Chapter 5

December 2155

Five years.

No, it had been more than five years since I've joined the Alliance.

It is interesting how fast time goes by when you're constantly busy with work. And I had a lot of work to distract me from noticing.

But sometimes you just had to stop and relax, like I was doing now.

I was standing on the observation deck of one of the five new dreadnoughts the SAN, the System Alliance Navy, owned. Built by my company and after the design of Dr. Hoshiyume Takahashi.

No doubt finding and hiring him had been the best thing I could have ever done. The man was a wellspring of ideas and had the skills to make them possible. Of course, the Prothean archives on Mars had been essential as well, after all, they had given humanity the boost in technological advancement that had been needed to see Dr. Hoshiyume's research come to life in less than half a century but even if they had not, I would have been surprised if the good doctor would have developed them either way, as long he had the funds for it.

But still, he was possibly the most valuable asset in our starship development. Give him a few hours or a day with the data we extracted from the Archives or the scans we got from the disabled small scout ship we had found in one area of the ruins and he would at least understand the concept behind it. If it had to do with starships, of course, anything else was 'not of interest' to him.

That man had a one-track mind.

Most of the original R&D-team of the Alliance had said it would take a year or two to develop a reliable shield for the ships, one of the most important things you should have on a ship. Not just for ship-to-ship combat but for traveling among the stars in general.

Let's say you walk into a wall, it doesn't hurt much, it's more annoying, but now you run into a wall. That hurts a lot more. Depending on the material the wall gets damaged as well.

And now think about this scenario in FTL speeds, which means more than 300 000 000 meters per second! Now multiply this number with 365 and you have the speed of one of the slowest starship engines we have, which can at least travel one light-year per day. If you run with this speed into a wall, there will be extensive damage to the wall and nothing much left of yourself. In space, it is more akin to the wall doing the running but the bottom line is the same. There are uncountable micro asteroids in space and if a ship flies into them without some kind of shielding, it can turn very ugly, very quickly.

Until we had provided reliable shields for our ships, we got extremely lucky in my opinion. There were some minor and major damages but we had only lost one ship. That number could have been significantly higher.

Our need for shields was one thing Dr. Hoshiyume worked on almost immediately and within the year he understood the principle behind it and halfway through 2151 all our ships were equipped with them.

"In the end" he explained to me when the first prototype was finished, "it is a pretty simple concept. Active E-Zero, so ezzo which we energized with electricity to create fields that increase or decrease the mass of an object, produces energy that dissipates quickly. But! But it has the same properties as the mass effect fields. So we just had to catch it somehow, then stabilize it so that it doesn't disappear and then just built an emitter that we could use to form a shield out of this energy around the ship. Nothing too difficult. The function of the shields is essence pretty simple, too. While Einstein would probably curse E-Zero till the end of time, our formula about kinetic energy still holds true. That means energy equals 0.5 times mass times velocity to square (E = 0.5 x m x v^2). So, if something enters the shield, say a bullet, we reduce its mass to nearly zero. We still get hit but with no kinetic energy behind the impact, those hits are not more annoying than someone throwing pebbles at you.

Sure, through impacts the form destabilizes and some of the energy disappears and the shields are still pretty weak because we still can't catch enough of the energy and the stabilization is also still a work in progress but it is still something."

The only thing that made his explanation difficult to understand had been the speed Dr. Hoshiyume talked in. Truly, if he was excited about something he could give Mordin a run for his money.

Nevertheless, Dr. Hoshiyume was a genius, that was clear, especially if you know that his work on shielding had been nothing more than a side project for him that he merely supervised.

His main focus was on the development of an FTL-drive that would work without E-Zero.

This project had already spent more than a billion dollars in the first year

without showing results that could indicate that success was possible.

Any self-respecting businessman would have canceled the project long before even half of that money had been used but I had faith in Dr. Hoshiyume.

It helped that I earned more money than ever before thanks to the Alliance and the side projects Takahashi worked on.

Our starships got better by the month thanks to him.

Better shielding, better weapons, better sensors, faster and more energy-efficient.

And that were just advancements pertaining the ships themselves, nothing to say of improved methods of constructing them.

Well, for the latter I would have to thank a worker of mine who got his hands on one of my mining drones and recalibrated them to weld two ship plates together. When I had heard about this, I ordered a promotion and raise for him and asked him to recalibrate more drones.

The time for the construction of any ship was lessened by 7% and the quality raised by 4%.

Selling the ships not only to the Alliance who was my major buyer but also the civilian populace made sure that the development of a non-E-Zero drive had no money issues.

It still was expensive as hell, especially after the second year when the total cost exceeded three billion but the technologies that were discovered or improved on were worth it.

Sadly not everyone could see that and I had to do some housecleaning when some people on the board of directors of 'Ad Astra' tried to remove me from my position of CEO.

Their reasoning was sound, after all, 'Ad Astra' wasn't making as much money as it could and I spent billions on a project that seemed useless.

If they had talked with me first I would have been merciful but going behind my back was something I truly didn't like.

So while they thought they had enough control over the company if they put their shares together to remove me, I made my preparations to remove them instead.

In the end, let's just say they had to get new jobs and my rivals had an example of what I was willing to do with those that tried to betray me, nobody wants to know all the ugly details.

Anyway, it took Takahashi and the team of experts that he had assembled from different scientific fields three years and almost 5 billion dollars to get a working prototype done.

Fortunately, Takahashi had made dozens of possible theories of how FTL would be achievable and thought about an uncountable amount of possible problems that could happen and their solutions.

Without his work, it would have taken at least one or two decades even with the Prothean archives if we had the will and determination to do it and didn't care about cost.

I believe without Dr. Hoshiyume the Alliance would have to rely on the ME-drives because it would have been too expensive even for me to get it done even before first contact. And afterward, we would have to concentrate on catching up with the rest of the galaxy and give, at first, no thought about brand new technology.

The new FTL-drive that R&D came up with was nothing short of amazing and I won't even try to understand the technical details and physics behind it, I know I'm smart but I'm no genius.

However, I could understand enough to know how amazing it truly was. They managed to create a rift in the fabric of reality to create a gateway to higher or lower dimensions than our own, there were still discussions of which exactly, to shorten the distance between point A and point B. Between those two points, a tunnel was created that the safe travel of the ship secured.

When I asked, Takahashi told me that half of the time they needed to develop the drive had been used to research how to exit the tunnel at the wanted point. Opening the rift and getting in had been pretty easy after the energy problem had been taken care of.

The opening of an exit rift and how to safely navigate inside had been the challenge.

The needed energy for the Dimensional-Rift-drive came from small fusion-reactors that had been previously used to power entire cities on earth.

To have fusion-reactors that could fit into a ship had been already worth the money I invested because ships equipped with them could stay operational more than double the time they had before.

And there were hundreds of other uses for them that could bring me my money back.

When the time came for the first true test of the DR-drive, Takahashi had been a nervous wreck. I believe he was worried about what would happen if it didn't work and if I would fire him.

That thought never came to me, he was much too valuable to let him go.

The ship with the DR-drive, the 'Flying Lab Test', named by the crew that had build the ship, would jump from one end of the system to the other.

Long story short, it worked.

The rift opened, the ship flew in and after some time a rift on the other end of the system opened and the ship came out again without any damage.

The only problem was that it took almost thrice the time a standard FTL drive, one with E-Zero, would need.

The whole team had been devastated by the knowledge, Dr. Hoshiyume the most until I pointed out that they had developed a method to travel the stars without relying on any alien technology. They had proved that humans could have done this without any outside help, just with ambition and perseverance.

It helped a little but it would take some time before they got their motivation back.

They started another test, to jump from one solar system to another, to see if the DR-drive could at least make the jump safely.

There was no argument against the experiment, they had to know if it was worth developing the drive further or not.

Then things got weird.

But the good kind of weird.

Instead of the expected nine days, it took the ship just a bit over five!

Not that much longer than the three days it would have taken with our ME-drives.

And nobody could explain why it had happened, so we started a series of new tests.

In the end, we found out that the longer the distance, the less time we would need to travel.

Some scientists tried to describe it like this: You need one second per meter if you want to walk ten meters but if you want to walk twenty meters and don't change anything, suddenly you would need less than a second per meter.

There were two theories about how this was possible.

One was that the distance got more 'compressed' the longer it was, the other was that the ship would continuously accelerate inside the dimensional tunnel and traveled the complete distance faster.

I didn't care why only that we had another way to travel the stars.

And I cared about that Dr. Hoshiyume got his motivation back.

We met and discussed what our next step would be and we decided to test if his engine would be compatible with E-Zero to possibly combine the two drives.

He looked downright ecstatic about the topic.

The first part would be to test if it was safe for E-Zero to be exposed to the dimensional rift.

They connected an 80-ton container to the ship and send it through the rift to have a starting point to compare how ezzo would influence the test results.

It had been a good idea because they found out that once inside the container started to sway as if a strong wind or current existed.

But it didn't have too much of an influence and they shelved the observation for later, right now, it was more interesting how E-Zero would be affected.

They put a small amount of E-Zero and a myriad of sensors into the container and send it on its way.

Nothing happened but the team was still wary because the ezzo hadn't been 'active' like it would have to be to produce a ME-field.

The only thing we knew right now was that we could transport it.

The next test had been prepared almost immediately and they installed a device in the container that would produce a Me-field and lighten or increase the mass of the container.

Only 1% of the total mass of the container had been reduced for the first test so that possible dramatic outcomes wouldn't be devastating.

Fortunately, even 'active' E-Zero had been stable inside the dimensional rift.

Though it had been noted that the swaying of the container had increased and the follow-up test with an increased mass had shown that the movement of the container had decreased.

That there had been no noticeable swaying of the starship had been attributed to its much higher mass and it had been theorized that if ME-field would be employed that it would be affected by the same dimensional winds, as they were called now, as the container.

Testing continued and one time the mass of the container had been reduced too much and the container swayed outside the stabilizing tunnel.

It was like a clean cut at the end of the cable.

The container had been lost to the dimensional rift.

We had experimented much with our DR-drive but never before was the connected danger with it so real to us.

Of course, we knew it could be dangerous but it never was a true concern for us until then. There is nothing like seeing the danger with your own eyes to truly understand it.

Nevertheless, we equipped the 'Flying Lab Test' with ME-fields and send it on its journey again but only reduced the mass to see a small increase in speed.

Two things were found out by this test. One the travel-time lessened and second the faster you got inside the tunnel, the stronger the winds were. So we just couldn't reduce the mass of a ship down to 100t and fly through, instead, we stipulated a maximum. No ship would be allowed to reduce its mass more than 32% of its total mass and installed security features in the DR-drive that would prevent its activation and the opening of a rift if it detected a breach in protocol.

In the end, while the DR-drive didn't even come close to the speed that the mass-relays provided, not even the Hybrid-drive that was finished only four months ago, it could reach systems without a relay in a reasonable time. Much faster than a ME-drive and without having to vent heat.

Systems and their planets that had been previously ignored due to distance were now available to us, for example, the planet we were currently orbiting.

It was a small garden world that had been discovered only two to three months ago, much smaller than earth but still hospitable and the Alliance claimed it for their use as a military world because it would be right in the middle of the still-growing Alliance territory and ships could be deployed to earth and two primary relays without much delay.

When I heard the name of the planet that Takahashi gave it, who got the honor of naming it, I had to laugh for two full minutes.

He named it Reach.

What a geek.

But it fit. A name for a world that would probably host the main assets for a military that operates in space? I would probably call it Reach as well.

Reach was kind of an open secret in the Alliance. Everybody knew it existed and the general direction but the exact coordinates of the system and the planet itself were classified. Only captains of the Alliance Navy had the clearance to know them. Higher positions in the military and the department heads had the clearance as well and that meant I did too.

Thinking about Reach and the Alliance military, led my mind towards the weapons company I owned now. It took longer than I thought to get control over it. Others bought shares of the company as well, mostly because they were the first to incorporate mass effect into their weapons and I couldn't just throw my money around, the DR-drive development took a lot of it but after three years I had bought the majority of the shares and the company belonged to me.

Only after I heard the name of the assault-rifle they produced I remembered where I had heard of them and why I started to like the company in the beginning.

The M5-Lancer and Hahne Kedar.

A weapons company that would become a big name in the Mass Effect universe even without my help.

The memory of when I visited the weapons development together with Admiral Wright came to me.

Wright had invited Major Nathalia Glovenko, a former Russian spec-ops and the one who was designing the spec-ops programs for the Alliance, among them the N-school, to accompany us. While he knew what weapons should have and do, he said, he was more comfortable with the big ones, those mounted on his ships. So he got Major Glovenko who was intimately familiar with what a weapon needed on the field.

We arrived a the testing range and the major almost immediately took one of the offered rifles and tested it while a technician explained the details of the rifle to Wright and me.

After the technician was finished, Wright looked to Major Glovenko and I don't know how but somehow they communicated without any word or moving a muscle, at least from where I stood it looked like two statues were standing before each other.

In less than a minute they finished their 'conversation' and the admiral looked back at the technician.

"It is a good rifle," he said and a smile broke out on the Hahne Kedar employee's face. Until the admiral continued.

"if your enemy is a small-time criminal who starts to cry when he cuts his finger with a piece of paper."

All joy vanished from the technician's face at the admiral's words and I had to hide a small chuckle. Since I had become part of the Alliance, Wright and I had become friends and I knew the admiral loved to be blunt. If you want to say something say it, was his motto.

"Rate of fire, good. Accuracy, recoil, and stopping power, not so much" added Major Glovenko 'helpfully', her voice thick with her accent.

"You heard her," Wright continued, "while it has a good suppressive ability, the rifle is something that fits law-enforcement more than the military. We need something with more power."

"And what should we do?" The technician asked angered and I had the suspicion he had been heavily involved in the design of the M5-Lancer.

"Bigger rounds. Wounds are too small, too easily patched up" suggested Glovenko.

"If we do that, the rifle overheats too fast and would probably break down after some time. Besides the ammunition block would be used up faster as well" countered the technician.

"Not when you reduce the rate of fire and the velocity of the bullets" voiced Wright. "A soldier doesn't want to fire a whole magazine at his enemy to down him, he wants him dead in three shots, four maximum. And Glovenko is right, the wounds are too small. If you want to kill with this rifle fast, you'd have to hit his head or heart to do serious damage and in the heat of battle that can be pretty difficult. Shots at the body are more easily managed."

"That could work" muttered the technician and from the look in his eyes, he wasn't really there anymore. He still managed a goodbye and assured us that we would be informed when a prototype was ready.

When we left Wright had that smug smile on his face that he wore when something went to his plans.

"Thanks for taking us. I think I speak for every soldier under my command that they're thankful that they won't get crappy guns" he said and Glovenko nodded stoically at his side.

Eight months later and the first batch of new rifles, the AR2-Wright, the spiritual predecessor of the Mattock, would be distributed to Alliance military personnel.

I still could remember vividly the shit-eating grin the admiral had when he heard that they named their new rifle after him. From what I heard the development name was even 'Get it Wright'. But that was something I would never tell him unless I wanted to see that self-satisfied grin again, and I didn't!

Not just the military had expanded and advanced in the last five years.

Dozens of new technologies appeared on the market from communication to medicine, every field showed advancements.

Slowly but surely we were able to communicate with people in other solar systems without too much interference and the beginnings of Medi-Gel were already available.

People were joining with the Alliance's colonist programs since the first habitable garden world had been found beyond the relay, a world called Terra Nova.

As of now, the Alliance had found 14 worlds fit for habitation but only 9 of them had any kind of colonization. Among them Benning, Mindoir, Eden Prime and the newest of them Shanxi.

Some planets also had a human presence on them, but those were mostly just for resource gathering.

When I heard the name Eden Prime I played with the thought of finding the Beacon and/or Javik before the events of the games but I immediately dismissed it. Not because I didn't want to change the timeline, well, maybe a bit, but because I didn't know where to start looking. It took around thirty years since the colonization of Eden Prime until the Beacon was found. I wasn't very hopeful that it would be found early and instead I would not interfere, else I sent them in the wrong direction and it is never found.

Shanxi, on the other hand, was something I was deeply concerned about. How far could I go with changing things and more importantly, what could I change? Because just sitting back and letting it happen wasn't an option for me.

Neither had I any influence on the exploration arm of the Alliance that was tasked with the discovery of new planets and the opening of relays, who hadn't even found the relay yet, that would lead into Citadel-space, nor did I have any say about how many military assets would be stationed there.

Besides, I didn't know when exactly the Turians would show up or if they even were on the other side of the relay when it opened and how or technology compared to theirs. The Mass-Effect-games never showed how far the technological gap had been before humanity met the Turians.

But I would try to close the gap as much as possible before the first contact.

That and making sure the Alliance had more ships and personnel.

The more ships we had, the more could be stationed in colonized systems with the Colonial Defense Fleets, which were still relatively small, especially in the less inhabited systems, and acted more like distractions until a dedicated battle group could arrive.

Acquiring more personnel was a running process that required cooperation from different sources.

From the Alliance itself, an advertisement company and many other companies.

I knew someone in the marketing department of 'Colorado Ads', a company in the ad industry that created ads that were personalized for individuals.

In half a dozen meetings we discussed how the image of the Alliance could be strengthened so that more people would join and what to do when the time came for the first extra-solar colony.

She even gave me some ideas concerning taxes that could be used to get people to join up with the colonist-programs which I passed on to Micheal Port.

In the end, dozens of different ads were placed, some for the Alliance military, for the science departments, administration, colonisations and just work in general.

Some were for the poor, speaking of a new beginning, others for the adventurous, telling them of the wonders of the stars.

And it worked, maybe a little too good. Thousands signed up for different programs, among them even those without any kind of qualification.

For those who didn't sign up with the Alliance and got a further education there, I created an administration group inside the economic department of the Alliance that was commissioned to find smaller companies and convince them to move to the new colonies and offer apprenticeships there or any kind of work, as long as the people earned money to live they were happy.

The best I could describe the group would be that they were like an employment agency.

The influx of new colonists got even higher when Port announced that every colonist would get reduced taxes for the next seven years and the people in the new colonies loved it.

The people who chose to stay on earth, not so much.

Protests were held in every major city on earth against the 'unfair' treatment of earth citizens in comparison to colonists.

But one speech from Micheal later, not only did the protests stop but they were even happy about paying higher taxes!

I still don't know how he did it and I probably never will.

Did a god bless him? Or a demon?

Before Micheal, no one thought it possible. People paying more and happy about it?! Never!

I had heard his speech only casually while I was going over some documents and I just remember he said something about 'earth will always be the heart of humanity' and 'without a strong and gentle hearth the whole body dies', something along those lines.

And the people loved it.

The man had a way with words like no one before and I was thanking every kind of higher being that Micheal was an idealist and the only one with this kind of talent.

Imagine that there were some politicians with less noble goals and that kind of charisma! Terrible!

Support for the Alliance was at a high after Micheal's speech and it didn't hurt that we used the taxpayer's money for projects that were in the open and beneficial to the whole Alliance space.

The development of a communication network to connect different solar systems was one example of that.

It took me some time to find a company that wouldn't waste most of the money we gave them and produced visible results in a reasonable time.

One of the comm buoys was currently under construction above Reach and I could see how a ship brought them new components right now.

The most important thing for me was the new shipyard that was under construction close to the Oort-cloud that had been discovered at the edge of Reach's system.

From the first surveys, that had been forwarded to me, the Olympus-system, where Reach was located, would support a military buildup for the next two hundred years, even if our production would increase by 46%.

That system would become a gamechanger in the things to come, deep down I knew that.