"Would you like a system report, Captain?" asked a feminine voice, and the man, sitting in his chair, staring bleary eyed out at the stars in the windows before him, sighed.

"Report, Cadet," he ordered, and the female in front of him began to rattle off the day's reports. All green, all good, and all ready for battle. A battle that he was being denied, again. Somewhere, out amid the distant stars, entire fleets were being mobilized, ships prepped, and crews trained. Out there, war, or at least a limited skirmish, was happening, and here he sat, his fleet of one cruiser and six frigates, with enough fire power to level any major city from orbit, were just patrolling.

Of course, he knew that those two facts were related. The batarians, those blasted four eyed freaks, were moving openly against the Council's will. Oh, there were apologies from their embassy on the Citadel, token efforts to blame the fleets that came from their homeworld into the Skyllian Verge and the Local Cluster on rebels and pirates. These areas of space, long undeveloped due to how rare it was that a Relay could send you to them, were being eyed by the Hegemony.

So, the Council had to flex its might, to aid the batarians in their, 'time of need', and deal with the pirates and raiders, all of which had Hegemony military uniforms, and even had to be turned over to their government for 'punishment'. Everyone knew, from the lowliest crewmen on the frigates, to the generals in their grand dreadnauts, that the batarians were just reequipping their men and sending them right back out, so they could sow panic and slowly claim the space, setting up makeshift colonies that would, of course, become Hegemony controlled worlds when the time came.

Still, he was a captain in the Hierarchy. His duty to Palaven said he would patrol these lifeless systems, destroying any ships that shouldn't be here, and hopefully getting those idiot politicians in the Citadel to finally crack down on the four eyes. Looking forward out of his view, he saw the tell tale lines of light that said his ships were traveling at FTL, their destination having been input the night before, as they made their way towards Relay 314, inactive, but important to check nonetheless.

The cadet finished with her report, and he motioned for her to turn around, as he stalked away from his chair near the front of the ship, and made his way towards the rear. At every station he saw his troops, each one working in perfect unison with the others. Most wore gloves, as their fingers danced over the holographic controls before them. Some, like the cadet, were bare handed, having the sensors that the gloves provided surgically installed in their skin, to allow them to use the holos easier.

Finding no fault with anything in his view, he kept moving back, finally passing the last set of stations, and finding two figures staring at the galaxy map that hung before them. The two men were debating something, though he only heard a little of the conversation as he got closer, the lines on the map they had been looking at vanishing, as the two turned to face him. Both snapped a salute, one he returned as he looked over at the map himself, and then turned to them.

"Something interesting, Kryik?" he asked of his commander, and the man, his face showing a few lines of worry in those rocky features, just shook his head and sighed.

"Nothing worthy of note. Just running a few sims," said the commander, as he leaned forward and pushed a button to return the lines that had been displayed. Looking it over, he noticed quickly that it displayed the latest reports of fleet movements, of the larger, better equipped armadas standing at the ready just outside batarian space, and all the patrols their ship knew of.

Watching, he saw some new blips pop on the map, and then was astonished as they flew a rather circuitous route, hopping to the edge of the Terminus Systems, and then back again, arriving right in the middle of the Verge, having bypassed every fleet. The action then reset, and he saw, again, the same thing happen, with a different route, and even a bit of action for one small patrol, which got soundly destroyed when the batarian fleets sent their largest out to crush them.

"Disturbing sims," commented the captain to his subordinates as he walked up beside them, and began to run some numbers himself.

"Vakarian seems to think so. He's the one who wanted to show this to me," commented Commander Kryik, and the captain sighed again, knowing exactly where this was going.

"Lieutenant, did you really waste computer cycles on this fantasy?" asked the older turian of his younger officer, turning to him. The tone in his voice, the look on his face, and everything else about him said this was a dance they'd had many times before.

"They weren't a waste, Captain. I think it's clear that the batarians could easily slip around our patrols in that sector, but this fleet could get there within a week and bottle them up, and maybe even hit them as they came out of the relay," he protested, and the captain just shook his head and rubbed his fingers on the top of his head in annoyance.

"And you don't think that the generals will have considered that, and placed a fleet there as a trap?" asked the turian, as he pushed a single button, and the sim replayed again, this time with a large force of cruisers and even three dreadnaughts added to it, stationed equally between the three relays the young lieutenant had been basing the sim around. This time when the batarians got there, they were wiped out utterly, the power of the turian military obliterating them.

"It might have, but the generals are far from the front lines, and we," he had been about to continue when the captain raised a hand, silencing him.

"Normally, I would applaud someone as young as you worrying about tactics on a larger scale than a single battle. It shows you do care about things beyond yourself, but on this, you will listen to me. We have our mission, and that mission is to patrol this sector until...," the captain began to talk, idly feeling that stopping sensation of his ship coming out of FTL. Normally, he would have ignored it, an old hand like himself barely feeling the sliding stop, but then, he realized voices had become hushed in the forward compartment, and he pushed a button on the console before him.

"Cadet, report!" he demanded.

"We have contacts sir, three of them, around the relay," came the reply instantly, and the three turians looked at each other, before the captain and commander rushed to their stations just behind the map, which shifted from the galaxy to show their forces and then the unknowns around the relay, while the lieutenant instead ran to one of the consoles along the wall, and which shifted to display targeting information.

"All hands, we have contact, battle stations," stated the captain simply, and while he couldn't see it, in his cruiser or the four frigates, he knew everyone was getting to their posts, as the data on the three unknowns began to come in. The display before him, which had three dots for the contacts, slowly resolved their shape, surprising the old turian with their oddity.

The first appeared to be some kind of aerofighter, no unlike things he'd seen in history holos back on Palaven. The wings swept back, but paneled so they could be adjusted mid flight, and with a duel set of engines to power them. The thing was holding steady, possibly with some kind of thrusters to aid it in maintaining its position equidistant between the larger vessel and the relay.

The large vessel looked more like a space born ship. The curves were a bit too smooth for his taste, but that might mean it was some kind of supply ship, rather than a war vessel, despite being the size of his own cruiser according to the sensors. More, it was cold. Colder than ships in space should be, even traveling a few lightminutes at FTL built up a large supply of heat, but according to the thermograph, all the ships before him were dead cold.

Most interesting was the one that seemed to literally be on the relay, its form, rather than the aerodynamic visage of a space or atmospheric ship, it was humanoid, two arms and legs, with a head. This seemed to allow the thing a bit of versatility though, as its hands were reaching out and touching the relay. As he watched, he saw the thing actually start to pull some kind of tool from a space on its arm and hold it at the relay, as if he were repair-

"Status of the relay!" demanded the captain.

"It's still inactive, but I can see it starting to come online, Captain," said Vakarian from his seat, and the captain of this expedition was faced with one of those historic moments, those times when, if you knew they were there, seemed to last for an eternity.

In front of him, he saw the mass relay activate, and the three ships using it to get away, only to return, broken and battered, as they were pursued by dark shapes he could imagine only as terrifying nightmares. Things that had, until then, known nothing of the wider galaxy. These shadows overtook the three vessels, uttering destroying them, and then turning on his own command, which only had a few seconds before they were torn apart as well, and the monsters advanced outward, worse than the Rachni Wars or the Krogan Rebellions as they slaughtered worlds.

Around him, he took in the reports of others, some of them probably important to the here and now, but seemingly trivial in the face of this. He heard something about odd radiation from the larger vessel, seemingly directed at them. He heard one of the cadets at a station mentioning it seemed like an old style transmission. He ignored it though, and began to issue his orders.

"Bring all main guns to bare! I want that ship at the relay gone, now!" he shouted, and everyone on the bridge reacted. Their hands went to controls, and the thrusters were fired, targeting solutions calculated as mass effect fields started to form somewhere deep in the belly of the great cruiser, energy being built up around bits of metal that seemed so small, but were being spun along an axis to give them true stopping power.

"Sir, are you sure this is the best idea?" asked Kryik beside him, and the captain turned, just staring at the man with an expression that told him he did.

"If they turn that thing on, those batarian idiots could unleash another Rachni, or worse. I will not allow history to remember me as the one who let that happen," he said simply, and Kryik nodded at him. The order had been given, the command itself explained. Vakarian, from a nearby control, looked like he wanted to protest, but he kept his mouth shut. These didn't look like batarians to him.

With a dull, staccato of thunks, something launched out from the bottom of the cruiser, huge projectiles with enough force that the frigate sized humanoid vessel was done for, no matter how large a barrier it had. They went at a significant portion of light speed, covering the distance between the launch and the target in a few minutes, everyone on the bridge waiting in breathless anticipation, hoping that they had done the right thing as the death they had dealt sailed.

Then the projectiles vanished, his first thought being they were intercepted somehow. That wasn't possible. The calculations needed to make an interception at relative velocities was just too great to calculate in the short amount of time, and even if you could, spinning a shot up to power took some time in and of itself. Yet, as he watched his display, he called up visual sensors, overlaying what they saw over what thermographs and radar did. The visuals showed a bar of blue light emerge from a dimple on the large ship, and hit his own shot dead on.

"What in the hells was that?" asked the cadet looking out the port before her, and her captain silently echoed her thoughts. What was this ship, which sported a new type of weapon, and just who was crewing her.