[Business] “Siatex” Project Reporting Preliminary Success, Controversy

“Siatex” Project Reporting Preliminary Success, Controversy

by Dillon Castor, Tayseri Times

Tythius Platform, Apien Crest - One of, if not the, the largest joint mining operations in the past asari generation broke ground today on its most ambitious task yet: the planetoid HK-2213. Streaked with veins of iridium, palladium, and possessing an abnormally large concentration of the heavy metals used in many modern alloys, HK-2213 was in the project’s sights from the very start.

“The reason that it has taken so long to build to this point is because we first needed an opportunity to gauge how well all involved were going to function on a project of this raw scale and scope. How efficiently they would be able to coordinate their actions.” Explained project founder and CEO of Cicerion Ltd. Baros Despari. Despari then went on to add that he was “exceptionally pleased” with the work of the entities involved, both public and private, thus far and that the next half dozen prospective mining sites would proceed to open on schedule.

So named after a turian spirit of the underground and precious metals, Siatex was the product of the mutual cooperation of over half a dozen turian, krogan, Terminus, and human interests. They count among their members such notables as the now resurgent United Mining Concord, currently based out of Luna, the extra-Citadel Space Legiatis Group, as well as detachments from the Hierarchy Corps of Engineers and Clan Urdnot. Heavily subsidized by the participating governments and supplied with manpower and equipment from all involved, Siatex’s stated primary goal is to “provide a steady flow of material to a galaxy starved of crucial resources”. To this end the project has embarked on a massive campaign of high intensity planetary and asteroid mining; deploying small fleets of ships and drones, multiple mobile industrial platforms, and thousands of sapients across eight (now nine) star systems.

Despite the highly promising mineral yields thus far, concerns have been raised regarding the planned expansion of Siatex operations. As Matriarch Baheris D’Mula, the primary critic of the project, stated, “taking into account the past three and six upcoming sites: two are located deep within the Terminus, three are habitable worlds that were intended at one point for colonization and, in the case of Varun II, actually colonized prior to being devastated by the Reapers, and one is a full fledged garden world. The practices used by Siatex on uninhabited planetoids are devastating to the body in question; the ecological damage when these very same ‘high intensity’ techniques are turned on valuable, inhabitable worlds will be immense and likely irreversible bar large scale intervention. These are precious resources to be preserved and cultivated, not tossed to the tender mercies of this project.”

Best estimates currently place Siatex at providing approximately 13.5 percent of the galactic market for precious and industrial metals. This number is expected to rise over the coming months.

One of the things that honestly interests me,speaking personally here, the most about all this is the level of cooperation with Terminus based organizations on a project of this size; there's Legiatis for one (and you just know that, some way or another, a share of the profits is finding it's way back to Omega) and at least a handful of the worlds that are on the projects schedule are outside Citadel space entirely.

In my mind, at least, Siatex seems to be something of an expansion of the economic co-dependence we saw during the Reaper War.

Certainly. While the environmental concerns are legitimate, if they are true, I think that the reward far outweighs the risk. At the very least, I'm happy to see that the Hierarchy and the Urdnots are working together in a greater capacity than passive-aggressive genophage sentiments.