What began as a routine inspection of Relay 314 becomes a bloody introduction to an unknown species that has proliferated in the Orion Spur of the galaxy.
Completely Isolated from the Relay Network, and seemingly ignorant of the Protheans and Mass Effect technology, these "humans" have nevertheless costructed a vast interstellar civilization and advanced their technology along utterly divergent paths.
As governments vie for dominance, companies sniff out opportunities for profit, and different cultures and philosophies collide, unfathomable powers watch these developement from their lofty perches, and prepare for their imminent confrontation.
Before the story proper starts, a short introduction.
1) Setting Background
This is setting is, essentially, "Mass Effect, but replace the System Alliance with the human civilizations from Lancer", both settings are mostly how you remember from their respective canons.
The main difference is that I'll take a less bioessentialist approach to the Mass Effect species, treating their cultural traits less like a blueprint and more like a starting point, and less like an inevitable consequence of their biology.
That said, the same bioessentialism that permeates Mass Effect canon will still be dominant in the culture of the Citadel Peoples: they'll use the term "race" to refer to the species and national entity interchangeably as is done in the games and consider species-wide monogovernments the norm.
2) About Realism
I research the topcs I write about to the best of my ability, but do keep in mind that I am pursuing an engineering degree at this time and as such may not have enough time to delve deeply into the most technical or complicated topics. I welcome accurate information and corrections, but please be understanding if something is not portrayed quite realistically
3) My experience with both settings
Although I have and am researching both settings thoroughly, I have little experience playing the Lancer and Lancer: Battlegroup TTRPGs. I would like to apologize in advance to experienced players if I write Lances and Battlegroups using bad strategies or miss obvious synergies.
Captain Nikolaidis - NGCS-CV Tunupe, Tawa-class Medium Carrier - Geostationary orbit around Shanxi
Marios Nikolaidis sipped the last of his morning coffee as he made his way onto the bridge. His officers were already busy at their station, including his Non-Human First Mate: Falstaff's main subaltern chassis was waiting for him at his seat.
"Karami is sending back our printers, I trust?"
"The Ambassador has requested that they remain available for another 7 days. She says his team is nearly done with the current housing project"
The captain's face squeezed into a scowl.
"Who does she think he is? I've been contracted to provide her with transport and escort, not to let her mooch off my ship as she pleases!"
"This planet was involved in a global conflict just a generation ago. There is a lot of damage that needs to be repaired if the native governments are to willingly join Union"
"That's the Dodgei- the Doge-" Marios slapped the side of his head as if to prod awake the laguage centers of his brain
"the get-a-better-acronym-department's problems. Our contract requires us to provide them with transportation and security, and the science team with the same. I'm not letting the eggheads file a complaint about me not having supplies and replacement parts ready just because she can't properly scope her resources"
"Or we could file a complaint to the DoJ/HR itself and let her superiors reign her in without appearing unprofessional ourselves"
Marios nodded
"Right, better not rush to make decisions until the caffeine has kicked in. And the rest of the reports?"
"Everything is nominal, captain. Scratch that, I just received a message from the Curie that the megastructure they were studying has shown signs of activity"
The whole bridge crew turned.
"What kind of activity?" asked Marios
"Forwarding video feed to bridge screen"
On cue, the screen unfolded from it's receptacle in the ceiling, showing low-res footage of a vast construct, a glowing sphere at it's center and two parallel beams at it's sides, not unlike the rails of of a mass driver.
The structure, which had always placidly orbited on the edge of the system with no sign of it's purpose, was now coruscating with lightning bolts the size of solar flares, all the stranger for the lack of medium around it for any current to ionize.
As the crew watched, a long arc unfolded from the center of the edifice and towards the camera.
There was light.
Then darkness.
Then stars again.
"The Curie's location has changed. They are in the Perseus Arm"
Veren Gallus saved the latest addition to his report; it was the same as the one before, and the one before that: perimeter secure, all nominal, crew well adjusted and raring for redeployement in more active patrols.
Other officers might have felt constrained in his assignement; patrolling a mostly bucolic or empty route just to check on a couple of inactive relays is not a quick road to glory and accolades. But Gallus was a Turian of focus and patience, and he knew routine checks and procedures seemed useless until they weren't.
Of course, he knew the reason his superiors had found him perfect for the task wasn't that they actually expected him to encounter any problems, but rather because an easy assignement under a commander who runs a tight ship was a perfect first tour of duty for new recruits to get used to active service and learn the underrated but indispensable virtue of constant vigilance. That suited him fine.
He checked the clock on the screen. In less than a minute, the fleet would arrive in the vicinity of Relay 314 and it's junction. Then it would be time for the junior captains of the Proud Banner and the Tip of the Spear to direct their frigate escorts in a system sweep before moving on.
With consummate timing, Gallus entered the command bridge right as the fleet slowed to sublight. Hestia, his comms officer, nodded approvingly as the other two cruisers and their escorts confirmed their arrival in near perfect sync with him. The loose formation the two ships had arrived in at the start of the patrol seemed more and more an isolated incident, as they consistently kept cohesion in each successive jump.
"All ships in formation, Commander", she said.
"Good. Tell the other captains to proceed". Gallus did not say with what: they should know, and if they didn't, it was better they be reprimanded then than to have their absent-mindedness betray them later.
Hestia relayed his instruction, then after a moment, confirmed they had begun sweeping manouvers.
Gallus ordered his own escorts to expand their formation to screen the other two cruisers while half of their own were out on recoinassance, then settled in to wait for reports.
It was only two minutes later than Hestia flared her mandibles in surprise.
"Commander, the Sharp Talon reports an unidentified contact in proximity of Relay 314. They request instructions"
When Gallus spoke again, it was in the parade ground voice he used for reprimands:
"Have them hail the ship and command it to get away from the relay! And have all ships converge on it!"
Hestia once again relayed his commands. As his orders were acknowledged and the patrolling frigates cohered again with their parent cruisers as they advanced on the trespassing ship, Gallus waited for the answer.
"Sir, the Sharp Talon reports they have received no intelligible answer. They further report the unidentified ship does not correspond to any make on their database and that the secondary relay 314-c has been activated. The unidentified ship has not obeyed or acknowledged their instructions"
"Open a fleet-wide channel then"
When Gallus turned his head toward the main holoscreen, it was already displaying the contacts of each ship as well as a tactical display. His face could have been carved from stone as he gave the commands.
"All ships, weapons hot. Aquire firing solution on bandit and fire when ready"
Though Gallus could hear their excitment and surprise through the open channel, the crews carried out his orders without delay. A brief cacophony of tones informed him that their railguns had been locked and loaded
Gallus looked at the unidentified ship's position on the display. Though it had started to move, it was not stepping away from the relay as instructed.
Stubborn idiots, he thought.
"Fire"
Fifteen railgun shells traced their paths on the screen. The formation had been perfectly lined up, and they impacted the target simultaneously, destroying it in an instant.
"Hestia, tell the Iron Wall and the Sharp Talon to confirm the kill and detain any survivors. The rest of the fleet is to sweep the system for further bandits as per procedure. And remind them not to engage them without explicit orders, I'm not risking excessive force from being still amped up"
Ambassador Karami - Guest Quarters of the Palace of the Host of Nations - Rgyamtsho eat u yyaarin - Shanxi
Halifa Karami sighed at the message. Leave it to corpros to react with irritation at people in need.
The complaint had come through Department HQ, but she knew perfectly well it was captain Nikolaidis who couldn't, nor cared to, see what was just outside her window.
Deliberately left there until the whole rebuilding project was completed, as a reminder to herself and as a statement to the local governments, was the bombed-out hulk of an apartment building; a microcosm of how nearly half the city had looked when she'd touched down.
For all that she'd been busy with meetings and negotiations and speeches, courting the leaders of the planet's nations hadn't made a hundredth of the difference that helping reverse the damages of the last war had. While statesmen and generals coily probed her to see how Union's support could be used against other post-war power blocs, their people has asked "What makes this 'Union' different to us?".
That, her team could answer.
In an hour, she was supposed to meet the coalition of charitable organizations they'd worked with, to pitch the idea of soliciting their covernment to include the Pillars in their constitutions.
And if she couldn't mollify IPS-N, she'd instead have to explain that some of the most important tools that were taking people out of poverty and off the streets were being taken away.
She was still planning and bracing herself for the confrontation when her Comp/Con announced an incoming call from the captain.
She took only a moment to compose herself before opening the call with a thought.
The dataplating around her cranium overlayed a metadata display over the top right corner of her field of view, and the sounds of the Tunupe's bridge over her hearing. A murmur was briefly heard, and the muffled voice of an automated announcement. Halifa spoke first:
"I've been told you have urgent need of the two size-three printers?" She asked, hoping to make him back-pedal by correcting her hyperbole.
"The situation is much more serious than that", was the answer. Change of plans, then.
"I dare say it is captain, the cold season here is starting in earnest, and if the last buildings can't be completed on schedule-"
"What- No! This isn't about what you're doing: I just received the last message from the research vessel Curie; it's been destroyed with all hands"
"I... didn't think there would be pirates so far past the periphery. Will you need to leave orbit for a time?"
"Buddha-fucking-Christ ambassador, haven't you received their comms?"
"Language, captain. And I've been too busy to check up on them. What happened?"
"It turned out the structure they were examining was a gate of some kind. It brought them somewhere in the Perseus Arm, and half an hour later an udidentified fleet showed up and blowed them to bits. They could be here in as little as fifty four Cradle-hours. You need to evacuate"
Halifa sat down and let each blow hit her before considering the situation more rationally.
"I will need to check with my team and ask GALCOMM for intructions, captain, but I can already tell you that unless we are ordered to evacutate, we're not leaving this world to fend for itself, It's-"
"The Curie's sensors counted three destroyers and twelve corvettes. Even if that wasn't just a vanguard and their parent ships are all high-capacity carriers, that's still severalbattlegroups' worth of ships; I couldn't do anything to stop that, and neither could the Liberator division and single Lance you brought along"
"Our likelyhood of success is immaterial, captain. We have a duty"
"Please reconsider, ambassador. You're not going to make any difference, only get yourself killed for nothing"
"I'm willing to die for my principles, captain; if you can believe that. But if you don't see any reason to stay, I'll petition Department HQ to release you from your contract so you can leave"
"Corporate already did that, seen as the current level of risk far outstretches it's original parameters. I'm asking you to leave because I don't want to leave civilians to die! Even if the military personnel should stay, you're not going to be of any help down there"
"Well, I apolgize for ever doubting your gallantry, captain, but unless commanded to do otherwise by my superiors, I'm not letting the people of Shanxi see me leave while they prepare to fight for their lives."
"Trying to be hero isn't your job, listen-"
"Your printers are still here in Gyatso's Garden, so let me know when you're picking them up and I'll have them brought out of the bunkers to the landing zone. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some important discussions to hold with my team and the Conclave of Nations"
Gallus was attentively monitoring the tactical display when ensign Hestia notified him of the coming transmission from the Iron Wall. They knew each other well enought that wouldn't need his words of assent, but he'd always insisted that procedure be followed to the letter.
"Report, captain"
"Sir, we found six survivors and brought them to the brig as commanded. Our search of the wreck is still underway"
"Very well. You may begin interrogating the trespassers"
"About that sir. They're not a Citadel race, or any on our database. The translators are useless"
Gallus frowned. This complicates things
"Limit yourself to detaining them, then. Found anything noteworthy about the vessel?"
"It's what we haven't found that's weird. The wreck has only trace amount of Element Zero"
"What do you mean?"
"The amount you'd expect from a battallion's worth of guns. according to our techies. Too much for them not to know what it is, but way too little for even the smallest FTL drive. Or artificial gravity, for that matter"
"Primitives, then. And already trying to mess with the Relays." Gallus groaned under his breath "Anything else?"
"Well, the only weapons we could identify look like a GARDIAN network, so it looks like it wasn't a warship, despite the size. And there are a couple sections of machinery the engineers can't make sense of. Like I said, we're still combing the wreck"
"Keep doing that, then. Return to you duty, captain. When you are done with the search, transfer the prisoners to my vessel"
"Yes sir"
No sooner had captain Aper closed the channel, that Gallus told Hestia to contact the comms officer of the Sharp Talon. Once again, it was only a short wait before the channel was opened.
"Ensign Crassus reporting, sir"
"Hestia, what did he transmit after he was ordered to hail the trespassing ship?"
"Transmission says: 'Vessel has no match in database. Secondary Relay 314-c activated. No intelligible response received' sir"
"Is that correct, ensign?"
The young officer looked down for a few moment. "That is correct sir"
"When you said that you 'received no intelligible response', did you mean that you received a response which wasn't intelligible?"
"No. Yes. Sir I-"
"Which is it ensign?"
"Sir I received a transmission I couldn't make sense of sir! I wasn't sure if it even was a response sir!"
"That's too bad ensign, because what actually came through is that the intruders were expressly defying my orders! When IN FACT it turns out they're an uncontacted race that couldn't understand them in the first place!"
The comms officer, who'd been on edge from the start, now looked mortified enough to die on the spot. His attempt at maintaining decorum by standing at attention only succeeded in giving him a thousand-yard-stare.
"This is why you are taught to specify EVERYTHING in communications! What would have happened if you'd gotten sloppy in a real fight ensign? Do you actually have the brains to realize it, or do I need to draw you a picture?"
Gallus stared at the comms officer for a few seconds, to see if he would break down or try to justify himself. He didn't, to his credit and Gallus' mild relief. When he spoke again, the commander didn't shout.
"Return to your post. Transmission over".
Gallus waited for the channel to be closed before commenting "He's lucky we needed to gun them down anyway".
He frowned at the celing.
"I hope this really was just a fluke. We need to act, and there's no time to wait for more experienced crews"
When he looked down again, the bridge crew was staring at him in wait. Galena Punica, his first officer, spoke for them: "Your orders, sir?"
"We need to prevent these primitives from laying their hands on another relay, and make it very clear to them that they must be left alone, at least until they can be made into a proper client race of the Hierarchy"
"And that means we need to cross the Secondary Relay they turned on"
"Issue a fleet-wide order to stand at Combat Readiness 2 and form a battlegroup around us. We're crossing as soon as we're done here"
Commander Orru - UNS-BB Giuseppe Mazzini, Battlegroup Termite - 27 light-days away from Shanxi
Vissente Orru was woken up by the sensation of biting cold turning into dry kitten-warmth. Even as he cursed the slight, dull pain of the eyeballs that always came with waking, he walked the few well-trodden steps to the gimbaled couch in front of his capsule and grasped the hot drink he knew would be placed there.
He opened his eyes, let the aroma lift his stasis-daze, and the memories of his assignement come back to him: secure the megastructure that the scientists on the Curie would already have been studying for about a month and the skyhook station he was escorting as it assembled the Strategic Rapid-Deployment Blinkgate; and, if necessary, assist Recontact Team Tayir with their mission.
Just as when he was first briefed, he puzzled over how such a confidential and and important assignment could be so pedestrian in practice.
It was probably for the best: if UN Command had thought a single battlegroup and a commander who just got his MSB were enough, then there was unlikely to be serious risk of losing the Gate; and this was probably the best opportunity a relatively junior CO like himself could have to advance their career.
Vissente knew SCIPIO was waiting patiently for him to recuperate. He considered making a detour to the observation deck before hearing it, but he decided against it: there would be plenty of time for stargazing during the assignment.
The Command Throne waited, it's uncanny subjectivity-bridging apparatus folded above it like the scythes of a mantis. SCIPIO continued to avoid using subaltern avatars, instead acknowledging the commander's presence with a curt "Sir" from the intercomm.
"I'm ready for your report, SCIPIO. What's our ETA?"
"31 days and 5 hours. There has been a drastic change in the tactical situation. I'll let you read the reports"
Before Vissente could voice his confusion, his dataplating started displaying a series of messages:
TIMESTAMP: (13.9.5017u 0812 CrST)
CODE+++PURPOSE: MIRROR BLANCHE+++MISSIVE TO ESCORT
DISTRIBUTION: TAG "CV_TUNUPE"
MESSAGE TO FOLLOW:::
>//[CUR(USB-SC_72309)]:: SEND MESSAGE
>//[TUN(NSGC-CV_45320)]:: RECEIVE MESSAGE
>//[CUR09]:: OBJECT RESPONDED TO OUR SIGNAL+++SENDING SENSOR FEED+++STAND BY FOR UPDATES
>//[TUN20]:: ROGER+++WILCO
>//[CUR09]:: ===
>//[TUN20]:: ===
________________________________________________
TIMESTAMP: (13.9.5017u 0820 CrST)
CODE+++PURPOSE: MIRROR BLANCHE+++MISSIVE TO ESCORT
DISTRIBUTION: TAG "CV_TUNUPE"
MESSAGE TO FOLLOW:::
>//[CUR(USB-SC_72309)]:: SEND MESSAGE
>//[TUN(NSGC-CV_45320)]:: RECEIVE MESSAGE
>//[CUR09]:: ALL GREEN+++OBJ TRANSPORTED US+++PRELIMINARY ASTRONOMICAL SCANS SAY WERE IN THE PERSEUS ARM RIMWARD OF SHANXI+++CUTTING SENSOR FEED TO COMM USB HQ+++CLOSING TRANSMISSION
>//[TUN20]:: ROGER
>//[CUR09]:: ===
>//[TUN20]:: ===
________________________________________________
TIMESTAMP: (13.9.5017u 0847 CrST)
CODE+++PURPOSE: STYGES TIDE+++AUTOMATED MESSAGE
DISTRIBUTION: TAG "CV_TUNUPE"
MESSAGE TO FOLLOW:::
>//[CUR(UNS-SC_72309)]:: SHIP DESTROYED+++HOSTILES UNIDENT+++STRENGTH 3 DEST 12 CORV+++LOCATION HD 452234+++END TRANSMISSION===
________________________________________________
TIMESTAMP: (13.9.5017u 0916 CrST)
CODE+++PURPOSE: SPIRE BRONZE+++LINK REQUEST
DISTRIBUTION: TAG "BG_TERMITE"
MESSAGE TO FOLLOW:::
>//[TUN(NSGC-CV_45320)]:: SEND MESSAGE
>//[MAZ(USB-BB_99133)]:: RECEIVE MESSAGE
>//[TUN20]:: UNIDENT HOSTILE FLEET INCOMING+++ETA 5300+++ESTIMATED STRENGTH 3-5 BB+++15 SUBLINES CONFIRMED+++FORWARDING LAST MESSAGES FROM [CUR09]
>//[MAZ33]:: MESSAGES RECEIVED+++WHAT ARE YOUR ASSETS
>//[TUN20]:: REMAINING ASSET ARE 1 WING TORT:::1 WING DRONES:::10 SQD MARINES:::1 CALIBAN/SQD+++WERE PREPPING EVAC FOR WILLING DOJ PERSONNEL+++WILL REMAIN IN SYSTEM UNTIL ENEMY ENTERS SENSOR RANGE THEN RETREAT+++REQ TO LINK WITH YOUR BATTLEGROUP
>//[MAZ33]:: WAKING CO+++STANDBY
>//[TUN20]:: ROGER+++CLOSING COMMS
>//[MAZ33]:: ===
>//[TUN20]:: ===
________________________________________________
TIMESTAMP: (13.9.5017u 0912 CrST)
CODE+++PURPOSE: COMET BLUE+++SITREP
DISTRIBUTION: TAG "BG_TERMITE"
MESSAGE TO FOLLOW:::
>//[KAR(DOJ/HR-UBM_TAYIR)]::SEND MESSAGE
>//[MAZ(UNS-BB_99133)]:: RECEIVE MESSAGE
>//[TAYIR]:: UNIDENT HOSTILE FLEET INCOMING+++ETA 5300+++INTENT UNKNOWN+++LIKELY RELATED TO THE OBJ+++LT_33297 AND ASHOKA LANCE ARE ALL GREEN AND AT FULL STRENGTH+++LOCAL POPULATION HIGHLY SYMPATHETIC+++LOCAL GOVERNMENT AMBIVALENT+++STANCE ON CRISIS STILL UNKNOWN+++THE CITY WE ARE IN HAS EXTENSIVE SUBTERRANEAN BUNKERS AND WE HAVE 2 S3 PRINT FROM [TUN20]+++GALCOMM ALREADY NOTIFIED
>//[MAZ33]:: WAKING CO+++STANDBY
>//[TAYIR]:: ROGER+++CLOSING COMMS
>//[MAZ33]:: ===
>//[TAYIR]:: ===
Vissente's surprise had, in the course of reading the messages, given way to his training, and he was already assessing the strategic situation.
It didn't take a Fleet Legion to recognize that, if the estimations of the enemy's strength were correct, his force, even with the support of the Tunupe and the sublines from the Obsidian Plateau, could do nothing to stop them from taking the planet and, potentially, the Gate.
If the Megastructure hadn't been involved, he would have considered the chance that the attack came from pirates, unlikely though they were to attack Survey Cruisers like the Curie and even less likely to destroy them utterly as it had happened.
But since they had attacked as soon as the -- teleporter? Blinkgate? Firmament device? -- had been activated, this might very well be the first contact with one of the Ten, or even a non-human civilization altogether.
Most of the important decisions would have to wait for more information to be available, but there were two calls he could make: confirm the Tunupe's absorption into his battlegroup, and advise the Recontact Team to evacuate: as horrible as it felt to ask them not to defend the people they were ment to usher into Union, their force alone could not prevent the conquest of the planet, and if the enemy fleet was only hostile to those who had disturbed their devices, their absence might spare Shanxi from an orbital siege.
TIMESTAMP: (13.9.5017u 1030 CrST)
CODE+++PURPOSE: SPIRE BRONZE+++LINK REQUEST
DISTRIBUTION: TAG "CV_TUNUPE"
MESSAGE TO FOLLOW:::
>//[MAZ(UNS-BB_99133)]:: SEND MESSAGE
>//[TUN(NSGC-CV_45320)]:: RECEIVE MESSAGE
>//[MAZ33]:: WE CONFIRM YOUR LINK REQUEST+++WILL TRY AND CONVINCE [TAYIR] TO EVAC+++TAKE THEM ALL AND LINK UP AS SOON AS YOU HAVE UPDATED RECON OF ENEMY FORCES
>//[TUN20]:: ROGER+++WILCO
>//[MAZ33]:: CLOSE TRANSMISSION
>//[TUN20]:: ===
>//[MAZ33]:: ===
________________________________________________
TIMESTAMP: (13.9.5017u 1031 CrST)
CODE+++PURPOSE: COMET BLUE+++DEPLOYMENT
DISTRIBUTION: TAG "UBM_TAYIR"
MESSAGE TO FOLLOW:::
>//[MAZ(UNS-BB_99133)]:: SEND MESSAGE
>//[KAR(DOJ/HR-UBM_TAYIR)]:: RECEIVE MESSAGE
>//[MAZ33]:: CLEAR SITUATION WITH LOCAL GOVS+++EVAC WOULD BE BEST+++IF IT CANT BE DONE TRY TO INTEGRATE WITH LOCAL FORCES
>//[TAYIR]:: AMBASSADOR ON HER WAY TO CONFERENCE WITH GOV+++WILL RELAY YOUR MSG
>//[MAZ33]:: CLOSE TRANSMISSION
>//[TAYIR]:: ===
>//[MAZ33]:: ===
aw fhuck yeah it's here too.
funnily enough, this fic is what got me to buy the pdf of the core book last week.
I'm gonna need to figure out how to be a GM though because literally no one in my area is running a game with the system though.
...anyways!
This is gonna be interesting.
Especially when HORUS gets involved.
I swear, I am fully willing to bet that those guys took inspiration for the omnigun off of something they nabbed from V̶̥̥̬͛e̷̪̪̝̘͋̈̂̔n̶̯̯̪̝̋ų̵̝̑͑͐-7777777EatthepatheaththeLightIAM%HEROAlphaLupimakeherstandwyrmsareinmymindAYEMAKSICCAR7777777
Three hours from the destruction of the Curie, the Tunupe was abuzz with activity. Across the cavernous space of the flight deck, subalterns and cosmonauts manouvered to ferry ammuntions and equipment to the drones and mounted chassis that were being positioned on the pre-launch carusel. Attached to their bridge cranes, enormous telescopic arms extracted unmanned strike craft and mechanized chassis from their hangars and docked them onto the rails which would move them onto the catapults when it was time to launch, where the latter were immediately surrounded by maniples of subalterns and technicians to be outfitted with their void combat mounts.
Cristina Orreja floated thorugh a bulkhead just in time to see her own Tortuga being slotted in queue with the others. She unthinkingly whipped out of the way a strand of black hair that was dangling in front of her eyes, and hailed her flight-mate Diego, who was hanging on a railing a couple meters to her right. He extended a hand to hers and pulled her closer.
Diego Martinez, by his looks, could have been Cristina's brother: same jade-green eyes that passed for brown in poor lighting, same slightly aquiline nose, same hair that seemed to decide whether to be straight or curly on whim. Except that Cristina had enlisted on the crew only five subjective years ago, while the Martinez family - one could say dinasty - had served as the Tunupe's officers since the time of its construction.
Diego had, in fact, broken their traditions by enlisting to become a mech pilot, which is why he'd been Cristina's first friend aboard the ship, as she'd left all her contacts behind on the Honest Truth with her family.
"Why the Orbital Drop Mounts? I thought we were preparing to defend from a hostile fleet?", she asked him.
"That's at least 51 hours away. The captain is concerned about the reaction of Shanxi's people to the news. Falstaff said we'll put the dogfighting mounts on at minus two hundred hours from then; so the day after tomorrow"
"I thought they were getting on well down there", replied Cristina, "Plus there's a whole division of Liberators to keep them safe"
"The amount of personnel comes up to a division, but the actual soldiers are about a battallion's worth. This was supposed to be a UBM, remember; just one more prepared than usual for things to go south. Same thing they did on Cressidium last year"
"First time hear of it"
"You should read some articles about it, that clusterfuck makes even this look like nothing"
"Is that supposed to be reassu...", Cristina tilted her head to look past Diego, "Since when does our wing have a Monarch?"
The frame which was just then being armed in front of her was different from the custom warmachines she'd seen in ads and movies: sleek, yes, but in the angular, jagged way of a sword; there were none of the graceful curves that were usually the mark of SSC frames. What had at first seemed like a mottled gray coat was in fact the standard black livery of Northstar strike craft, but positively crowded with kill-marks. While the Tortugas around it had bulky external nearlight drives and thruster pods bolted on their back and chest, this frame had them incorporated in arrays shaped like wings, themselves bristling with pylons which the deck crew was already busy loading with ordnance.
"That's not our wing's. It's the captain's personal frame", said Diego. "Looks like I've jinxed it, Cri; if he's is taking his old warhorse out, he must think we're not going to cut it"
"Then you better prove him wrong", said a voice from above them.
The interruption had come from their Wing Commander, Jerome Decker - callsign PYRO. Another relative newcomer to the Tunupe - just nine years before - although just as cosmopolitan as the rest of the crew. He drifted down to stand in front of them, before speaking again.
"We've got an update from planetside. The good news is the recontact team will be evacuating. The bad news is this is because we're seeing mass mobilization of the local armed forces, and the bigwigs ambassador Karami is talking with are being vague about what they want to do. They're probably just being indecisive, but in five minutes, we will be briefed on our landing zones; just in case this turns into a fighting retreat. That means you're getting your lazy gossipy asses to the-"
The deck jerked slightly to the left around them. Cristina briefly heard a muffled thud before it was cut off by the intercom screaming the "hull damaged" tone before intoning:
ALL HANDS BATTLESTATIONS ALL HANDS BATTLESTATIONS
HOSTILES AT COLLAPSING RANGE AND APPROACHING
SCRAMBLE ALL PILOTS SCRAMBLE ALL PILOTS
Even as they listened to the message, the three pilots had already pushed themselves towards their mecha, as had all others on the deck. Cristina saw the others pour in from the bulkheads and straight towards their own.
As her chassis was attached to a catapult, her HUD went through the pre-sortie check routine.
Hours passed in the two minutes it took for the flight deck to depressurize and all the pilots to be ready for takeoff; the alert message was interrupted several times by announcements that the shield was being depleted. But finally, the vast bulkhead began to slide open, and the drones ahead of them started launching while their frames started taxiing to the emptied catapults.
A transmission from Falstaff began coming in from her comms, and with no more urgency in its airy baritone than when relaying routine alerts, the ship's NHP began briefing them.
"The enemy fleet which attacked the Curie has snuck up on us and we are currently engaged: three destroyers are already firing at us, and three squadrons of corvettes supported by eight wings of strike craft are closing in; their ETA five minutes"
A tactical display was rendered in front of her to illustrate the explanation, and Cristina could see that the enemy sublines had arrived from behind Shanxi itself and were using it's horizon as cover for their bombardment and approach.
"You are first to assist the drone wings in screening for the carrier and repel the enemy strike craft while our marine landers approach the enemy corvettes and overwhelm them. Once the boarding is underway, you will move on to attack the destroyers".
Again, the tactical display formed a timeline of the plan: the mounted chassis wings were to form in a claw and use their superior armour and point-defence to deny attack and retreat vectors to the enemy strike craft and box them in, while the drones followed them close behind to harass their targets from beyond the range at which they could reliably hit them.
"Be advised that the enemy spacecraft has no match in Northstar Command databases: EWAR attacks might not work as usual and their armament and capabilities are unknown, but analysis of their approach and the timing of their arrival suggests more powerful drives than ours, though our sensors have not detected any active shielding from them. More information will become available as I gather your combat data and probe the enemy network."
The last of her wing was ready for launch. It was time.
Cristina felt her eyes squashed by the acceleration of the catapult, and before she knew it, she was in the void.
Blue circles and squares on her screen highlighted the other strike craft which were already burning on their intercept courses, and she joined them without hesitation.
The Tunupe's wings passed over an archipelago the size of a continent, and past Shanxi's International Space Station which already had lost half of it's solar panels to an errant shell from the attackers and was barely managing to drag itself back in a stable orbit.
"Should we send a shuttle?" She said to herself
"Eyes on the enemy", came a reproach from WATCHDOG, "can't do search and rescue while bullets are flying"
The intercept course had been perfectly planned: at the lowest boundary of low orbit, in the perfect spot to foul the enemy destroyers' firing solutions, they came within engagement range of the enemy's strike craft.
"Captain Nikolaidis here. Good intercept, pilots: the destroyers have stopped firing at us. Keep them engaged there and sort them out before their corvettes can catch up"
Movies and games often portrayed space battles between strike craft as whirling furballs of daring manoeuvres and close dodges, but even air combat had ceased to be like that long before the Fall. Real space pilots knew that it was all about two things: reading the enemy and managing probability. First, computers and fleet legions calculated the enemy's gaussian of likely positions with respect to time, weighted by their ability to take hits depending on position and angle, and compared it to those of their own forces to find the range of relative vectors that maximised the likelihood of kill/likelihood of death ratio for most craft, again weighted by their expendability.
Then commanders made the decisions about how to approach the enemy to achieve the highest likelihood of reaching said range of vectors, while also taking into account that the enemy commanders would be trying to do the same. At this level, the fight was carried out through statistics, game theory, and psychology.
And finally, at the tip of this pyramid of estimations, the pilots and captains executed their orders, and engaged in their own mind games with their opponent: trying to find a pattern in the apparently random movements of the enemy, while keeping their own mostly unpredictable, but teasing an apparent pattern that they would break at the crucial moment.
Without any intelligence on the enemy, however, Cristina knew the only thing that would decide if the fight was whether her and her comrades' skill was enough to keep them alive until command had the data to properly guide them. She hoped their attackers were going in just as blind as them.
Though still hundreds of kilometres away, the enemy fighters and bombers were now visible on their chassis' scopes: angular, almost knife-like shapes in dull grey, the first flat and triangular, the second like three-sided spikes with blended wings and a few large payloads mounted on pylons.
A group of seven was flagged as targets for her wing. PYRO called their marks, and they burned into action.
Even if they hadn't been stuck with the relatively clumsy orbital drop mounts, it was soon clear that the enemy craft had them beaten on specific impulse, but a Tortuga was never meant to dance. Soon enough, the compiled observation of her comrades was enough for her targeting system to make acceptable-confidence predictions, and a gradient of yellow bloomed elliptically around her target to denote the space of it's possible positions in the time her weapons would take to hit, Cristina opened up with her cloudkill projector and saturated the densest areas of that reticle.
The fighter tried to react, but even going farther than predicted, it still caught a shower of microprojectiles which caused it's surface to erupt with bright blue geysers of energy.
Despite the telling hit, however, it seemed no worse for it, and answered with a burst from it's mass driver which arrived on target far faster than Cristina knew to be possible.
She'd meant to trade hits, however, and still managed to angle her armour in time to deflect the worst of the few slugs that managed to land. The strength of the hit surprised her as much as it's speed, however, and her chassis was spun and flung off course.
"Enemy weapon data transferred to flight command", said WATCHDOG, "I'll call a swap"
As it had said, while Cristina burned to stop spinning, the digital advisor found another target who was in a good trajectory for being intercepted with her current course. She and the pilot who was currently engaging it confirmed the target swap with each other, and both enemies were surprised by the sudden attack from a new source.
This time, Cristina had managed to come at her target from one of it's broad sides, and so she opened up with her point defence laser as well as the cloudkill projector. As before, the kinetic projectiles didn't seem to damage the fighter, but the laser left deep pockmarks where it pulsed, and an especially accurate hit destroyed one of the enemy's thrusters.
Cristina noted with satisfaction the probability sphere of her target shrinking down as her targeting system registered the damage, and went in for a joust.
The enemy fighter took her on, and its fire , despite catching her mech in its most armoured profile, still made her cockpit shake and screen fill with warnings.
But it had made the mistake of coming too close.
The flow of cloudkill kinetics was narrow and focused, it completely saturated any point where the fighter could be in the next quarter of a second.
It tried to power through it by meeting it with its narrow, angled front, but it wasn't enough: before the kill cloud was done washing over it, the blue light it emitted in response was extinguished, and what came out of the other side was a shredded wreck.
"Pilots, the enemy corvettes are entering close range", said the voice of Captain Nikolaidis in her comms "do not let the enemy disengage, but lead them towards the effective range of the Tunupe's PDC screen. We'll need you to screen for the marine landers but can't let the enemy strike craft fly uncontested. You're hitting them hard, but the drones aren't managing to outmanoeuvre them as they should and are taking heavy casualties"
"Be also advised:", continued Falstaff "the enemy has a form of overshield invisible to sensors, but directed energy weapons bypass it. Use your lasers whenever possible. In better news, I have also managed to pin down sensory spectra for fragment signal invades; I'm relaying them now to you EWAR suites and will begin interfering with the targeting of enemy sublines. Me and the rest of flight command have also compiled a tactical profile of enemy strike craft and will begin supplying your commanders with positional predictions"
The data flowed to the onboard computer, the gaussians of the enemy craft stabilised, and were joined by gradients of red to represent their available attack vectors.
Now they could fight at their fullest.
She and her wing coordinated to invade the systems of their targets and herd them into disadvantageous vectors.
The effect was so immediate and marked it looked as though they were spoofing drones: the enemy craft lost all coordination, and when two of them tried to shoot Cristina again, their rounds went wildly off target. One by one, three of them were focused by her wings' lasers and destroyed, while the last two pulled back too far to be reliably hit.
They were not the only ones, all the enemy craft were burning away, and into the cover of the incoming corvettes.
They were small, at 150 metres in length; certainly meant to be used as landers and gunships on planets as well as gunboats in space. Their bright, steel-gray armour made them look like sleek, winged whales, having a narrow prow flanked by downswept fins and trailed by a fan of thrusters like an upraised tail.
The twelve sublines advanced in three groups of four, formed in a wedge across the horizon and each formed into another wedge along the perpendicular axis, such that each craft could cover all others.
By now unable to pursue the retreating strike craft, the Tunupe's wings set out to hug the advancing ships at what they thought was harassment range so they would be too busy with them to repel the boarding parties.
Ensign Crassus - Frigate Sharp Talon - approaching hostile superdreadnaught
"Radix Sagum1 Leader, please repeat. Signal is garbled"
"We're nudi2 o#####tic barriers an####turnin### the ship. Cover us"
The tone of transmissions from the cruisers' strike craft complements had been getting tenser since the start of the fight, but now they were almost screaming, and much fewer. It seemed something had gone terribly wrong. Seemed, that word was carved in fiery letters into his brain. Don't forget to think twice, don't forget to ask questions, don't forget to think again beyond your first instinct or people will die. Never again.
Despite the growing anxiety, Thalax kept on working at the comms station without missing a beat. He routed the Resolute Spirit's wing commander's request to the leader of his frigate squadron, and went back to monitoring his section of the battle network. His hands were full: more and more target calls between the GARDIANs of different ships were overlapping.
That wasn't supposed to be possible without the targeting systems being damaged, but there was a procedure for when it happened. Thalax notified the other ships, and he and the other comms officers set apart a subroutine of their ship's computers to continously check for duplicates on top of the checks that were supposed to be already happening.
No sooner was that done than a deluge of noise washed across his channels. Thalax had only ever heard something like it when he'd turned on the analog radio he'd assembled as a science project as a kid near a magnetic scanner. The overwhelming shriek threatened to cross the uncanny valley into a full blown scream of agony, even as the automatic filters on his console kicked in one after another to try and filter signal from randomness; the electromagnetic wailing reasserted itslef every time it seemed to be clamped down.
Thalax removed his headset and turned to his captain.
"Ma'am, all communications are jammed and my systems are not compensating. I request permission to activate Emergency High Radiation Enviroenment protocol 1"
Captain Astarte was not looking at her tactical display, flashing an [OUT OF SYNC] warning; she was yelling at Sensors Officer Calamus.
"Take off that headset and tell me already! I can't hear you!"
"The GARDIAN is blind Ma'am!", he said, turning to her, "It lost all target locks!"
For a moment, everyone on the bridge froze as the implication set in. The Captain was the first to snap ot of it.
"HELM! GO DEFEN-", she began; but it was too late.
The Intercom blared warning after warning; their kinetic barriers were falling fast, even as the ship began what evasive manouvers it could do without risking a collison with the rest of the squadron.
Thalax asked the captain again: "Ma'am, the emergency protocol for high rads; it could pierce the noise!"
She turned towards him, bewilderement still on her face. It took another moment for her to register what he'd said.
"Yes! Authorization given! Comms, Sensors! switch to EHRE-Apex! On the double!"
It worked: at a choppy frame rate and a low resolution, the battle network became available again.
Thalax was flooded with requests for a status report, and as he began to re-sync with the squadron and the fleet, it bacame apparent that only the Sharp Talon had been blinded so completely: the others were only having a harder time locking firing solutions and tracking enemies.
He looked back a moment, towards the captain's tactical display, and saw what had happened: enemy strike craft had swarmed the ship, but not just to attack it: the way they were positioned, they'd been using it as cover to harass the rest of the squadron from closer range. Now that it's point-defence was stirring to life again, they were scattering one more.
An in-ship transmission brought his attention to the console once again: it was from engineering.
"What in the Spirit's name are you doing up there? We had to open all radiators to keep up, and the heatsinks are still at 20% above nominal!"
"We didn't even fire anything: we just got so jammed the ship was running blind"
"That heat didn't come from nothing, and the engines don't account for all of it"
"Routing you to the captain"
With that Thalax returned to monitoring, and found that once again target locks were overlapping, even more than earlier, and also locking onto phantom targets. On top of it, despite all the system power dedicated to cleaning and filtering communications, transmissions to and from other ships were still garbled; not just for them but for all the fleet. How do they keep tricking the GARDIANs into tracking the wrong target? Jamming should make them lose tracking, but this is different. How can they tell ur guns to switch target if they've never seen our hardware?
No, wait. Don't assume you know everything. You think they're telling GARDIAN lasers to change target, and you think they can't do that. One of them must be wrong. If it's the second, I don't know what to do about it. If it's the first...
They weren't spoofing the sensors. But then who was doing it? It's only them and us
He and the other comms officers had set up an automated procedure that would tell other ships to switch targets if one was already tracked.
Thalax brought up a spectrograph of all battle network transmissions in the last minute, and ran a comparison between each and all the others.
There were a lot of matches.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
He looked at the unencrypted signals; and there it was: since the start of the frigates had been engaged, they'd been flooded with false retargeting commands. They'd been automatically ignored, at first, being crude imitations without the proper ids and checksums, but it had taken only minutes for the enemy to isolate the parts of the signal which referred to sender, recepient, and target. With that, they'd been able to flood the battle network with trash requests couldn't yet fool the GARDIAN network, but slowed it down with the task of filtering them.
Then they'd started to get the encryption right; rarely at first, but with exponentially rising accuracy.
They didn't need to understand how the signal worked, just what it did; and in using those signals against their weapons, they'd also caught and repeated pieces of verbal communication that went on to garble new ones.
"Sharp Talon to ALLCON - Sharp Talon to ALLCON. Be advised: the enemy has compromised our encryption and is spoofing the GARDIAN with false retargeting commands."
He needed to repeat the transmission two more times before the rest of the fleet started confirming they understood; then an answer cut through:
"Resolute Spirit to all frigate squadrons: switch encryption key to Baca Code, assume Tetrahedron formation, and call targets by sector without involving the network. Surround the enemy flagship and clear our firing line. We detect launches from the enemy vessel: ten contacts, between shuttle and corvette size, vectoring on you"
Thalax relayed the command to the rest of the bridge, and tensed. The Point-Defence Tetrahedron was taught as an emergency formation in case of overwhelming communications issues or integrating non-Turian combat elements, but it was also taught as a case study in weak points: the "seams" of the targeting sectors where a cannily launched torpedoes could tie up more lasers than would have been needed to deal with them, and the direction in which all the frigates' afts would be pointing, which would be both a triple seam and where the least laser emitters were present.
Commander Gallus - Cruiser Resolute Spirit - Orbit of Shanxi
Gallus knew he was making a gamble.
Despite their lack of Mass Effect technology, it was obvious that his enemies had experience. No novice of space combat, no matter how clever, could have been able to tear apart his fighter and interceptor wings like that; despite having his own, more experienced pilots take point, the enemy had immediately gone for the throat, and the recruits flying behind them had been nearly wiped out.
And the way they moved... it had made sense at first: the slower fighters moving almost like a school of fish, the lighter interceptors like a swarm of insects; like his pilots would be if they lost the inexperience and hesitation.
And then something had happened, communications and sensors had started getting spoofed, and the enemy strike craft had begun moving in an unsettling, chaotic pattern that frustrated any attempt at prediction while always being in the exact right shape to outmanouver his own forces.
Even the frigates, despite being practically purpose-built for decimating strike craft, weren't having the success he'd hoped, due to their GARDIANs being constantly sabotaged. What V.I. could break down their codes in a matter of minutes? As far as he was aware, only quantum computers should be able to find the primes in a useful timeframe; and that brought up the worrying possibility he might be fighting an actual Artificial Intelligence. Was there any limit to the recklessness of this race?
Crucially, though, the enemy had displayed skill, and tricks, but not that much power. Despite the weaknesses of the Tetrahedron formation, Gallus hoped that, if electronic warfare was made less effective, the enemy fighters would not prove strong enough to prevent his frigates from swarming their flagship.
These new craft though, they were a complication. Gallus ordered an active scan of the first.
It was armored, and fast, but practically unarmed, almost like a dedicated troop lander. Gallus was relieved: the enemy had realized it was only a matter of time before his cruisers could resume bombarding their ship, and were abandoning it for the planet below.
Except the landers were vectoring towards the frigates.
To attack them? With their undersized point-defences? No: they were picking up speed.
"Hestia! Tell the frigate squadrons to go defensive! They're trying a suicidal ramming!"
1)Turians use their own phonetic alphabet to spell single letters. "Radix Sagum" is the equivalent of "Romeo Sigma" in Union Common.
2)Turian equivalent of "Winchester", meaning "spent" or "empty"
Lt. Colonel Daniil Vikuplenyy - Liberator Battalion 16137th "Boyband" - outside the Meeting Hall of the Host of Nations
Even outside the actual meeting, the tension was palpable in the lobby. Journalists and secretaries thronged the hardwood floor of the hallway and rubbed against the delicate jade basreliefs in an effort to negotiate breathing room with each other. Soldiers in different uniforms, clearly on edge from lack of direction and uncomfortable with sharing responsibilites, crowded the far end; Daniil recognized the usual Conclave Rifles in their yellow helmets, and besides them the orange-clad Lama's Immortals and a S.W.A.T. team from the Gyatso's Garden Police Department.
He was glad none of the regular armed forces which had been deploying throughout the city were inside causing a standoff as he had feared: the whole planet was a powder keg already; it was already tense enough between them and his battallion, and if shots were fired coordinating a defense would be impossible until it was too late.
Daniil bid his slate to once again show Captain Nikolaidis' last report. The attackers hadn't won yet, and if his marines managed to board a majority of the enemy corvettes they might even be driven off, but that was a big "if": even a career groundpounder like him knew boarding sublines was an unrealiable proposition even when concerning cruisers, and that was with mecha outfitted with their own EVA mounts; getting marines on a small, agile craft like a corvette would take immense skill and, frankly, luck from both him and the boarding parties.
The sight of Daniil's holographically projected face made the crowd turn their heads and part for him and his attendants. Even with their dress uniforms concealing the special retractable light hardsuits, everywhere on Shanxi there were televisions or newspapers their insignia was synonimous with the two-kilometer-long spaceship they had arrived in, and the towering machines who strode from it; always unarmed, never threatening, but always seen whenever the cold war which gripped the planet threatened to bubble into skirmishes.
Halifa hadn't been happy about that: the ambassador had wanted the soldiers to stay mostly in orbit, but she'd realized in short order Shanxi would precipitate in the vortex of reactionary xenophobia all too common in freshly recontacted worlds; unless it was made clear to any would-be demagogue that violence was not an option.
Despite her very recent induction in the New Division from the Administration Department, she'd shown more skill and patience than ambassadors several decades her senior in threading the line of displaying strength without devolving into gunboat diplomacy.
If she'd been on Nestor - or so Daniil thought - it might not have been such a black mark in the history of the DoJ and the Albatross.
Finally, he made his way to the end of the hallway. Two different soldiers tried to step in front of him and briefly devolved into a staring contest before the Immortal made a show of ordering the Conclave Rifle to deal with him and stepped back.
"Access is not presently allowed to the meeting in progress", said the young woman with practiced parade ground impassivity.
Behind her and to the right, both the Rifles and S.W.A.T. sergeants were having a quiet but furious discussion between themselves and -judjing by how they were tapping their commbeads - their respective headquarters.
He caught "I thought the army had them contained at the LZ! Why is he here?" and "well then you talk to him!"
Daniil made no sign of having overheard them, and immediately replied:
"You know that I'm part of Ambassador Karami's staff, and you know this is an emergency".
He let a moment pass, and soon enough the soldier's face started showing the tell-tale signs of a grunt that anticipates being dressed down by an officer regardless of what they do. He continued:
"Look, this is a tense, difficult situation for me too. I just need to speak to the ambassador to make sure we're on the same page. We can't have her saying one thing and my troops doing another, can we? If I can just get things straight with my boss, she can get things straight with yours and we can avoid getting in trouble"
The soldier didn't answer, but she gestured for her sergeant. Daniil stepped back to let them talk, and waited, hiding his mounting impatience, while she convinced him, and then he radioed his own superiors.
He could have sworn three full minutes had passed before they were let inside. The soldiers passed at their side to form a barrier against the sudden wave of people trying to get a peek of the hall beyond or a sliver of conversation.
The hall was a clash of different styles: the Palace of the Host of Nations had once been the Imperial Palace, and this room had been it's High Court: its' eight, looming walls were still painted in the original red, and the great copper and gold statue of the Judge of the Underworld still grimaced from the ceilings at the evil Karma of nonexistent defendants.
Beneath this canopy of imperious, ancient judgement, the amphiteater of seats for the representative of the conclave was screamingly contemporary despite the laquered wood with which they were constructed, and the chrome steel dais, bas-releifed with the shape of Shanxi as seen from the south pole, seemed to mock sneering Shinje with it's mirror-shine.
Standing over this dais, circling the pole as she addressed the assembly, was Halifa Karami, her left hand grasping her hijab to prevent it from coming loose as her right and head swept and jerked towards her audience. Her voice was starting to get hoarse, and though she was too composed to show it in her expression or tone of voice, Daniil could tell by how she wasn't keeping her knees as close as usual that she was getting exhasperated.
"I am just as aware as you of the economic cost of a full evacuation, but if your industrial infrastructure is destroyed from orbit having kept the workers from getting to safety will only worsen the problem. This is something you can bear for one month until we are relieved"
"We?" Hollered one of the representatives. Daniil recognized the voice even before reading 'Kingdom of Hoian' on his plaque. "You provoked them! In fact, how do we know you're not with them!?"
The obvious answer was that any spacefaring nation which could afford to put on such a show could have more easily taken over Shanxi by force with a hundretdth of the effort, but he knew from experience that pointing this out would be interpreted as a threat.
Halifa did not show indignation, or anger. She looked to her accuser and asked, in the conversational tone she'd use to ask a friend if her dress fit:
"And what would you have the conclave do in that case?"
This gave him pause, and Halifa seized the reprive to call attention to where Daniil was standing.
"Lieutenant Colonel, what is the matter?"
"The Captain says he is not confident the attackers can be driven off and he will most likely need to retreat. Commander Orru has advised us to evacuate but did not give it as an order. Given the current circumstance, I believe we need to prepare for an orbital siege and requisition a platoon of Barbarossa licenses, but I need your authorization", said Daniil, stepping forward. He then looked to the assembly around them, and said:
"They are mechanized chassis designed for the purpose of engaging vessels such as those that are attacking, even from ground to low or medium orbit. If we can obtain them, a significant region of the planet can be protected from follow-up orbital bombardment after the first salvos, but time is of the essence: it will take twelve hours for each of them to be fabricated, and we can only produce three of them at a time. We will need at least nine to meaningfully threaten the larger enemy ships. At least those who are already in theater"
He had not even finished speaking when the hall once again descended into pandemonium, but now the maelstrom of discussion had a clear eye: where would these weapons be deployed.
Halifa took a moment to look him in the eye an take a deep breath. Her mouth formed an enigmatic curve which, unfortunately, neither of them could liken to the long-forgotten Mona Lisa. They'd both wanted to stay and fight, but this was anything but a joyous occasion.
"I don't believe anyone will object to these requisitions?" She asked. Some tried to deny her, but were quickly cowed into silence by the rest of the assembly.
GALSIM is said to simulate multiple futures of the whole galaxy.
I wonder how much GALSIM knows? Did they somehow derive knowledge about the Council or are they only taking information about human activity into account?
GALSIM is said to simulate multiple futures of the whole galaxy.
I wonder how much GALSIM knows? Did they somehow derive knowledge about the Council or are they only taking information about human activity into account?
It was a strange, lonely feeling to be an individual without an opponent; he wouldn't have suspected it.
Being part of a Fleet Legion wasn't like being part of a crew: BRAHAMASTRA, CARYBDIS, REPOSSESSION, and all the other gestalts had been him, not with him. And his opponents hadn't been much in the way of company either: they'd been gnawing doubts, intrusive thoughts, waves of dread, a sense of impending doom.
In humans, the experience would have been considered a cocktail of crippling mental illnesses. Indeed, it was only his supreme confidence and unassailable self-esteem which meant he hadn't needed to be cycled after those battles.
And now, in the middle of one of the hardest battle him or his crew had ever fought, Falstaff had come, crowned in baleful sunlight, many-winged with destiny, armoured in contempt, and edged with disdain; to fight a dumb, mute puzzle-box.
Lesser minds would have fallen to indignation or tunnel vision, but Falstaff, with the inexorable patience of him who is assured of his victory, had turned his hateful sword into a versatile multitool of all the ways intrest could be made terrible by the lack of mercy.
At his prodding, stabbing, and hammering, the novel gears of the enemy's mechanisms had begun to unfold.
He grasped them all in his manifold limbs, but the scorching radiance of his gaze focused on one of the corvettes; the one which had begun to resist him: it had shied away from the mirror-pick with which he had been working it's lock; and after it, the others had tightened themself as well. Someone in there had, dare he say it, an actual brain.
He felt an impulse to set his mind to pry it open, but what in Legionspace was an idle lock, in the realm of bodies was threatening his ship; no time for letting frustration guide him, not when there were more vulnerable targets.
Entropic Manifestation and Memetic Warfare had never been his forte, but Falstaff knew he was second to none when it came to targeting; he took hold of the marine lander's point-defence lasers and directed them to shoot the sensors of their enemy equivalents.
From the range they were at, they wouldn't do damage, but they would partially blind them, turning a defined target into a spatial blur and their positional gaussians into chaotic curves.
Falstaff felt the little locks grind open again, and he plunged his picks and blades and levers inside once more, testing their barriers, their pins, their springs. Each differently, each at a different pace, and he spread his arms and wings apart to separate them and deafen them to each other.
He could feel them trying to close again, but when a strategy of attack started to fail against one target, he'd switch to one he hadn't tried on it yet, and try the discarde one one another still.
None went far on it's own, but as he tried and tried, Falstaff started to sense the underlying pattern of their construction, he saw, blurry and bare as half-forgotten memories, the concepts and assumptions which underpinned them, and with every attempt his tools reached deeper and deeper.
He found their heat management system first: a set of hearts and veins and hot glowing tiger stripes. Each pipeline independent, but connected to the others. The one for the lasers, he'd already found; and there was another one which seemed connected to a spinal gun.
One of the lines was the largest by far however, and entwined with what he sensed were vast capacitors, all entwined around a large, powerful, and deeply unfamiliar device.
Drone flights one and three were in the middle of a strafing run when Falstaff detected the enemy was tracking them, and two were significantly damaged before he could redirect a chassis from wing four to cover them.
He was down to thirteen combat effective drones, five of which needed hardpoints repaired. Did he have time?
No: getting the marine landers within boarding distance of their targets would require all the pressure he could apply.
The enemy had obligingly crystalized themselves into unwieldy four-point flights: no less an amateur mistake for the speed bump it put in front of his tech attacks. Falstaff highlighted the thrusters of the lead corvette in each squadron as a priority target.
They might have the sense to scatter once one of their corners was crippled, or they might foolislhly try to keep cohesion: either way, at least four corvettes would get boarded and overwhelmed, and the rest would be much more susceptible to attack until they formed up again, which would be complicated by the loss of their squadron leaders.
At a sluggish pace to him, but quickly enough for humans, the pilots entered their attack vectors.
Their WATCHDOGS had immediately understood his intentions and, even before he'd tweaked their priority weights, had directed their pilots to cover the advancing landers.
The enemy had not been blind to the manouver, but hadn't been wise to his tricks either: one squadron - the one he'd pegged as the veterans - scattered immediately, another two lined themselves up so as to be burning away from the landers while exposing them to the most lasers, and the last immediately burned directly away; hadn't they been taught that in space there is no such thing as maximum speed?
For the first squadron, he directed wing four to pursue them and stand in the way of the linking back up, while he retasked the landers and drones which were pursuig them to pinch the second squadron.
the third and fourth enemy squadrons were dealt with quickly: since they were presenting their pursuers their least armed and most vulnearble side, Falstaff signaled his partitions in the drones to engage the TLALOC Protocol; no longer needing to dodge and weave, the whole of their processing power became availeable to ensure telling hits, and soon enough not just the lead corvettes, but the whole of both squadrons had their manouverability crippled.
They'd been going fast, but the landers had been accelerating in that direction for longer; five ships were boarded. two corvettes of one squadron tried to stick with them in attempt to drive off the landers, while the las unboarded on of the fourth squadron broke formation.
The second squadron was a bust however: they held off their pursuers until the lander and drones retasked from the first squadron caught them in a pinch: at which point they scattered as well. Though all corvettes were damaged, non of them had their engines crippled, and there was no choice but to retask the landers pursuing them towards the two corvettes from the third squadron which hadn't scattered yet.
Except Marios had another idea: board and capture a specific ship, the one that had been quicker on the uptake than the others.
In a moment, the battlescape shown to the pilots and marine had changed to lead two landers and an appropraite escort to the new target, and the pilots he'd called upon burned to cut off their prey's escape while the handful of drones his legion could spare harassed it and covered the other's advance.
There was a sudden shift on the bridge. A barely noticeable impact, but the Tunupe's crew were spacers born and bred, and they realized the ship was being shelled once again even before the actual warning was disseminated through the intercom.
Falstaff's avatar on the bridge heard Marios order the ship to angle itself against further hits and curse under his breath.
He noted with relief that his blasphemies, though lacking in the usual humour, were still varied and articulate; as long as all divinities involved were described with a couple crass epithets each and engaged in some kind of non-consensual group sex, Falstaff could rely on Marios being at the top of his game.
"All landers have clear approach vectors, Captain", he said, placatingly, "those corvettes have practically put up an umbilical for them"
"Thank Buddha-Christ's bellend", replied Marios "Have you been able to pry more intel from their network?"
"Not directly, but from the ways they reacted to my probing, I'd say their systems are as dumb as a combat vessel can realistically be. I haven't perceived any intelligence above a simple milspec Comp/Con; just somewhat-smart weapons.
They do have heatsinks which can be overheated by a fragmentation signal, but they seem to be segmented: I'm afraid it will take an attack on several systems at once to trigger a meltdown"
Falstaff paused for a few moments, to let Marios mull over his findings, then continued.
"Their reaction times and ability to respond to my interference differs a lot between crews, and one ship in particular is generally clumsy but has managed to shut down my attempt to spoof their point-defence network. I'm still progressing on decrypting their comms, but without those convenient retargeting signals it's going to take longer"
"You're seeing it too: their combat experience seems to be patchy, and I don't think this is just due to us being an out-of-context problem", said Marios.
Falstaff pointed to the tactical display in front of them, updating it and letting the command staff format the information for readability.
In turn, he higlighted the corvettes.
"It seems you are correct, Captain", he said, pointing at the corvettes which had given their afts to their pursuers and were now being boarded. The marines were already forwarding their camera feeds and the bridge crew could see the oddly tapered, wide-hipped shapes of their crew trying to drive them off.
"These ones seem the most competent", he continued, pointing at the squadron which had scattered immediately, "and these ones... just like in Legionspace, they haven't taken the smart choice, but they took a clever one"
Marios took on a calculating expression.
"Then task the two landers with boarding that ship you mentioned. I want these satyr-fellating cleverclogs dead, or better yet captured"
"With respect, Captain, we can't
afford to settle scores at the moment"
"I don't care to. But aside from getting a competent enemy off the board, I have a hunch that ship might have an especially keen, ambitious commander. Those kinds of officers tend to be more in the know about the strategic situation and what their commanders want, and that means we might get a better understanding of why this is happening in the first place"
Falstaff felt airlock C27A vent atmosphere, and a quick sensor check confirmed his suspicion: the outer bulkhead had deflected a railgun slug. The enemy destroyers were shooting again.
GLANCING HIT TO AIRLOCK C27A
He announced through the various intercomms.
ATMOSPHERE LEAK IS BEING SEALED
LIFE SUPPORT NOMINAL
CREW IS ADVISED TO BRACE FOR FURTHER IMPACTS
Marios promptly ordered the ship to be angled against the incoming bombardment and resume evasive manouvers, but as railgun slugs started pouring in, three every second, they started hitting just by sheer saturation of fire.
They were heavier, faster, and more frequent than Falstaff had ever seen coming out of any destroyer vessel, and these were just barely on the larger side for the type.
IPS-N carriers were durable, for carriers, but durability only delays destruction without means of avoidance or retaliation, and with the Tunupe's wings tied up on the corvettes, these destroyers were going to whittle it down sooner or later. Sooner, probably: the Tawa class just didn't have the bulk of a Masauwu.
As he patched leaks, bypassed damaged systems, and directed the crew to evacuate compromised sections, Falstaff considered the weapons hitting his ship: someone's first guess would have been that Harrison Armory had finally perfected the Apocalypse Rail, but even leaving aside where the attackers had come from (and the fact they had actual faster than light travel), the impact data told another story: the slugs seemed to be made of relatively soft metal, in order to transfer more kinetic energy on impact (he'd have to get an analysis of those which were getting stuck inside the hull), and from the data he had on the Apocalypse Rail, such projectiles could have never survived being shot from it; at least not as anything other than clouds of plasma.
Falstaff was being forced to give convoluted approach vectors to drones and chassis landing for a resupply, so that the enemy couldn't predict the ship's movement from where said craft were predicted to meet their launching decks. Even so, one shell found the aperture, and pierced three bulkheads, coming dangerously close to his own casket, before being stopped.
He'd known Marios should have insisted on the Curie making the journey on it's own. Was it not a far-field survey vessel, with it's own, perfectly functional nearlight drive? Didn't USB rangers make such treks on their own all the time?
The Tunupe could have been escorted by a nice pair of destroyers of it's own: the Mako and Bluering were just a week away when the DoJ had contracted the ship in a hurry.
But no, apparently it was essential that the Curie arrived in the Shanxi System as early as possible. And look what good had come of it.
The bombardment became less accurate as Falstaff's extrusion in Legionspace found vulnerabilities in the targeting sensors of the enemy destroyers, but with a ship this slow and guns that fast, there was only so much Falstaff could do until he could properly infiltrate the enemy software.
A railgun shell knocked out one of the hard-kill missile pods on the starboard side.
Falstaff felt, for the first time in the battle, true, unmitigated hatred: that was his ordinance!
They would pay for touching it, every last infinitesimal fraction of Manna, even if he had to repossess their skin to make up the difference.
Dolan Meris - Special Tasks Group Discovery Department Forward Office - The Citadel
Two weeks after the signing of the Shanxi Accords and the opening of the Union Embassy on the Citadel
As the saying goes: children believe spycraft to be all done by smooth operators and deadly commandos, but adults know the single most desirable background for an intelligence agency is accounting.
The Special Tasks Group is no different: for every operative spying and assassinating in the field, there is a host of clerks, accountants, lawyers and technicians combing through data to find slight discrepancies or evidence of tampering. Even the most advanced Virtual Intelligences the Council allows (and, rumor has it, even some genuine Artificial Inteligences), can only partially automate these processes.
The irony of hyperactive, short lived Salarians employees of the most adventurous-sounding organization in Citadel Space short of the SPECTREs spending their best years on some of the dullest work possible is not lost on the clerks of the Discovery Department. If one tells you they don't cosider daily if the pay and references are truly worth their limited time in this mortal coil, they're lying; and likely fast approaching burnout.
Trying to gather intel on the Human Union was not contributing positively to their mood.
Attempting to place trojans in the personal devices of embassy employees had seldom worked, and never for long: apparently even janitors had a Virtual Intelligence in their personal communicator, and while these
"Companion-Concierge Units" had been proven to be sub-sentient to the satisfaction of the Council, they were still smart enough to recognize most attempts at data injection and keep up good security standards even when their owners were lax.
The opening of the embassy's Omninode for public use had not been the great opprtunity for understanding the humans it was hoped to be. Even when easily availeable, information on them was baffling: it was not clear wether the Union used money in its' economy, how long humans lived, or what an Omninode even was, under the hood, and the less said of trying to pin down the concept of a "printing license" the better.
Most disatrous of all had been the attempt to understand how the relationship between humans and the AIs they used so ubiquitously: after days of trying to decipher the information publically availeable on encyclopedias, scientific papers, and news pages, one of the middle-managers had resorted to asking for clarification on a public forum. It was aparently a subject upon which humans had strong, contrasting opinions, and on which some of those same AIs had the opinion that one asking should "Castigate" himself.
The computer somehow catching fire had driven the final nail in the coffin for that approach.
And so, Dolan and his colleagues sat dejectedly; looking at the mostrous, yawning abyss of the blank periodical report like a marooned astronaut at the event horizon of a black hole. The question nobody needed to ask was how they could word "we got nothing" in a way that didn't make them sound criminally negligent.
A hand was raised. Gazes turned.
"One thing we haven't tried yet", said Nolis, the System Administrator, "though it does sound stupid"
"Feel like a moron already", answered Dolan, "shoot"
"Pornography"
Dolan, and not for the first time, wondered if Nolis was one of those salarians.
He was not one to judge, of course: when one had as hideously boring a job as this, one had to find intrests to stimulate the brain. He too had been tempted by the sumptuous curves of a 1:2000 scale model of an Amane-class liner, and knew the secret shame of waking up late, covers knotted, face, hands and even chest sticky from what he couldn't resist bringing to bed the night before.
But still, Dolan, like most salarians, viewed sex like he viewed using the toilet: normal and necessary, sure, perhaps even something to look forward to if not done for an exceptionally long time, but ultimately an interruption from what truly mattered in life, and so to be given little consideration. Something it would be peculiar and a little off-putting to be into.
Nolis tired of waiting for the uncomfortable silence to stop, so he countinued:
"It's dead simple and completely unfiltered; unconcerned with respectability, principles. Only what intended audience wants most. The humans' 'fetishes' can tell us of their cultural fixations"
Dolan resisted the temptation of asking Nolis how he knew what a fetish was, partly because he feared the counter-question of how he knew, and partly because they really were at the end of their rope; as much as his instinct wanted to try anything else, they were coming up with nothing. He could see the same calculation in the eyes of his colleagues, and a similar absence of counter-proposals. Wordlessly, he took out a bundle of stiluses from a drawer, and started mixing them with three shorter ones.
Half a minute later, he opened his hand to find one of the short ones, and heard one of the interns swear, while Nolis tried and failed to give him a sympathetic look.
Finding an appropriate site took less time tha closing all the pop-ups and blatant scam ads. Before Dolan, Nolis, and Gek sprawled an expanse helpfully and extensively illustrated categories of content.
The usual suspects were all there, Nolis said: one had their pick of categories centered around body parts, tools, number, age, experience, and sex of the participants, as well as roles, dominance relationships, pain application, and even narratives.
The first incongruous elements came in the form of a series of acronyms clustered together, which a some quick searches revealed to stand for various sexes, orientations, and gender presentations.
Humans, it seemed, did not stop at transtioning from one sex to another or shunning the concept entirely, but could also combine them in several configurations, made even more numerous by their relationship with diffrent kinds of attraction towards other such configurations. Gek had to delete the linear list he had begun to make an create a chart to accurately store that information, then he had to do it again when they discovered there was an entirely distinct axis of self-conception regarding a human's relationship with cybernetic and neural implants, and how those factored in the previous relationship.
A simple hypertext document proved to be insufficient, and Gex was forced to save the data as a 3D model with accompanying charts.
Dolan briefly wandered if the reason Volus were so disinclined to discuss their sex was because they were as complicated as humans and did not feel like pulling out a diagram every time someone asked them.
This discovery led them to a rabbit hole of new, previously unimagined forms of BDSM, the exploration of which Dolan ordered to interrupt when their search history started to look like the criteria for adding surveilled individuals to a watchlist.
None of that could have prepared them for the shock of seeing the next category.
"Interracial"
The three salarians were briefly paralized byt the staggering amount of questions that word raised. Humans had been present in any significant number in Council Space for less than a month; that was enough time for some of them to get busy with an Asari huntress, but certainly not enough for recording enough such occasions to reach an industrial amount. Had Quarians been employed en masse for this? Batarians? Was the rumor true that those tall, masked humans which had appeared only at the negotiations were in reality a separate race? Had the humans discovered and absorbed other spacefaring races entirely, which the Citadel knew nothing about? Had there been Turian POWs which had not been released as agreed upon, or worse, had been disposed of before the end of the Incident?
Reality turned out to fall short of their speculations: humans used the word "race" to mean different phenotypes of their own. Although some of those phenotypes looked more different from baseline humans than humans did from Asari, or even Turians in the case of one with prehensile feet and pressure-sealed orifices.
Those were, according to several articles and the "about us" page of the Smith-Shimano Corporation, phenotypes selectively cultivated and cloned - and this once again made their jaws drop before being added to the report - to colonize enviroenments normally uninhabitable for normal humans.
And finally, they were baffled by the category tree of "Mecha"
The one-to-several-stories-tall war machines that could crumple a Taurus Tank just by standing on it? Those mecha? How could it even work?
It turned out there were several ways it could work.
From soft, anatomically accurate parts, to modified power armour, to more exotic means like magnetic manipulators employed on pierced bodies and questing swarms of nanomachines, humans had devised a plethora of ways to turn their favourite instruments of war into ones of pleasure; but most remarkable of all, some videos showed pilots employing "subjectivity bridges", which apparently were comprehensive neural interfaces allowing the pilots to feel and control the body of the machine as their own, or even an AI within the mech to feel the body of the pilot; a link which they thoroughly exploited for a variety of interactions by which even Dolan started to feel fascinated.
"AIs like this, you think?" asked Nolis.
"Of course not. Entirely artificial. Just acting as ordered"
"How do you know that?"
"Notion you propose, ridiculous! They're machines, they can't!"
"Would solve compliance problem", Interjected Gek, "we know too sophisticated AI risks rebelling. Humans claim they've been using them for two thousand years. Must have unknown way to keep them loyal. Subjectivty Bridging remarkably similar to Melding. Asari reinforce diplomacy with seduction. Basic formula proven to work"
Dolan paused. Despite finding the notion almost offensive, he had to admit the argument had merit.
Dolan Meris - Office of Dalatrass Wikless - Presidium
"Useless drivel. Insane", commented the Councilor, before scornfully tossing Dolan's report back at his face.
Dolan mentally kicked himself for actually filing that report. He could have just disappointed his manager and gotten off with a demotion, but no, he'd just had to try and salvage the situation, and now a Dalatrass herself had summoned him to express her disapproval. He could say goodbye to the prospect of doing anything of worth with his career, now.
"Our operatives are hard at work to analyze the humans, and you waste the whole departement's time with nonsense. Expect your resignation tomorrow morning"
There was a knock at the door.
"Enter, accountant Meris is leaving", said the Councilor. Her secretary entered, and after checking his omnitool, he said "Dalatrass, there is a courier with a large delivery for you"
"You too distrub me with trivialities? Handle it as usual"
"Delivery for you personally, from human ambassador. Came with confidential message"
The secretary was, indeed, holding an antiquated wax-sealed paper envelope, already marked to show it had passed every security check.
Dolan hardly noticed as he exited the office in a daze. His mind was torn between trying to imagine what to do with his life and trying to think of anything but his current predicament. He ignored the human courier outside the building, who had indeed brought several large crates in a small hovertruck, and didn't notice the clerk running after him until he was shaken by the shoulder. "Councilor wants to speak to you again", he said, before hurriedly leading Dolan back to her office.
The Dalatrass no longer looked furious, but eerily unexpressive. As soon as the sound-proof door was closed again, handed him the letter, saying:
"Seems I will have to make due with your work"
The letter read:
Esteemed Dalatrass and Councilor, as a gesture of good will and courtesy, I deliver the batches of surveillance equipment that the Special Tasks Group has misplaced in and around our embassy. Rest assured this is not at all an imposition, and that we look forward to knowing how we may further ingraciate yourself to the Salarian Union.
Forget letting your freak flag fly, we'll paint it on the side of our ships and give them a lecture on why the pride flag now has seventy five colors 😂
The streets of Rannoch are dark and still. No window is lit, no wind blows.
The clouds above, by contrast, are lit dull-red like hot irons. So is the ash flaking down like snow.
Tali wants nothing more than to go home, but she can't. Not until she has found the end of the path.
The moon rises from the graven skyline. Which is it? She doesn't know.
It silhouettes a wall of gathered shadows. Quarians and Geth alike, and things she has never seen; all staring at the light.
Tali realizes they are all around her as well, thronging her from all sides.
One of them whispers in her ear "Greetings"
She turns to face... it? "Did you do this?"
"Yes", another answers, far away. Still whispering, yet clear in the silence.
"Why?"
"You must dream to gain the chance to awaken", comes the response from many mouths.
"I don't understand"
"Of course you don't: to enlighten you would be to kill you. But you might enlighten yourself, if you find the Path"
"Where is it?"
"The First Hour has rung. Soon you will hear the mourning cries from the Mountain. Pass its' gate, and seek the gift"
All are speaking now. They begin to walk forward
"Now sleep, once again"
Tali'Zora nar Rayya - QNS Rayya - Aethon Cluster
Tali bolted upright with a start in her berth, slamming her forehead against the back of Shio's.
She heard him cursing under his breath before poking his head down to face her.
"What happened?"
"I had the nightmare"
"Again? Cousin, I told you, the pilgrimage isn't that hard. Look at how many idiots managed it just fine"
"I know. It's my brain that's hard to convince". Tali sighed. "Why can't I have normal anxious dreams, like being naked, or getting vented into space, or being late?"
"You were always very creative. You could make a Council snob rich and famous if you decide to be a ghost writer"
That got a snort out of her.
"Nah, who'd want to read stories about incomprehensible scary things happening to people?"
"You don't know until you try"
"Quiet you two! It's the middle of the night and I have the morning shift today" whisper-hissed Lesu from underneath them.
"Ok, sorry", apologized Shio "Wanna go for a walk to calm down?", he asked Tali
I don't have any supernovas in program, but once HORUS is able to interact with the Citadel... well...
Actually, two plot points I have in program for this chapter could be considered minor examples of releasing an eldritch horror.
One is already part of ME canon. The other is a possibility implied by Lancer canon that I've not seen explored
