The Reapers’ first attack on turian space followed an age-old maxim: hit them where it hurts.
More likely, they are herding their prey to make the coming harvest that much easier. This is not an example of the Reapers being merciful. Meanwhile, Reaper destroyers descended into the atmosphere to melt roads and capture population centers with minimal loss of life. The capital ships bombarded defense installations and industrial centers, annihilating entire cities with populations in the low millions, including Adelaide, Hamburg, Al Jubail, and Fort Worth. Communication is so limited that the fate of entire nations remains unknown. Earth’s resistance now relies on outdated radio towers and a few quantum entanglement communicators whose matched pairs happen to be on other continents or outside the Sol system.
It stood no better chance.Īfter destroying Earth’s comm buoys, smaller Reaper destroyers wiped out all GPS and communications satellites in Earth’s orbit and cut the undersea fiber-optic cables that linked the continents. The Fourth Fleet, near Earth, had a few minutes of advance warning. Dozens more capital ships continued through the Charon Relay, where the First Fleet had been lying in wait but was soon destroyed. This was mere screening for the main force. The tactic was unexpected, since the navies of organic species would never risk coming out of FTL within combat range or leaving enemies at their backs to threaten supply lines.Īt Arcturus Station, more than a dozen Reaper capital ships engaged the Alliance’s Second, Third, and Fifth Fleets. The Reapers bypassed the Sixth and Seventh Fleets at Terra Nova and Eden Prime, flying straight from relay to relay where they could neither be tracked nor intercepted. The Alliance knew the first wave would arrive from batarian space, but they were unprepared for the speed and scale of the attack. The Reapers took Earth in a matter of hours. More systems have gone dark as their comm buoys were destroyed, and millions more batarians, trapped on their planets, sit waiting for the Reapers. So many refugees poured into the human-occupied Exodus Cluster that Systems Alliance officials at first thought the batarians were invading. The planet’s comm buoys were destroyed next, creating an ominous silence that has persisted ever since.įearing they were next, batarian colonies across Hegemony space began evacuations. Moments after the information minister took to the extranet and announced that unknown ships were destroying all traffic near Khar’shan, the defense minister declared there was no reason to panic. Within a day, Reaper capital ships appeared in the Harsa system and descended on the batarian homeworld, Khar’shan.įor all the rhetoric about the Hegemony’s military prowess, their response to the Reapers was uncoordinated. The Hegemony’s Department of Information Control blamed the loss of signal on space weather, but scrambled ships to the system nonetheless. The Reapers arrived first in the Vular system and immediately destroyed its communications network. A few elements are common to almost every version, however. THE REAPER WAR CODEX The Fall of Khar’shanįor every thousand batarian refugees, there are a thousand and one stories about how the Reapers invaded the batarian systems.