance started as nothing more than a promise, where the countries who actually had spacefaring capabilities had pledged to represent a united front should contact with an alien species ever happen. The discovery of the Prothean ruins on Mars had made contact with an alien species a certainty, and so they had started turning that promise into something more.

That something more had originally turned into a space version of the United Nations, an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes were to maintain peace within the solar system, eventually turning into the galaxy once the Charon relay was discovered, and to represent humanity, but without any real power or military force. The first Parliament had been selected, one representative chosen by each of the first eighteen nations' governments, and that Parliament had then selected a Prime Minister. In those first five years the biggest problem had been disputes between the nations of the Systems Alliance, mostly in regards to colonization and mining rights.

As more nations began to develop space faring capabilities on their own, the next three years were spent dealing with disputes between the nations of the Alliance and these new nations jockeying for resources discovered within the new systems they were exploring.

Then everything changed when the turians attacked. It had been fortunate that even while their governments debated on what to do, the space militaries of the nations of the Systems Alliance acted. The Chinese had rushed to defend their colony, beating back the first turian ships that had been seen over the planet. And when the turians came back with reinforcements, destroying most of the Chinese fleet and occupying Shanxi, the rest of the SA nations had pulled together a fleet to take the fight at the turians, all while their governments argued over what to do, pointing accusing fingers at the others for their refusal to act while ignoring the hypocrisy of their words.

It had been those actions to defend Shanxi, and the negotiations with the Council afterwards, that fully cemented the Systems Alliance as the face of humanity. Since then they had been working nonstop to turn the Systems Alliance into a proper government and a proper military force. Change didn't happen overnight, and creating a supranational political, economic, and military union that was similar to the European Union but gave more power to the overall union itself over the individual member states, while dealing with the political theater of the eighteen largest nations on Earth, many of whom were old enemies, was beyond difficult.

That several new members had requested membership, which had been granted, and then throwing their politics into things had made it even more difficult. Then if all that wasn't enough, there was the push to make the colonies their own nations, rather than territories of the original nations that founded them; which had caused a lot of pushback from the UNAS, the EU and the CPR, all of whom had multiple colonies. They had ended up compromising that the smaller Sol colonies on places like Mars and Titan, would stay under the control of their founding nation, while the larger non-Sol colonies like Eden Prime and Terra Nova, would be given independence.

It had taken almost a year and a half to get it all sorted before they had finally drafted and ratified a constitution. They had settled on a federal, semi-presidential republic with a bicameral legislative branch split between the Senate and the Parliament. Both would be in charge of passing laws, regulating commerce, controlling the budget, setting taxes, government oversight, and dozens of other duties. The Senate would be the upper house and would have additional powers to approve treaties and appointees of the President. The Parliament would be the lower house and would have additional powers to approve appointees of the Prime Minister.

For the Senate, the original eighteen nations of the Systems Alliance would each get three Senators, while the new nations to join would get two Senators. The members of the Senate would be handpicked by the governments of the individual nations, and it would be up to those individual nations on how they picked their Senator.

The Parliament would be officials elected by the people of a set district based on Instant Runoff Voting. The larger the population of a nation, the more Members of Parliament that nation would get. The hardest part was setting the number of MPs per population because you had countries like the Indian Union that had a population over two billion, and then you had some of the newer nations like Tiptree which currently had a population less than 30,000.

The Parliament would in turn elect the Prime Minister, who could call both the Senate and the Parliament into session, could introduce bills to be voted on, could bring forth a vote in either chamber, had the ability to veto a bill (the veto could be overturned by the chambers), and was in charge of the civil services. The Prime Minister would select his cabinet, the members called Ministers, to work under them in their role as the Head of the Legislature and the Head of the Government.

Then there would be a President elected by IRV across the entire Systems Alliance. The President would appoint judges to vacancies in the various court systems, could grant pardons or reduce sentences, and would deal with diplomacy, such as the negotiating of treaties, hosting foreign dignitaries, and assigning ambassadors. They would also be a part of Alliance Command, the board in charge of all SA military based assets and operations, in their role of Commander-in-Chief, which despite its name didn't actually make them the overall head of the military, just one of three, the other two being the Commander General of the Marine Corps and the Chief Admiral of Naval Operations. The President would select their own cabinet, the members called Secretaries, to work under them in their role as the Commander-in-Chief, and the Head of the State.

As he sat in his office, knowing his time as Prime Minister was likely at an end, the first Prime Minister in Systems Alliance history, whose term had lasted eleven years so far and had included the discovery of the Prothean ruins and the First Contact War, couldn't help but feel sad. While the first half of his term in office had been like a snooze fest with few major issues, the second half of his term had seemed to have been one problem after another. After the First Contact War, as the Systems Alliance slowly became more than what it had previously been, he had done his best to make sure that once all the arguing was done and an actual governmental body was ready to take over, that they would be in the best possible position they could be in. Except the batarians had decided to start raiding human facilities to capture civilians to force them into slavery. The people who would be taking over would do so at a time of great uncertainty.

"How long do you think it will last sir?" his Chief of Staff, always a cynic, asked. "A new government with all the crap humanity has going on?"

The Prime Minister grimaced. The biggest issue for the new government wouldn't be dealing with the batarian raids or the tepid relationships with the Citadel community, it was the staggering difference in representation between the largest nations and the smallest. The four largest nations - the Indian Union, the Chinese People's Federation, the European Union, and the United North American States - could effectively control Parliament if their elected Members of Parliament were united on an issue, and would even half enough votes to override a veto from the Prime Minister. At least in the Senate the playing field was relatively equal.

"I don't think it will be anything going on that is going to cause issues. I give it a few years until the newer members start complaining about their representation compared to the IU or the CPR. I mean 400 MPs to 1 is a huge difference. And I give it less than twenty years until some of the smaller nations leave the Alliance, probably to try to form their own group with all the other cast off nations.

"The new government should have two main goals, making sure the smaller nations feel represented and getting as many of the holdout nations to join as possible."


A/N: I honestly have no idea if the type of government I created for the Systems Alliance would even work. I'm sure those who actually know how governmental systems function are probably looking at what I wrote with absolute horror.