They called it the greatest discovery in human history.
The civilizations of the galaxy call it...
It has been nearly 20 years since the System Alliance founded its Embassy on the Citadel and since then humanity's race to spread itself over the galaxy has come to a crawl. Bogged down by bureaucratic litigation and Council oversight the Systems Alliance has had to slow its expansion. To make matters worse conflict with slavers and pirates during the Skyllian Blitz has set back colonies already established. Troubles with the Batarian Hegemony plague colonists in the Terminus Systems and the ever present threat of the Perseus Veil looms.
Still, despite all this humanity prospers. They are young to Citadel Space but they are making their presence ever known. In the less than thirty years since making first contact with the Turians in the First Contact War humanity has gained an Embassy on the Citadel, something some races have taken 1000 or more years to do. The colonies and worlds under System Alliance control are too numerous to list, and the wealth and resources that flow into human led corporations every day is in the billions.
Yet no matter the troubles or the prosperity of humanity, things can always change...
Six Months before the events of Mass Effect 1...
"Two beautiful moons, one spectacular ring, zero neighbors," says a popular advertisement for Aite a Terminus Systems world. Aite is known for its sparsely settled population despite being a garden planet with a colony nearly a century old. Blessed with a mild climate, wildlife no more dangerous than that on Earth, and soil and bacteria amenable to imported plants, Aite would appear to be an unexploited paradise.
However, it is unpopular for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that its moon, Litae, is in an unstable orbit that will lead to a planetary impact and an extinction-level event within the next two centuries. As such, all investment in the planet is short-term, and the biggest business is selling off the local biota to the highest bidder.
The second drawback is the level of violence on the planet. Like the rest of the Phoenix Massing cluster, Aite was briefly considered part of Citadel space during its first wave of colonization. However, when the colony broke off to become an independent planet in 2133, the Council let the doomed planet go with less than a day of debate. Free from any real governing body, Aite's history has since been filled with wars between small frontier-town city-states over its resources. The result is a dangerous world where the average citizen in expected to be self-reliant to the point of fending for themselves against cutthroat corporations, strong-arm militia groups, and even slaver incursions. The fighting is so frequent that the name of the planet itself has changed more than eleven times. In a sign of blunt indifference, standard Citadel galaxy maps refer to the world by the name given to it by human colonists in the latter half of the century.
It makes the world perfect for a small ExoGeni mining and research facility located a few hundred kilometers outside of the planets disputed capital of Adrasteia. The small facility is home to a hundred or so workers, security personnel, merchants and other staff needed to keep the place running. On the surface it is a small mining camp, pulling out a decent amount of Palladium every month. A few months ago things started to change. Those in charge, namely Chief of Operations Nikoli Petrosky and Chief Scientist Dr. Angelica Holic began to pay less and less attention to the mining resources. As a result several much needed shipments of parts for the local machinery have gone unauthorized causing a headache for the mechanics of the facility who have been attempting to keep all equipment in production. Security has noticed that several areas of the base camp have had security levels raised, and fewer and fewer people have been admitted to the main bunker facility that houses the science and research teams.
ExoGeni home corp has made inquires into the situation, but as of to date they haven't sent in any inspectors or outside personnel. Payroll continues to flow, and the local watering hole hasn't run out of liquor or booze, so the regular staff (the minors, dock workers, mechanics, etc) have nothing to complain about.
