AUTHOR'S FOREWORD:

Hello ladies and gents, welcome to Battlefield: Wars of the Systems Alliance.

This is an accompanying story to Battlefield 2183 and its sequels. It will explore the major conflicts between humanity and other species, starting with the Skyllian Verge Conflict and hopefully working through the Eden Prime War, the Terminus Conflict and the Reaper War at the least. It will be in a documentary style, based on the Battlefield TV series that ran on BBC and PBS, which some military history junkies will be aware of.

You don't need to read the parent story to enjoy this, though if you unfamiliar with the Battlefield series of games, you may want to read the prologue and timeline of BF2183.

This has been written as the nature of the conflicts in question have changed from the canon, mostly due to far greater numbers of human colonists leaving Earth (which is in somewhat of an ice age), and I thought exploring those differences would be fun to write. And hopefully to read as well.

To the readers of the main story, fear not, writing has continued for that as well.

Enjoy!

THE VERGE CONFLICT: Battle of Mindoir (2170)

At 0530 hour local time, October 5th 2170, the Batarian Hegemony struck its long-awaited first blow against the human Systems Alliance, in an operation named "Righteous Cause", attacking the agricultural colony of Mindoir. This was the moment that the batarians had been been preparing for five years, and what humanity had tried desperately to avoid. The campaign would see the batarians achieve one of the most complete of victories in the history of warfare. And yet in this utterly demoralising and crushing defeat of their enemies, the seed of the downfall of the Hegemony was planted.

The batarian forces and their pirates would kidnap more sentient beings than had ever before been captured in a single raid. Up-scaling their already proven intimidation tactics, the Hegemony hoped to scare the human race into abandoning colonisation of the Skyllian Verge entirely, and perhaps even to contain the Alliance within its own local cluster. Despite huge military success, they would find the opposite reaction would be the one they were to receive.

In 2170, it would seem like the entire Traverse was opening up for the batarians to take. They would humiliate the species that had held off the mighty turians, putting the very existence of humanity as an independent entity at stake with the worst defeat that any human force had suffered since First Contact. The batarian campaign would leave the Alliance battered, creating a military problem it could barely deal with and a political crisis of unprecedented fury. So complete would the batarian victory be, that humanity would openly respond with their most terrible weapons as the only option for continuation as a unified species.

PRELUDE TO THE BATTLE

In 2165, Humanity gained an embassy on the Citadel as an associate species of the Citadel Council, fully integrating its economy with the galactic market and gaining formal access to the highest levels of interspecies government for the first time. It was a hard fought achievement. Only seven years previously, humanity had been at war with the Turian Hierarchy, and the diplomatic wounds were very much still open. However, the turians were convinced to close the matter of the Relay 314 Conflict, called the First Contact War by humans. In particular, the asari were eager to integrate the new species. The salarians on the other hand were neutral, believing it too early for the human species to join but fearing the creation of a rogue state on the borders of Citadel space.

As old wounds were closed and the hatchet buried, another conflict was brewing as a result of the diplomatic settlement reached. With the Alliance's integration into the galactic market, its tiny colonies throughout the Skyllian Verge exploded in population and wealth. Trade boomed and the coffers filled, and humanity was increasingly optimistic in its attitude. All of this was achieved at the expense of the batarians, whom had been developing the Verge for decades before and were pushed aside by the vast wave of new colonists that arrived between 2165 and 2170. Alliance programmes to promote colonial life merely exacerbated the dispute, and the Hegemony saw humanity as dangerously expansionist. Its leadership determined to halt and reverse the trend, and decided that military force was the only solution.

Unable to act using their own fleets at first, the batarians began arming and outfitting privateers to attack Alliance colonies and ships as early as a month after humanity's admission to the Citadel. By use of such tactics, the Hegemony hoped to avoid provoking a response from the Council. These attacks started small, some succeeding and others failing, usually on the basis of how close the target colony or ship was to Alliance reinforcements. The Hegemony's intelligence services mapped the response of human fleets carefully, gathering as much information on Alliance Navy's behaviours as they possibly could. This information was so extensively gathered that the captains of individual Alliance ships often had files of their own, detailing habits and reactions. Simultaneously, the batarians sought every possible scrap of knowledge about the First Contact War. Great risks were taken and equally great sums of credits paid to get batarian hands on turian debriefing reports from Shan'xi and Relay 314.

The Alliance did not rest on its laurels either, however. Operations to find and destroy pirate bases were launched, and a number of successes scored against individual pirate groups. Most famous of these was the destruction of the batarian frigate Tunerron, by the Alliance cruiser Hyderabad in the Action of 14 July 2167. No matter how successful individual pirates were, the expansion of human colonies did not stop and the disunited pirate groups could not challenge the Alliance Navy. Pushed by cold climate on Earth and facilitated by a government that needed to increase its clout, almost three hundred million humans left for the new colonies between 2167 and 2170.

The batarians knew that they needed to change their strategy or lose the entire Verge to the Alliance. They would apply what they had learned over five years of testing their enemy's defences, and planned the escalation of hostilities with total confidence that they had the drop on humanity.