Quarians | Mass Effect 1 Wiki

Quarians Economy

The Migrant Fleet has little economic base, operating in a state of perpetual "hand-to-mouth". While Quarian ships include light manufacturing and assembly plants, they lack heavy industries such as refining and shipbuilding. The fleet has tankers for water purification and oxygen cracking, but the space-intensive nature of agriculture limits food production. A single disaster could destroy the fragile balance.

The Quarians earn income in creative ways. Because the government is obliged to provide food, water, air, and medical support for every individual, the Conclave strategically determines the course of the Fleet to bring in resources and income. A species who suspects the Migrant Fleet is heading towards their space often offers a "gift" of surplus starships, fuel, and resources to alter course.

As the fleet passes through a system, swarms of mining vessels work over asteroids for metals and siliceous materials and cometary bodies for water ice and organics. Quarian miners are adept at locating and strip-mining space-borne resources. This sparks conflict with corporations already working the system. Large mining concerns spend millions on lobbyists and public relations portraying the Quarians as locusts, devouring the resources of a system before moving on.

The greatest asset of the Quarians is their rarefied skills. Most are experienced miners. Due to their life of perpetual salvage and repair, they are skilled engineers and technicians. More than once, the very corporations that lobby against the Quarians have made back room deals with the Fleet, arranging for skilled Quarians to fill space engineering jobs that other species would demand higher wages for. Quarians are widely hated among the working classes. "The Quarians are coming to take our jobs" is a common response to the Fleet's approach.

Quarians Government

Due to the Quarians' precarious existence and the need to enforce strict rationing, government is somewhat autocratic. The Migrant Fleet's operations are directed by the Admiralty, a board of five military officers who are advised by a legislative body called the Conclave.

Each vessel in the Fleet has the right to send representatives to the Conclave aboard the flagship. The number of representatives is based on crew size. Larger clans, with bigger ships and more votes, form the cores of political blocs. Opposition comes from the Outriders' Coalition, with delegates from thousands of smaller ships.

The Admiralty defers to the Conclave's decisions in most circumstances. However, if all five members agree a Conclave decision jeopardized the survival of the fleet, and cannot get the Conclave to address their concerns, they have the right to summarily overturn the legislative decision. After the Admiralty uses this extraordinary power, they must resign. If the Admiralty does not step down after using their veto the rest of the military is obliged to arrest them.

Each ship captain has authority over the vessel, but is advised by an elected civilian Council, just as the Admiralty is advised by the Conclave. This relationship may range from cooperation to polite tolerance to outright hostility, but any captain who overrules his council without good reason is relieved of command by the Admiralty.

Many Quarian ships are owned by clans who pool their resources to purchase used vessels from private sellers. Large ships are prestigious for big, rich clans, but a small ship means status for a small clan with enough personal wealth to afford a private vessel. Clan vessel captains are not subject to dismissal by the Admiralty; abusive captains are a "family" problem if they do not disrupt the operations of the fleet.

Quarian Law and Defense

Although the Conclave establishes civil law much as any planet-based democracy, enforcement and trials are more unique. After the flight from the Geth, there were few constables to police the millions of civilians aboard the Fleet, so the navy parceled out marine squads to maintain order and enforce the law. Today, Quarian marines have evolved training and tactics akin to civilian police, but remain adept at combat in the confined spaces of a starship, and fully under the command of the military.

Once taken into custody, the accused is brought before the ship's captain for judgment. While the ship's council may make recommendations, tradition holds that the captain has absolute authority in matters of discipline.

Most are lenient, assigning additional or more odious maintenance tasks aboard the ship. Persistent recidivists are "accidentally" left on the next habitable world. This practice of abandoning criminals on other people's planets is a point of friction between the Quarians and the systems they pass through. Captains rarely have another choice; with space and resources at a premium, supporting a non-productive prison population is not an option.

In the early years, many Quarians freighters were armed and used as irregular "privateers". Civilian ships still show a strong preference for armament, making them unpopular targets for pirates. Though they have rebuilt their military, there are still mere hundreds of warships to protect the tens of thousands of ships. The Quarian navy follows strict routines of patrol, and takes no chances. If the intent of an approaching ship can't be ascertained, they shoot to kill.

Migrant Fleet

The Migrant Fleet is the largest concentration of starfaring vessels in the galaxy, sprawling across millions of kilometers. It can take days for the entire fleet to pass through a mass relay.

When the Quarians fled their homeworld, the Fleet was a motley aggregation of freighters, shuttles, industrial vessels, and the odd warship. After three centuries, all have been modified to support larger crews as comfortably as possible. As the Quarians achieved stability, they began weeding out the ships least suitable for long-term habitation, selling them and pooling the money to buy larger and more spaceworthy hulls. This process is ongoing, as vessels wear out and break down.

While some ships enjoy dedicated cabins with full privacy and sanitary facilities, many more are former freighters, whose cargo bays and containers are pressurized and divided into family spaces using simple metal cubicle bulkheads. The Quarians enliven these austere spaces with colorful quilts and tapestries, which also help muffle sound.

The day-to-day operation of the fleet - traffic control, station-keeping, supply distribution, and so on - are under military jurisdiction. Though ship captains have the authority to deviate from their assigned positions and may leave the fleet at any time, they are assumed to do so at their own risk. As the Migrant Fleet moves around the galaxy, many ships split off to pursue individual goals, returning days or years later.

Quarians Pilgrimage

When Quarians of the Migrant Fleet reach young adulthood, they must leave their birth ship and find a new crew to accept them as permanent residents. To prove themselves, they must recover something of value. This is offered to their prospective captain as proof that they will not be a mere burden on the shoestring resources of the ship.

This process is called the Pilgrimage. Stripped of ritual, the Pilgrimage is merely an attempt to maintain genetic diversity within the small, relatively isolated population bases that make up the Migrant Fleet. If the young stayed and married within their birth vessel, the risk of inbreeding would increase sharply.

Quarians are surgically fitted with their various immunity-boosted implants in preparation for leaving on Pilgrimage. Having grown within the sterile, controlled environments of the Migrant Fleet ships, Quarians have virtually no natural immune system.

Quarians Religion

The ancient Quarians practiced ancestor worship. Even after abandoning faith for secularism, quarians continued to revere the wisdom of elders. As time passed and technology advanced, they inevitably turned their knowledge to preserving the personalities and memories of the elderly as computer virtual intelligences. These recordings became a repository of knowledge and wisdom, stored in a central databank and available through any extranet connection.

They held no illusions that this was like a form of immortality; like all virtual intelligences, their electronically-preserved ancestors were not truly sapient. This was considered a surmountable problem; sapience could surely be reduced to simple mathematics.

The Quarians began exhaustive research into creating artificial intelligence so they could learn to escape the bounds of mortality and give their ancestral records true awareness. Unfortunately, the life the quarians created did not accept the same truths they did. The Geth destroyed the ancestor databanks when they took over.

In the centuries since they evacuated their homeworld, most quarians have returned to religion in various forms. Many believe the rise of the Geth and the destruction of their 'ancestors' were chastisement for arrogantly forsaking the old ways and venerating self-made idols.

Others have a more philosophical outlook, believing their race was indeed arrogant, but no supernatural agency lay behind the geth revolt. Rather, the Quarians' actions wrought their own doom. Either way, every Quarian would agree that their own hubris cost them their homeworld.