Alexander Snow
Mad Artificer
Wow i was really off
Unbound (Homeworld/Mass Effect)
- Thread starter Geas
- Start date
- Crossover Sci-Fi
-
- Tags
- homeworld mass effect fusion
Arimai
Curmudgeon
Yup. The Quarian refugees left Quarian space on any ship capable of space travel. From lifeboats to salvaged garbage hauling scows. 300 years of constant habitation. I shudder to think how bad it smells on the ships with old and failing HVAC and Scrubber systems.
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Why do you think that they spend all their time in hermetically sealed environment suits.
Mgunh1
Not an AI, honest!
- Location
- Northern Luna Base, Module 5, Sublevel 15
Just to put that into perspective:
I've said this before, but in HW1, during the fight with the AI swarm ships in the graveyard, you can see some intact Progenitor ships at the far end of the map. Click on one and it will reveal it is a corvette.
Said 'corvette' is same size as your carriers.
Homeworld is one of the few settings that get the sheer scale of space right. And what such a high tier civ should be able to do as a matter of simple routine.
Me like.
Me like.
- Location
- Northish
Well assuming that the ship was able to be fully restored that means the Exodus Armada has the ability to create hyperspace cores and Progenitor spacecraft technology. Depending on the timescale involved in forging a core that means ridiculous mobility for the various Clan fleets in the Armada and access to energy generation that makes anti-matter look like burning coal.
- Location
- Philippines
@Geas I hope this music was playing across Turian comm channels just to emphasise how fucked they are.
This music makes me break out a sweat in the Karos Graveyard for this was the Song of DOOM for my fleet in Homeworld 2 Classic.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3YmmPM5ohw
This music makes me break out a sweat in the Karos Graveyard for this was the Song of DOOM for my fleet in Homeworld 2 Classic.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3YmmPM5ohw
So we've got Sajuuk, I believe the biggest ship is a Progenitor Mothership but the 2km tall ship has me believing that the Hiigarans retrieved the Pride of Hiigara from Balcora. Because why not? Although it was built primarily as a warship for the Vaygr war it could easily have some of its systems converted for transporting a large amount of the population via cryo trays like the Kushan Mothership.
Is there a possibility of the System Alliance existing or are we assuming they don't exist in this universe?
Is there a possibility of the System Alliance existing or are we assuming they don't exist in this universe?
Perhaps it once did, long ago. Then they went to another galaxy and seeded new life there...
And now, many years later their children have come back to their old home galaxy.
And now, many years later their children have come back to their old home galaxy.
TheOmnimercurial
Dragon Bard
- Location
- UK
I always preferred the "Kushan Mothership" to the "Pride of Hiigara".
The Bridge Pillar on the Mothership gave it an element of Wonder that the Pride of Hiigara just lacked.
If they had at least up-gunned and up-armoured the imitator then removing/hiding the Bridge would have made sense, but the 2nd Banana was still very weak sauce indeed.
Maybe they combined the "Kushan Mothership" and the "Pride" into a Super Tall Mothership?
The "Kushan Pride"?
The Bridge Pillar on the Mothership gave it an element of Wonder that the Pride of Hiigara just lacked.
If they had at least up-gunned and up-armoured the imitator then removing/hiding the Bridge would have made sense, but the 2nd Banana was still very weak sauce indeed.
Maybe they combined the "Kushan Mothership" and the "Pride" into a Super Tall Mothership?
The "Kushan Pride"?
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- Location
- Frozen Winterland
The Original Mothership had all of 4 point defence guns.
The 'Pride of Banana' had all of 8.
The Kuun-lan had 8 Ultra-heavy Mass drivers retrofit to semi-homing plasma bursts based on a combination of plasma bomb and energy weapon techs, and could easily demolish enemy strikecraft or even frigates in a scrap.
Neither Banana could functionally kill a single strikecraft without help.
It's kinda sad.
TheOmnimercurial
Dragon Bard
- Location
- UK
All the more reason to create a "Super Banana" or a "Banana Bunch"! ^_^
Could build a Sajuuk derived Uber Main Gun in the area that the 2 Motherships are to be linked/melded together?
Then Twin Siege Cannons on the Top Tip and Bottom Tip?
Ion Cannon Turrets all over as well....
Geas
Meat Thing
If I did that, then I'd be obligated to paint it in all the colors of the rainbow and this would be an entirely different and less serious fic.
Now, to be fair, the Kushan Mothership and the Pride of Hiigara filled a different role compared to the Kuun-Lan. The first banana was very much just a colony and exploration ship, while the second was built solely for war, but both ships also served the role of carrier and multi-purpose shipyard, and the second only had limited capacity for modification via its subsystems.
The Kuun-Lan on the other hand? Designed from the ground up to be as modifiable and flexible as possible. It's easy to think of Somtaaw Explorers as these massive ships, ore canisters above and below or research and support modules, and a great big hangar module. The actual the ship however is just the bridge, a very long spine/keel, and the massive engines. Anything and everything else is built and added on as needed, when it's needed.
Also chapter coming soon.
Here's a clip from the game showing the Keeper waking up; anyone curious can watch from the start and see some of the really large debris in the background.Just to put that into perspective:
View: https://youtu.be/Jl0RETy5WaA?t=252
Prologue 3 - Rude Awakenings
Geas
Meat Thing
Beta'd by (If you suggest an edit, insert your SV handle here please): Wargonzola, Riversand, Asiatore, Zectbu, Some_Guy_161, Spiritofpower, Arimai, Martin Bajar, someone called 'As Bo' I think (that's probably not right), LostArchivist
2155.9.12
For the first time in two hundred and sixty years, war threatened the entirety of Citadel-governed space. The last time such a threat loomed was the Geth War, but those AI had been content to remain behind the Perseus Veil after ousting their Quarian creators from their homeworld of Rannoch and their colonies. Even then, that brief conflict had resulted in the deaths of billions of Quarians - and at best perhaps a mere few hundred combined Asari, Turian, Volus, Batarian and Salarian lives total - it had been enough to instill dread at the thought of ever clashing seriously with the Geth for all save the displaced Quarian refugees and had almost single handedly thoroughly torpedoed all future Artificial Intelligence research ever since.
Council Spectre Tela Vasir found herself wishing not for the first time that it was the Geth threatening the galaxy a second time rather than something completely new. At the very least, the Geth were a known and somewhat understood threat. But no, someone just had to go and stumble across the sleeping Thresher Maw that no one had a clue was there until the aforementioned someone went and kicked the damn thing in the mouth, like an idiot child that had been dropped on their head a few too many times.
These Somtaaw however were an unknown quantity in all the most unpleasant ways. Tela didn't like unknowns, because they had a way of savagely biting a chunk out of a sapient's ass, as the Turian Hierarchy had just found out in one of the more unpleasant fashions possible. But better the Turians than her; Tela quite liked her blue ass just the way it was, tight and toned and without ragged chunks bitten out of it.
Also, Tela figured that the Turians had definitely had it coming sooner or later, given the - ahem - 'aggressive' tactics they preferred in acquiring other races as clients before they could be properly acquainted with the other races that occupied Citadel space. Turians could be bastards like that; Tela knew that better than just about anyone.
Her father had been a Turian.
"Boss, you've got that 'all Turians are bastards' look on your face again," a feminine voice marked with a very distinct flanging tone lazily drawled. Tela immediately glowered at the petite Turian woman that was calmly and methodically reassembling an Armax Crossfire assault rifle, clad in a heavier combat hardsuit than most Turians - especially the rare biotics - typically bothered with. A simple crescent of vibrant red stretched across her face from cheek to cheek. She wasn't just petite either, even for a Turian. She was Goddess-damned tiny for a Turian, only just barely one point six meters in height.
"No I don't," Tela angrily retorted, then added, "You're not even looking."
"You were doing that thing where you suck on your teeth, Boss," came the young Turian woman's lazy reply.
"She's kinda got you there, Boss," commented a young Asari that wasn't quite out of her maiden years… which made the massive light machine gun cradled in her arms very nearly as eye-catching as her two point one meter height. Asari that tall were very much unheard of.
"I hate you both," Tela retorted, and the other two females traded toothy grins.
Cloelia Albia wasn't the Turian woman's real name, not that Tela cared (plus she'd learned exactly who 'Cloelia' really was after a very thorough four-day investigation,as well as just why the young Turian woman was working as a mercenary under an assumed name when she was at the age where she still should have been serving in the Turian military). The Spectre only cared that the Turian was effective, and being ex-Cabal made her very effective indeed, not only as a biotic, but also as one hell of a gifted markswoman. With either her assault rifle, her Haliat Equalizer sniper rifle or the twin Stiletto heavy pistols she always had magnetically locked to her hips, she was a particularly deadly shooter, and despite her youth her biotics were equally impressive. However, she didn't fit the mold for what a 'proper Turian woman' should look like. Oh, she had an especially tiny waist for a Turian female, and even Tela could admit that the girl's slender jaw was definitely aesthetically pleasant by Asari standards, as was her large and expressive eyes and the smooth counters of her face plate. But below that aforementioned waist?
An Asari with Cloelia's build would've been called full-figured or Matronly to have such powerful thick legs, and Tela knew more than a few Asari and even some Quarians that might've killed to have Cloelia's backside and hips. To the Turian military however, and Turian society as a whole? It was bad enough that she was a biotic - even after more than a thousand years, the Turians didn't easily take to the biotic members of their species. That Cloelia was so physically different as well made her an object of scorn even by her fellow Turian biotics, no matter how much she excelled or overachieved... unless the other Turian was a pervert, which had its own set of problems. It was a shame that the girl had been ostracized so much by her own people for being unable to physically conform to the 'Turian ideal,' but that probably had a lot to do with why Tela was as fond of her as she was.
Faegan on the other hand was damn near a mountain of an Asari, which Tela chalked up to the fact that that maiden was the product of no less than five consecutive Asari-Krogan relationships. The maiden wasn't just bewilderingly tall; she was solid in a way that most Asari never were, with most of her one hundred and twenty kilos being hard, eezo-infused muscle. She was big enough - and more importantly strong enough - to literally bounce a Krogan in a fist fight.
Without her biotics.
Which was good, because while the girl's biotics were uncommonly strong for a Maiden (seriously, it's like the Asari in her family tree all had a thing only for Krogan Battlemasters), Faegan's control with said biotics was absolute cattle shit. Fortunately, she made up for it by being able to easily haul around and wield weapons that were usually considered crew-served or usable only by Krogan, such as the massive battle hammer she often brought along on missions when her LMG wasn't enough.
They were young - barely more than girls, especially in Cloelia's case - but they were good operatives with a hell of a lot of potential, these two. Reliable, talented, excellent in a gunfight, and capable of keeping up with Tela when the Spectre cut loose with her biotics. Pity that they were two of the snarkiest bitches that she'd ever met.
"Lies and slander Boss, we know you love us," Cloelia playfully retorted as she finished reassembling her rifle. "After all, you wouldn't bring us along for such wonderfully fucked-up messes if you didn't!" Faegan giggled, a surprisingly high-pitched sound for such a mountain of a young Asari, then outright laughed when Tela blatantly rolled her eyes.
"And on that note girls, here's the sitrep," Tela announced, and her two sidekicks straightened up. "Short version: a Turian Rear-Echelon Matron Fucker royally fucked up during a First Contact already gone wrong, and our job is to unfuck his mess before all of Citadel space gets dragged into a war with a very new alien race with very new and very scary alien guns."
"Well shucks Boss, and here I thought this would be something hard," Cloelia snarked. Faegan didn't reply right away, instead humming thoughtfully as she scratched the side of her nose with a finger that was half as big around as Tela's wrist.
"We gonna have to shoot some Turians, Boss?" The giant Asari asked.
"... Probably not," Tela replied after a moment's thought. "Depends on how deep the hole is that the Turian idiot in question has dug himself. Though to be fair, Licinius has already stuck both feet into this steaming pile of cattle shit and the day is still young, so who knows? Our main concern, however, is extracting the alien POW in his possession while he's thoroughly distracted with several Primarchs, a delegation sent by the Council, and a few other Spectres trying to keep this mess from getting worse somehow."
"Wait, Licinius? As in Crassus Licinius?" Cloelia asked, and when Tela nodded, the young Turian woman's mandibles tightened against her mouth and she let out a quiet hiss. "... Are you sure we can't shoot him, Boss?"
Tela quirked her brow.
So did Faegan, who was quick to comment, "You know him, Cloe?"
"Don't call me 'Cloe,'" the Turian grumbled. "And it's none of your business if I know him or not. Just know that we'd be doing the Hierarchy a favor if he somehow slipped and suffered a fatal fall down an elevator shaft and onto several kilos of pressure-sensitive high explosives."
Tela's brow rose higher.
"... For someone crazy enough to go into hiding by working for a Council spook, you are really, really bad at hiding your past," the Spectre bluntly said and Cloelia very deliberately avoided eye contact. Then she winced and stumbled when Faegan laughed and slapped her on the back hard enough to almost send the petite Turian sprawling.
"Hey Boss," a voice called out over the comms, "We're in-system and approaching the Turians now. It's…" Tela's pilot trailed off for a moment, then added, "... You might want to see this."
"Finish getting kitted up," the Spectre ordered, already leaving her ship's armory to make her way to the cockpit. Her frigate was on the small side, built and designed for speed and business, which meant that it took her less than two minutes to make her way to the cockpit where her pilot - an older Asari Matron - was staring wide-eyed at the sensor plots.
Seeing that the numbers of Turian ships had grown by five entire fleets' worth of ships wasn't a surprise, given that what was left of the first three fleets barely numbered enough to make either a single oversized fleet or two undersized ones, but by Athame's eternally perky tits that was still a hell of a lot of ships. In most situations, the Turian solution would have definitely been a very pragmatic one; when in doubt, throw more guns at the problem. For the race with the largest navy in the galaxy, it was an especially effective tactic… against everyone but whoever or whatever these Somtaaw were.
The Somtaaw ships were roughly five light-minutes away, in a high orbit around the outermost of the system's two gas giants. Almost immediately, Tela spotted why her pilot had been concerned.
"... What the fuck is that?" Tela said as she stared at the holographic image of the massive structure that hovered in orbit above a shattered moon that she was pretty sure wasn't supposed to be shattered; there wasn't a hazard notification mentioned anywhere in the navigation chart for the system. It was big, too damned big to be a ship. It couldn't have been a ship. The Somtaaw's super-dreadnoughts and their absurdly destructive cannons were, by all reports, already stretching the limits of what should be possible, and those damn things were over a kilometer and a half long.
The thing that the Somtaaw ships gathered around was perhaps somewhere between the length of a cruiser and a dreadnought, but it was more than two kilometers tall. It must have outmassed the Destiny Ascension at least ten times over. Tela tried not to think of the firepower that that thing must carry, if their super-dreadnoughts alone could single handedly decimate entire fleets.
The fleet around it was only somewhat smaller than the gathered Turian ships, which was also rather concerning.
Equally concerning was that an entire chunk of the broken moon had somehow been pulled away and appeared to be tethered to the enormous ship. Numerous smaller craft - perhaps half again as large as a cargo barge or possibly frigate-sized - seemed to be swarming over the debris fragment, tearing away at it with what appeared to be mining equipment. Clearly it was some kind of mining operation, but not even in the Terminus systems had she heard of anyone being crazy enough to crack apart an entire Goddess-damned moon. Amazingly, there wasn't much of a debris field, but that could mean that either the aliens had cleaned up most of said debris already or that the gas giant's gravity well had already snagged much of it.
"Well… this just got a lot more interesting," Tela mused out loud, to which her pilot let out a snort.
"That's one word for it, Boss," her pilot nervously quipped.
"Relax Enyala, we aren't going anywhere near that," the Spectre reassured her pilot. "Not today, anyways."
The other Asari gave her a very unamused look.
"Boss, we're going to need to have a talk about how much you pay me."
"Oh, you say that every time things get complicated," Tela retorted as she patted Enyala on the shoulder.
"I mean it this time!" Enyala snapped, but Tela Vasir was already turning away.
"Sure you do. Just get us in close with that prison ship," she drawled, her mind already on just how she was going to make her way through the ship and whether or not she'd have to shoot anyone. Much like Cloelia, she wouldn't be that broken up if she had to put a bullet or ten into anyone that got in her way.
That was why the Council (and occasionally the Shadow Broker) always gave her the fun jobs.
~~~~~~~~~~
It was more by luck than anything else that the THS Glory of Palaven had endured the last major confrontation with the Somtaaw mostly undamaged… mostly. It had as much to do with distance from the epicenter of the first detonation that had savaged the 21st Fleet as the fact that there had been a number of ships between that terrible weapon and the Glory, including another dreadnought.
Most of those ships had been lost with all hands, and the other dreadnought had needed to be towed back to the relay. Whether or not it could be fully repaired or if it would be consigned to a ship graveyard after being stripped of whatever was still useful, no one yet knew. As for the Glory, she was more or less intact, for which one Private First Class Iolus was immediately grateful. Knowing that there was something that could one-shot a dreadnought was terrifying.
Not that there was anything Iolus could do about that, being fresh out of training. Serving on a top-of-the-line dreadnought as his first tour of duty was supposed to be a sign of good luck. Being one of the Glory's first crew was the sort of thing that helped a young, barely seventeen years old Turian make a name for themselves and quickly climb up the citizenship tiers, and provided that he managed to avoid screwing up, ensured that he'd have his choice of unit assignments after his tour on the dreadnought was over.
Being under the command of an officer that had just gotten over twelve thousand Turians and Auxiliaries killed just permanently torpedoed his future career prospects until he discharged out once he turned thirty, unless he got really, really lucky. Nevermind that as a lowly grunt, he was so far from the chain of command that he'd need a top-tier navigation and sensor array just to see the decision-making process. He, and a lot of other Turians, were tarnished by association and would be for a very long time if they survived this mess.
As such, Iolus had volunteered for a shift on the prison ship Brig 1701 and transferred over the instant he could, and had already submitted a request to make the transfer permanent if possible.
Fucking Crassus Licinius…
Suppressing a growl of irritation, Iolus just tried to focus on the now, which was guarding the airlock to the 1701's hangar bay with one of his fellow grunts, waiting for orders and hoping that if the ship was targeted by the aliens, both of them could either make it in time to a shuttle or escape pod, or that he'd die too quickly to notice the ship exploding around them.
When the door to the hangar opened Iolus and his partner reflexively snapped to attention and turned towards the door.
Then Iolus froze and his mouth fell open because by all the Spirits that ever existed that was a lot of blue skin.
Swallowing, Iolus's eyes slowly tracked upwards until he was gazing up at the enormous Asari cheerfully grinning down at him as if her hardsuit wasn't unbuckled and slightly opened all the way to the bottom of her rib cage. He'd known of the Asari secondary sexual traits called breasts, of course.
He just hadn't known that they could be as big as a Turian's head or bigger until today, and he really didn't know where he should or shouldn't be looking. She had really big … eyes. Eyes as blue as the rest of her and that seemed to twinkle, eyes that a Turian like him could fall into and never climb back out of, with a crest framing her head that gleamed so brilliantly it might have been polished.
"Uhhhh," Iolus squeaked out.
"Ooooh, is that an Armax Arsenal 17A1 Phaeston?!" She chirped out excitedly in a surprisingly girlish-seeming voice for someone that was so big, and suddenly she was looking directly over him and gazing rapturously down at the assault rifle that he cradled against his chest.
"Uhhhh."
"It is! Goddess, I've been wanting to get my hands on one of these for years," chirped the gigantic Asari. "You are so lucky to have one! How well does it handle on a firing range?! Everyone says it's one of the best rifles to come out of Armax in the past five hundred years! Hey, is it true that even without a muzzle brake you can fire one of these at full auto for ten seconds and the muzzle climb will only throw off your aim by less than four centimeters at a thousand meters?!"
Iolus wasn't aware that he was backing up until his back actually hit the bulkhead behind him; he was really trying his hardest not to let the excitable giant Asari's very large breas-... chest touch his arm as she continued leaning over him and wow she smelled really really nice. It occurred to Iolus that he probably should be demanding to know why she was on the 1701, despite his heart trying its best to lodge itself into his gizzard.
"Uhhhh."
Unnoticed by Iolus, another Asari and a tiny female Turian were leading his partner away.
~~~~~~~~~~
Absentmindedly, a part of Tela kind of hoped that Faegan wasn't going to get that young Turian in trouble. Or worse, leave him heartbroken. The maiden could get excitable when it came to rare and hard-to-obtain guns, to put it mildly.
Still, Faegan made for an excellent distraction whenever Tela let her off of the proverbial leash, especially during times when her Council Spectre authority might not get the results that she wanted. Such as now for example, making her way through a Turian prison ship in the middle of a warzone in order to hopefully prevent a diplomatic crisis.
"I can't believe that you keep encouraging that, that behavior from her," Cloelia irritably grumbled as she fingered one of the collapsed pistols at her hips, looking as if she'd prefer to shoot their increasingly nervous guide rather than let the Hierarchy soldier lead them through the ship.
"Relax Cloe, let Faegan have her fun," Tela replied.
Cloelia's mandibles fluttered. "Boss, you know I hate that nickname."
Tela smirked. "Next time pick a better name. And besides, it's not like anyone's stopping you from doing the same; I've seen lots of people staring at those legs of yours. Or that big, fat, garbage scow of a-"
"Boss!!" It took a lot to make a Turian blush, given their thick carapaces. When Tela saw the blue hue creeping across Cloelia's face shortly after her mandibles began spasming, she marked another mental tally on her scoreboard.
"Just saying, the way you stomp when you get agitated doesn't help," Tela snickered. "Our humble private here has been sneaking a few peeks himself, given that wiggle you put in those wide, wide hips."
Said private let out a faint choking noise when Cloelia turned a glare on the soldier that could peel the paint off of a tank. Naturally, Tela threw her head back and cackled, which was when they finally reached the entrance of the prison ship's cell block.
It wasn't perhaps unusual that an entire unit of soldiers was guarding said hatch. That could definitely be excused given that the Turians were at war with an unknown alien race, and even the well-disciplined Turians had their occasional troublemakers… but these soldiers clearly looked nervous and twitchy about something.
"Identify yourself," snapped one of them, who strode forward to challenge Tela and her remaining sidekick.
"Council Spectre Tela Vasir, on assignment by the direct orders of the Citadel Council to take custody of the alien prisoner being kept here," she replied, still smiling despite the sudden suspicion that something definitely wasn't right. The Turian soldiers immediately began looking uneasy and spooked. That was something that Tela was used to. She had a well-earned reputation for being one of the Spectres that was sent in when the Council wanted something done in ways that were often splashy and violent. Tela was very good at 'splashy and violent.' It was her thing.
These Turians didn't just look scared, they looked ill. And not the funny kind of ill that happened whenever someone other than a Krogan was dumb enough to try and drink Faegan under the table.
"I… I'll need to pass this up to my superior officer," the sergeant said evasively, and immediately Tela sighed.
"Look. I really don't have all day," she began as she dropped the pretense of humor. "Right now, Admiral Licinius is busy getting his crest ripped off by a Council rep, a few of my fellow Spectres, and probably a couple of your Primarchs. I'm here to take the alien you Turians captured into custody before he has time to give any more really stupid orders that could get more people killed."
The Sergeant's eyes slid away from Tela's and he sucked in a breath.
Tela didn't like that, and dropped one hand to the gun at her hip and primed her biotics. Beside her, she felt as much as saw Cloelia do the same as several of the Turians hefted their weapons.
"See, reactions like that tell me that the good Admiral might've already given another really stupid order," Tela coolly continued. "So Sergeant, I recommend that you and your unit forget whatever really stupid orders that you've been given and move aside, before I'm forced to conclude that I might have to do something really unpleasant."
"... Stand down," the Sergeant quietly ordered his troops, and Tela very deliberately took her hand off of her gun. "Spectre Vasir? You should hurry. They're in the middle of interrogation."
Tela's eyes widened, then she swiftly strode for the hatch.
"Faegan, stop playing with that boy and catch up," she absentmindedly ordered via her teams' comms. "Enyala, be ready for immediate evac."
The cell block of the cruiser-sized prison ship was quiet, with only a small number of cells visibly occupied by either Turians or Auxiliaries. It made the pained cries stand out all the more. Cloelia's mandibles went right against her mouth as her thin lips peeled back in a snarl. Tela was calmer, but not by much as they hastened to the source of the commotion, the last row of cells.
There were four Turians there, two outside of the cell and two within it, and a lot of red blood splashed on the floor.
"Council Spectre Tela Vasir, drop the guns and I probably won't kill all of you," she barked. One of the soldiers whirled and raised a gun; with a gesture Tela biotically slammed him against the ceiling hard enough that his hardsuit crumpled on impact with the snapping of bone being crushed, then she drew her gun and took aim as she let the soldier's corpse hit the floor. Cloelia gestured and Pulled the so-called 'interrogator' from the cell, just as he paused in mid-swing with a truncheon still clutched in his hand. The Stiletto pistol in the dimunitive Turian's other hand help to keep the other two soldiers from getting any stupid ideas.
"I really don't like repeating myself," Tela said in a steely tone as Cloelia dropped the interrogator at their feet. It wasn't until Faegan caught up to them with her LMG cradled in the giant Asari's arms almost like a toy, that the Turian soldiers grudgingly collapsed their drawn weapons and tossed them to the floor, followed by their sidearms. For that, Tela was grateful; if Faegan felt the need to fire that LMG of hers things would get metaphorically and very literally messy, given that it was a weapon meant more for vehicles than soldiers. Plus Tela's ears would be left ringing for days.
With Faegan and Cloelia to cover the interrogator and his two surviving cohorts, Tela strode into the cell.
Then for just a moment, she froze as the alien prisoner spat out a mouthful of crimson blood and tried to pick herself up.
She looked so much like an Asari that it was intensely unsettling. The shape of her eyes, mouth and nose, the slender five-fingered hands, the facial expressions that so obviously showed fear and anger and pain…
Were it not for her pale skin, the red blood dribbling from her mouth and nose and the messy dark fur that covered the top of her head (almost like Quarian scalp fur), Tela could have walked past her on the street and would have thought of her as just an disturbingly familiar Asari maiden.
"This is a restric-" the interrogator started to say as he picked himself up off of the floor despite the gun Cloelia had pressed against his forehead.
Without looking, Tela shot him in both knees, sending him screaming back down to the floor. Almost immediately she chastised herself, because she only meant to shoot him once. Shit, she shouldn't have shot him at all - her pistols were modified to fire large caliber high-velocity rounds. It was a small miracle that neither bullet hadn't overpenetrated through his legs and ricocheted; her target wasn't even protected by a kinetic barrier. One of the soldiers nearly went for one of the guns scattered on the floor, only to freeze when he realized that Faegan's LMG was aimed at his chest and was one trigger squeeze away from turning him into an especially gruesome abstract art piece. The Turian wisely backed away and kept his hands very visible.
It was then that Tela realized that she was more pissed than she thought. Despite being a different species, the bruised and bloodied face looking up at her didn't look all that different from a face that she used to see in the mirror when she was just a few decades old.
"I really won't mind killing the rest of you where you stand," Tela heard herself softly say in a voice that suddenly sounded strange, even to her. She was grateful that her gun hand was still steady. "You really don't want to annoy me right now."
The Spectre then forced herself to collapse and holster her pistol before she shot someone else, then very carefully and deliberately approached the Somtaaw female that was trying to shy away from her.
"C'mon, we're leaving," Tela said as she held out a hand, then almost immediately cursed in the privacy of her own head because there was no way in hell that the alien could understand what Tela was saying. The girl sure as hell didn't have reason to trust a strange alien after getting the shit kicked out of her by yet another alien for however lo-
Tela Vasir blinked when the girl's hand closed around her own in a surprisingly strong grip.
"Oh. Huh. Okay then," the Spectre blurted out. Then she very carefully pulled the alien to her feet, noting the way she was clearly favoring her chest and one leg. Tela wasn't one that was typically comfortable with physical contact in most situations, but at that moment she stomached her distaste and let the girl lean against her and throw an arm around the Asari's shoulders.
Carefully, she walked the alien out of the cell, and noted that the other two Turians were giving emergency first aid to the Turian officer that had been interrogating the girl that she was taking to safety. The interrogator was hissing in pain, but still managed a defiant glare.
"... Fuck it," Tela found herself saying, and in a single smooth motion she drew her pistol one last time, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. The officer's eye burst in a blue spray and the back of his head exploded, showering the floor behind him with gore as he collapsed to the floor one final time.
The girl squeezed herself all the harder against Tela's side, but she still stared at the corpse until it was out of sight.
~~~~~~~~~~
The girl was creepy in how Asari she was for something that definitely wasn't an Asari, how much she looked like Tela and it was disturbing her more and more with every passing second, which made Tela angry, which made things all the more disturbing because the alien girl was picking up on it and getting agitated and that was bothering Tela even more and it made her really want to fucking hurt someone.
It was worse once they got the blood cleaned off of the alien's face. It was like someone had gone back in time some two hundred and fifty-something years and kidnapped a much younger Tela Vasir fresh from one of her asshole father's 'lessons on discipline,' and replaced the speckled cobalt blue skin she'd had with a tone that was more… sort of a pale beige kind of a color, with hints of that weird Batarian color that had white mixed with a little red; she couldn't remember what it was called. Her mouth was Tela's, from the downturned corners to the split lip oozing blood. Her broken nose was Tela's, just like it'd been the first time she'd had her nose broken. The hard, distrustful glint in her grey-green eyes… Every time Tela looked at her, it was like she was looking into a mirror, and her hands would begin to shake and her heart leaped into her throat and she remembered the beatings, the screaming, being told over and over that she wasn't good enough that she'd never be good enough that she'd be just a stupid Asari whore like the mother that had left them, that she should be thanking him for not just tossing her out with the rest of the garbage until the day that she'd finally had enough and-
So Tela hid in her personal quarters while her team tended to the Somtaaw girl's injuries and desperately tried to calm the fuck down before she put a biotically-empowered fist through something or someone, because being angry was so much better than going to pieces over some shit that she'd thought she was long over. However she was discovering that just burying something deep down inside to never see the light of day wasn't exactly 'getting over it.'
The way that Cloelia and Faegan both began giving her that cautiously uncertain look when they took over getting the Somtaaw girl to the infirmary 'So you can report in, Boss,' did not help, not one damned bit.
It occurred to the Spectre that she probably should make an attempt to report in to the Council, but she desperately needed to get it together and get her head back on straight first.
In her mind she saw the girl curled up on the floor of that cell and her mind went right back to the way she used to cower in her bedroom and the next thing Tela knew her biotic amp was beeping as her biotics surged dangerously out of control as her heart tried to explode in her chest, and it took all she had to pull herself back from the edge of a panic attack before she triggered a biotic nova in the middle of her own damn ship. Almost too late to do any good, she frantically began the breathing exercises to help her calm down.
"S-Serrice Ice Brandy…" she whispered to herself between deep breaths. "Aged for a hundred and eleven y-years… in casks made f-from the wood of the Sha'ira trees that grow along the coasts of the Serrinian Sea. The inside of the casks are lined with frozen mineral water… to a thickness of .. of six centimeters. The brandy is added whe-"
A beep at the door to her quarters interrupted her mnemonic trick for calming herself, but that was okay; Tela was mostly cool and collected by then. She still briskly rubbed her face to obscure any sign that she might have been crying, because damnit she was Tela Matron-Fucking Vasir and one of the baddest and toughest bitches to ever get squeezed out by another Asari. She was a Spectre, not that helpless traumatized kid, not anymore. She checked her reflection one last time, then with a self-assured nod, made her way to the door.
~~~~~~~~~~
"So, uhh… Boss," Faegan tentatively began, but Tela cut the much-larger Asari off before she could pry.
"What's the Somtaaw girl's condition?" she asked authoritatively as she began striding for the ship's infirmary.
"Ah… well Boss, those Turians worked her over pretty good," Faegan said after a moment's hesitation and began to follow, her much longer legs allowing her to easily keep up with the older Asari's swift stride. "According to the Doc, the Somtaaw alien's physiology seems so much like ours that if it wasn't for the fur on her head and her skin being the wrong color, she could be a Maiden. Near as she can tell, broken fingers on one hand, bruises for days, might have some busted ribs too. You know, the usual 'beat them until they tell you what you want to know' shit." The Spectre let out a contemptuous snort at that.
"Figures. Soft-headed idiots," Tela muttered. "The girl's a matron-fucking alien. There's no way in hell that whatever she speaks is something we can figure out anytime soon." Melding was always an option of course, but using a meld that way was practically an art form. It didn't just take practice to use a meld in that way, it took a certain type of Asari to really do it anything close to effectively.
Tela knew herself well enough to know that she was definitely not that kind of Asari. She didn't even like melding; she had… trouble, letting herself be that open to anyone, and the few times she had hadn't gone well because of her issues. She didn't dare suggest that Faegan make the attempt, because the sort of finesse required by that sort of meld definitely wasn't the enormous young Asari's strongpoint.
Hell, Faegan once accidentally broke someone's hip during a one-night stand. The maiden was many things but gentle was not one of them.
"Actually Boss, I don't know how, but she seems to know some Palaven Standard," Tela paused in mid stride to stare up at the younger Asari, who responded with a shrug of her broad shoulders, "enough to manage. Couldn't tell you if her people were learning it to try and negotiate with the Turians or if she picked it up on her own in between violent beatings."
"... Well then, that'll make things easier," Tela mused thoughtfully.
Then the two walked into the infirmary, and almost immediately Tela's eyes narrowed as she took in the sight of the Somtaaw girl, sitting upright on one of the beds. She'd been stripped to the waist and her chest was carefully wrapped in compression bandages to hold her ribs in place. The girl happened to notice Tela's stare, and glowered right back at her. One of her grey-green eyes was nearly swollen shut, but the bruises and cuts on her face and bare arms had been carefully cleaned. It made it easier to bear looking at the girl and keep old and unpleasant memories pushed down deep enough to not affect her self-control, but…
"Is she wearing one of my tops? Are those my pants?" Tela said indignantly.
"She needed something to wear that wasn't stained with blood and grime, Spectre Vasir. You happen to be the closest to her in size, and I don't just mean in height and body shape," the ship's medic dryly commented. T'lessia was an older Asari, almost to her Matriarch years in fact. It showed in how she moved, how she spoke, how unflappably calm she always was, and in this particular instance, how she was built. As if to emphasize her point, she very pointedly glanced down at her own sizable chest, then looked at Faegan, then stared very blatantly at Tela's chest.
"I hate you all," Tela grumbled.
"... I hayte hue all," the Somtaaw girl very carefully parroted in a crude approximation of High Thessian, which had Tela taken aback. The Spectre blinked twice. The girl's tongue placement was off, and she wasn't quite putting the proper emphasis on vowel sounds, but…
"... Shit, Boss, she even sounds like you," Faegan said wonderingly, then almost immediately the big maiden nervously shied away when Tela glared up at her. "I'm uh… I gotta go clean my gun now." She swiftly turned and retreated from the infirmary so fast, she nearly forgot to duck to avoid hitting her head on the hatch frame.
"So T'lessia," Tela grudgingly said in Palaven Standard, and almost immediately the Somtaaw girl perked up, "how's our guest?" The ship's doctor quirked her brow, then replied in the same language.
"As near as I can tell she's badly dehydrated and has been beaten nearly to death," T'lessia replied in the same dry tone as before. "Other than that? Why, if her skin tone was different, I'd say she reminded me of you after that mess on Chalkhos."
"Fucking Terminus Warlords and their cattle shit; don't remind me," Tela grumbled with a roll of her eyes. That hadn't been a pleasant assignment.
"Terminus Warlords," the Somtaaw girl parroted a second time, eerily mimicking Tela's accent almost perfectly, then just before the Spectre could get creeped out, "The Turian asked things about 'Terminus.' I do not know this word."
"He was likely fishing for wherever the Somtaaw Homeworld is," Tela neutrally commented. "Your people have embarrassed them. Good for you, by the way. They've been needing to get knocked on their asses for a while now."
The girl let out an amused huff, and the corner of her mouth quirked up in a bitter little smirk.
"The Turian is many, many years too late and many, many light-years too far away to find either Hiigara or Kharak," she replied. "Our Homeworlds are dead and dust."
Tela kept her face impassive, though on the inside she winced. Nevermind that the girl mentioned two distinct worlds, but claiming that they'd been destroyed. For a moment, she wondered whether their worlds had been lost to ecological disaster like the Drell, or if they'd been ousted like the Quarians were… then decided that at the moment, it didn't matter.
"Well… sorry to hear that," she said as sincerely as she could manage, "but unfortunately, right now I've got much bigger concerns. Namely, what it'll take to convince your people to stop this war with the Turians."
"That… is difficult," the girl said with an expression that Tela could only call troubled. "Am not Kiith-sa, not Clan Leader," she enunciated very carefully. "Am merely Kanya Somtaaw. Cannot speak for Clan Leader, and do not dare speak for Sajuuk."
Just like that, Tela knew that this shit was getting even more complicated, but she wouldn't be a Spectre if she gave up at the slightest obstacle.
"Okay, sure… Kanya," Tela said, taking her time pronouncing the girl's name or title or whatever, "but you're the first member of your people that I've been able to speak with. The Citadel Council sent me here to stop things from getting anymore out of hand. So I figure if I get you back to your people, you can get me a meeting with your Kiith-sa and we can-"
"No," Kanya all but hissed as she rose unsteadily to her feet, then waved off T'lessia's approach before the older Asari could attempt to steady her. Tela very deliberately did not go for her gun, but it was a near thing, because the hard look on the girl's face was only too familiar.
"Too late," Kanya continued somewhat breathlessly, but she met the Spectre's eyes without flinching. "Ecks… Exec... Slayer Benyamin Somtaaw, already reported to all Kiith-sa and One-Who-Speaks-For-Sajuuk. Sajuuk - He Whose Hand Shapes What Is, come, very soon now."
"Okay, so…" Tela began. She did her best to ignore Kanya name-dropping someone who was called 'Slayer.' People with that kind of title tended to be problems, but that was a problem for Future-Tela Vasir. "This… Sajuuk or Shaper, is what, the leader of your military then? And they're over your Clan Leader, this Kiith-sa?" Tela's mind was racing, because if these Somtaaw were only a fraction of Kanya's people and one of their military leaders was on his way, then this already fucked-up mess was well on its way to becoming a matron-fucking disaster. The more information she could get, the better informed the Council would be, and if they could get the Turians to stand down before this Sajuuk-person and their fleet arriv-
Of course, the very moment Tela Vasir thought that alarm klaxons began screaming all over her ship. Turning on her heels she immediately sprinted for the bridge, inwardly thankful that she hadn't yet peeled out of her hardsuit just in case she was about to dive into another combat situation.
"Enyala, sitrep!" Tela barked as she opened a comm channel to the cockpit, and absentmindedly realized that Kanya was right on her heels despite the alien's busted ribs. A much larger concern was that her pilot wasn't answering. "Enyala!" she yelled again, but still nothing.
When Tela got to her frigate's cockpit, she found her pilot deathly pale and staring dumbly at the holographic screens hovering in front of her face. Tela fully prepared to verbally tear a chunk out of the other Asari, then froze as something caught her eye.
There were hundreds of … of panels of light, just hovering in space, so massive that even thousands of kilometers away, their distinct shapes were obvious. The ship's sensors couldn't make sense of them, but they were bright enough that they filled the cockpit's viewports with distant twinkling orange stars. Most were squares, though the bigger ones were massive rectangular shapes.
Then ships began emerging from them.
Some of them were the Somtaaw ships that were supposed to still be several light-minutes away… but most of them weren't, instead being distinctly different. There was that two-kilometer-tall monster of a ship, drifting free of one of those big rectangle energy fields… then almost a half-dozen more just like it, just with different paint schemes and subtle differences in profile.
There were hundreds of ships as big as dreadnoughts or bigger disgorging from those fields. Some of them were fat and ungainly seeming things, others that looked as if someone had made a ship to look like the blade of a knife then covered the thing with weapon emplacements. There were ships that looked like they were covered in bronze or gold, ships that disgorged smaller craft by the dozens, but there were two ships that dwarfed everything else.
The first was a ship so big that Tela had trouble grasping that it could even exist. It was a behemoth of a ship, its golden hull broken by a band of vibrant red. It was so big that the other alien ships were very clearly giving it space, so big that the only thing Tela could think was that there was no way that any of the Citadel's capital ship berths had a prayer of being able to handle that thing.
"Sajuuk has come," she heard Kanya reverently whisper at her side.
"That is Sajuuk?" Tela was proud of herself. Her voice didn't break. Not even when her eyes drifted to the even bigger thing that hovered just above that massive ship. "Then what the hell is that?" Tela pointed at the thing. Her mind refused to call it a ship. It couldn't be a ship. It had to be a space station or something… which was pretty terrifying all by itself. If Kanya's race could FTL a matron-fucking space station… The Spectre ended the thought rather than let it continue to its inevitable question, because she wasn't sure if she could handle asking it even in her own head.
"That is Kharos," Kanya said in the same soft tone. "Named for the lost world. Kharos shelters the children of Hiigara, as it did when its builders first carried the children across galaxies to Hiigara."
Tela couldn't think of what to say. She could only stare at the thing that was so big it dwarfed every space station that she'd ever set eyes on, save for the Citadel itself. She'd had doubts before, but at that moment, she was absolutely certain that the Turian Hierarchy had just poked something that they damn well should not have.
What she didn't know is whether or not all of them would pay for it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Okay, that's it for the prologue! Time for me to go back to work on my other stories (I really need to stop starting new projects and just focus on my current ones, but my muse just found a new dealer so...)
Edit: due to borking my math a bit (or a lot) regarding the dimensions of the citadel in comparison to the Progenitor Mothership, I've adjusted the last paragraph of this chapter.
2155.9.12
For the first time in two hundred and sixty years, war threatened the entirety of Citadel-governed space. The last time such a threat loomed was the Geth War, but those AI had been content to remain behind the Perseus Veil after ousting their Quarian creators from their homeworld of Rannoch and their colonies. Even then, that brief conflict had resulted in the deaths of billions of Quarians - and at best perhaps a mere few hundred combined Asari, Turian, Volus, Batarian and Salarian lives total - it had been enough to instill dread at the thought of ever clashing seriously with the Geth for all save the displaced Quarian refugees and had almost single handedly thoroughly torpedoed all future Artificial Intelligence research ever since.
Council Spectre Tela Vasir found herself wishing not for the first time that it was the Geth threatening the galaxy a second time rather than something completely new. At the very least, the Geth were a known and somewhat understood threat. But no, someone just had to go and stumble across the sleeping Thresher Maw that no one had a clue was there until the aforementioned someone went and kicked the damn thing in the mouth, like an idiot child that had been dropped on their head a few too many times.
These Somtaaw however were an unknown quantity in all the most unpleasant ways. Tela didn't like unknowns, because they had a way of savagely biting a chunk out of a sapient's ass, as the Turian Hierarchy had just found out in one of the more unpleasant fashions possible. But better the Turians than her; Tela quite liked her blue ass just the way it was, tight and toned and without ragged chunks bitten out of it.
Also, Tela figured that the Turians had definitely had it coming sooner or later, given the - ahem - 'aggressive' tactics they preferred in acquiring other races as clients before they could be properly acquainted with the other races that occupied Citadel space. Turians could be bastards like that; Tela knew that better than just about anyone.
Her father had been a Turian.
"Boss, you've got that 'all Turians are bastards' look on your face again," a feminine voice marked with a very distinct flanging tone lazily drawled. Tela immediately glowered at the petite Turian woman that was calmly and methodically reassembling an Armax Crossfire assault rifle, clad in a heavier combat hardsuit than most Turians - especially the rare biotics - typically bothered with. A simple crescent of vibrant red stretched across her face from cheek to cheek. She wasn't just petite either, even for a Turian. She was Goddess-damned tiny for a Turian, only just barely one point six meters in height.
"No I don't," Tela angrily retorted, then added, "You're not even looking."
"You were doing that thing where you suck on your teeth, Boss," came the young Turian woman's lazy reply.
"She's kinda got you there, Boss," commented a young Asari that wasn't quite out of her maiden years… which made the massive light machine gun cradled in her arms very nearly as eye-catching as her two point one meter height. Asari that tall were very much unheard of.
"I hate you both," Tela retorted, and the other two females traded toothy grins.
Cloelia Albia wasn't the Turian woman's real name, not that Tela cared (plus she'd learned exactly who 'Cloelia' really was after a very thorough four-day investigation,as well as just why the young Turian woman was working as a mercenary under an assumed name when she was at the age where she still should have been serving in the Turian military). The Spectre only cared that the Turian was effective, and being ex-Cabal made her very effective indeed, not only as a biotic, but also as one hell of a gifted markswoman. With either her assault rifle, her Haliat Equalizer sniper rifle or the twin Stiletto heavy pistols she always had magnetically locked to her hips, she was a particularly deadly shooter, and despite her youth her biotics were equally impressive. However, she didn't fit the mold for what a 'proper Turian woman' should look like. Oh, she had an especially tiny waist for a Turian female, and even Tela could admit that the girl's slender jaw was definitely aesthetically pleasant by Asari standards, as was her large and expressive eyes and the smooth counters of her face plate. But below that aforementioned waist?
An Asari with Cloelia's build would've been called full-figured or Matronly to have such powerful thick legs, and Tela knew more than a few Asari and even some Quarians that might've killed to have Cloelia's backside and hips. To the Turian military however, and Turian society as a whole? It was bad enough that she was a biotic - even after more than a thousand years, the Turians didn't easily take to the biotic members of their species. That Cloelia was so physically different as well made her an object of scorn even by her fellow Turian biotics, no matter how much she excelled or overachieved... unless the other Turian was a pervert, which had its own set of problems. It was a shame that the girl had been ostracized so much by her own people for being unable to physically conform to the 'Turian ideal,' but that probably had a lot to do with why Tela was as fond of her as she was.
Faegan on the other hand was damn near a mountain of an Asari, which Tela chalked up to the fact that that maiden was the product of no less than five consecutive Asari-Krogan relationships. The maiden wasn't just bewilderingly tall; she was solid in a way that most Asari never were, with most of her one hundred and twenty kilos being hard, eezo-infused muscle. She was big enough - and more importantly strong enough - to literally bounce a Krogan in a fist fight.
Without her biotics.
Which was good, because while the girl's biotics were uncommonly strong for a Maiden (seriously, it's like the Asari in her family tree all had a thing only for Krogan Battlemasters), Faegan's control with said biotics was absolute cattle shit. Fortunately, she made up for it by being able to easily haul around and wield weapons that were usually considered crew-served or usable only by Krogan, such as the massive battle hammer she often brought along on missions when her LMG wasn't enough.
They were young - barely more than girls, especially in Cloelia's case - but they were good operatives with a hell of a lot of potential, these two. Reliable, talented, excellent in a gunfight, and capable of keeping up with Tela when the Spectre cut loose with her biotics. Pity that they were two of the snarkiest bitches that she'd ever met.
"Lies and slander Boss, we know you love us," Cloelia playfully retorted as she finished reassembling her rifle. "After all, you wouldn't bring us along for such wonderfully fucked-up messes if you didn't!" Faegan giggled, a surprisingly high-pitched sound for such a mountain of a young Asari, then outright laughed when Tela blatantly rolled her eyes.
"And on that note girls, here's the sitrep," Tela announced, and her two sidekicks straightened up. "Short version: a Turian Rear-Echelon Matron Fucker royally fucked up during a First Contact already gone wrong, and our job is to unfuck his mess before all of Citadel space gets dragged into a war with a very new alien race with very new and very scary alien guns."
"Well shucks Boss, and here I thought this would be something hard," Cloelia snarked. Faegan didn't reply right away, instead humming thoughtfully as she scratched the side of her nose with a finger that was half as big around as Tela's wrist.
"We gonna have to shoot some Turians, Boss?" The giant Asari asked.
"... Probably not," Tela replied after a moment's thought. "Depends on how deep the hole is that the Turian idiot in question has dug himself. Though to be fair, Licinius has already stuck both feet into this steaming pile of cattle shit and the day is still young, so who knows? Our main concern, however, is extracting the alien POW in his possession while he's thoroughly distracted with several Primarchs, a delegation sent by the Council, and a few other Spectres trying to keep this mess from getting worse somehow."
"Wait, Licinius? As in Crassus Licinius?" Cloelia asked, and when Tela nodded, the young Turian woman's mandibles tightened against her mouth and she let out a quiet hiss. "... Are you sure we can't shoot him, Boss?"
Tela quirked her brow.
So did Faegan, who was quick to comment, "You know him, Cloe?"
"Don't call me 'Cloe,'" the Turian grumbled. "And it's none of your business if I know him or not. Just know that we'd be doing the Hierarchy a favor if he somehow slipped and suffered a fatal fall down an elevator shaft and onto several kilos of pressure-sensitive high explosives."
Tela's brow rose higher.
"... For someone crazy enough to go into hiding by working for a Council spook, you are really, really bad at hiding your past," the Spectre bluntly said and Cloelia very deliberately avoided eye contact. Then she winced and stumbled when Faegan laughed and slapped her on the back hard enough to almost send the petite Turian sprawling.
"Hey Boss," a voice called out over the comms, "We're in-system and approaching the Turians now. It's…" Tela's pilot trailed off for a moment, then added, "... You might want to see this."
"Finish getting kitted up," the Spectre ordered, already leaving her ship's armory to make her way to the cockpit. Her frigate was on the small side, built and designed for speed and business, which meant that it took her less than two minutes to make her way to the cockpit where her pilot - an older Asari Matron - was staring wide-eyed at the sensor plots.
Seeing that the numbers of Turian ships had grown by five entire fleets' worth of ships wasn't a surprise, given that what was left of the first three fleets barely numbered enough to make either a single oversized fleet or two undersized ones, but by Athame's eternally perky tits that was still a hell of a lot of ships. In most situations, the Turian solution would have definitely been a very pragmatic one; when in doubt, throw more guns at the problem. For the race with the largest navy in the galaxy, it was an especially effective tactic… against everyone but whoever or whatever these Somtaaw were.
The Somtaaw ships were roughly five light-minutes away, in a high orbit around the outermost of the system's two gas giants. Almost immediately, Tela spotted why her pilot had been concerned.
"... What the fuck is that?" Tela said as she stared at the holographic image of the massive structure that hovered in orbit above a shattered moon that she was pretty sure wasn't supposed to be shattered; there wasn't a hazard notification mentioned anywhere in the navigation chart for the system. It was big, too damned big to be a ship. It couldn't have been a ship. The Somtaaw's super-dreadnoughts and their absurdly destructive cannons were, by all reports, already stretching the limits of what should be possible, and those damn things were over a kilometer and a half long.
The thing that the Somtaaw ships gathered around was perhaps somewhere between the length of a cruiser and a dreadnought, but it was more than two kilometers tall. It must have outmassed the Destiny Ascension at least ten times over. Tela tried not to think of the firepower that that thing must carry, if their super-dreadnoughts alone could single handedly decimate entire fleets.
The fleet around it was only somewhat smaller than the gathered Turian ships, which was also rather concerning.
Equally concerning was that an entire chunk of the broken moon had somehow been pulled away and appeared to be tethered to the enormous ship. Numerous smaller craft - perhaps half again as large as a cargo barge or possibly frigate-sized - seemed to be swarming over the debris fragment, tearing away at it with what appeared to be mining equipment. Clearly it was some kind of mining operation, but not even in the Terminus systems had she heard of anyone being crazy enough to crack apart an entire Goddess-damned moon. Amazingly, there wasn't much of a debris field, but that could mean that either the aliens had cleaned up most of said debris already or that the gas giant's gravity well had already snagged much of it.
"Well… this just got a lot more interesting," Tela mused out loud, to which her pilot let out a snort.
"That's one word for it, Boss," her pilot nervously quipped.
"Relax Enyala, we aren't going anywhere near that," the Spectre reassured her pilot. "Not today, anyways."
The other Asari gave her a very unamused look.
"Boss, we're going to need to have a talk about how much you pay me."
"Oh, you say that every time things get complicated," Tela retorted as she patted Enyala on the shoulder.
"I mean it this time!" Enyala snapped, but Tela Vasir was already turning away.
"Sure you do. Just get us in close with that prison ship," she drawled, her mind already on just how she was going to make her way through the ship and whether or not she'd have to shoot anyone. Much like Cloelia, she wouldn't be that broken up if she had to put a bullet or ten into anyone that got in her way.
That was why the Council (and occasionally the Shadow Broker) always gave her the fun jobs.
~~~~~~~~~~
It was more by luck than anything else that the THS Glory of Palaven had endured the last major confrontation with the Somtaaw mostly undamaged… mostly. It had as much to do with distance from the epicenter of the first detonation that had savaged the 21st Fleet as the fact that there had been a number of ships between that terrible weapon and the Glory, including another dreadnought.
Most of those ships had been lost with all hands, and the other dreadnought had needed to be towed back to the relay. Whether or not it could be fully repaired or if it would be consigned to a ship graveyard after being stripped of whatever was still useful, no one yet knew. As for the Glory, she was more or less intact, for which one Private First Class Iolus was immediately grateful. Knowing that there was something that could one-shot a dreadnought was terrifying.
Not that there was anything Iolus could do about that, being fresh out of training. Serving on a top-of-the-line dreadnought as his first tour of duty was supposed to be a sign of good luck. Being one of the Glory's first crew was the sort of thing that helped a young, barely seventeen years old Turian make a name for themselves and quickly climb up the citizenship tiers, and provided that he managed to avoid screwing up, ensured that he'd have his choice of unit assignments after his tour on the dreadnought was over.
Being under the command of an officer that had just gotten over twelve thousand Turians and Auxiliaries killed just permanently torpedoed his future career prospects until he discharged out once he turned thirty, unless he got really, really lucky. Nevermind that as a lowly grunt, he was so far from the chain of command that he'd need a top-tier navigation and sensor array just to see the decision-making process. He, and a lot of other Turians, were tarnished by association and would be for a very long time if they survived this mess.
As such, Iolus had volunteered for a shift on the prison ship Brig 1701 and transferred over the instant he could, and had already submitted a request to make the transfer permanent if possible.
Fucking Crassus Licinius…
Suppressing a growl of irritation, Iolus just tried to focus on the now, which was guarding the airlock to the 1701's hangar bay with one of his fellow grunts, waiting for orders and hoping that if the ship was targeted by the aliens, both of them could either make it in time to a shuttle or escape pod, or that he'd die too quickly to notice the ship exploding around them.
When the door to the hangar opened Iolus and his partner reflexively snapped to attention and turned towards the door.
Then Iolus froze and his mouth fell open because by all the Spirits that ever existed that was a lot of blue skin.
Swallowing, Iolus's eyes slowly tracked upwards until he was gazing up at the enormous Asari cheerfully grinning down at him as if her hardsuit wasn't unbuckled and slightly opened all the way to the bottom of her rib cage. He'd known of the Asari secondary sexual traits called breasts, of course.
He just hadn't known that they could be as big as a Turian's head or bigger until today, and he really didn't know where he should or shouldn't be looking. She had really big … eyes. Eyes as blue as the rest of her and that seemed to twinkle, eyes that a Turian like him could fall into and never climb back out of, with a crest framing her head that gleamed so brilliantly it might have been polished.
"Uhhhh," Iolus squeaked out.
"Ooooh, is that an Armax Arsenal 17A1 Phaeston?!" She chirped out excitedly in a surprisingly girlish-seeming voice for someone that was so big, and suddenly she was looking directly over him and gazing rapturously down at the assault rifle that he cradled against his chest.
"Uhhhh."
"It is! Goddess, I've been wanting to get my hands on one of these for years," chirped the gigantic Asari. "You are so lucky to have one! How well does it handle on a firing range?! Everyone says it's one of the best rifles to come out of Armax in the past five hundred years! Hey, is it true that even without a muzzle brake you can fire one of these at full auto for ten seconds and the muzzle climb will only throw off your aim by less than four centimeters at a thousand meters?!"
Iolus wasn't aware that he was backing up until his back actually hit the bulkhead behind him; he was really trying his hardest not to let the excitable giant Asari's very large breas-... chest touch his arm as she continued leaning over him and wow she smelled really really nice. It occurred to Iolus that he probably should be demanding to know why she was on the 1701, despite his heart trying its best to lodge itself into his gizzard.
"Uhhhh."
Unnoticed by Iolus, another Asari and a tiny female Turian were leading his partner away.
~~~~~~~~~~
Absentmindedly, a part of Tela kind of hoped that Faegan wasn't going to get that young Turian in trouble. Or worse, leave him heartbroken. The maiden could get excitable when it came to rare and hard-to-obtain guns, to put it mildly.
Still, Faegan made for an excellent distraction whenever Tela let her off of the proverbial leash, especially during times when her Council Spectre authority might not get the results that she wanted. Such as now for example, making her way through a Turian prison ship in the middle of a warzone in order to hopefully prevent a diplomatic crisis.
"I can't believe that you keep encouraging that, that behavior from her," Cloelia irritably grumbled as she fingered one of the collapsed pistols at her hips, looking as if she'd prefer to shoot their increasingly nervous guide rather than let the Hierarchy soldier lead them through the ship.
"Relax Cloe, let Faegan have her fun," Tela replied.
Cloelia's mandibles fluttered. "Boss, you know I hate that nickname."
Tela smirked. "Next time pick a better name. And besides, it's not like anyone's stopping you from doing the same; I've seen lots of people staring at those legs of yours. Or that big, fat, garbage scow of a-"
"Boss!!" It took a lot to make a Turian blush, given their thick carapaces. When Tela saw the blue hue creeping across Cloelia's face shortly after her mandibles began spasming, she marked another mental tally on her scoreboard.
"Just saying, the way you stomp when you get agitated doesn't help," Tela snickered. "Our humble private here has been sneaking a few peeks himself, given that wiggle you put in those wide, wide hips."
Said private let out a faint choking noise when Cloelia turned a glare on the soldier that could peel the paint off of a tank. Naturally, Tela threw her head back and cackled, which was when they finally reached the entrance of the prison ship's cell block.
It wasn't perhaps unusual that an entire unit of soldiers was guarding said hatch. That could definitely be excused given that the Turians were at war with an unknown alien race, and even the well-disciplined Turians had their occasional troublemakers… but these soldiers clearly looked nervous and twitchy about something.
"Identify yourself," snapped one of them, who strode forward to challenge Tela and her remaining sidekick.
"Council Spectre Tela Vasir, on assignment by the direct orders of the Citadel Council to take custody of the alien prisoner being kept here," she replied, still smiling despite the sudden suspicion that something definitely wasn't right. The Turian soldiers immediately began looking uneasy and spooked. That was something that Tela was used to. She had a well-earned reputation for being one of the Spectres that was sent in when the Council wanted something done in ways that were often splashy and violent. Tela was very good at 'splashy and violent.' It was her thing.
These Turians didn't just look scared, they looked ill. And not the funny kind of ill that happened whenever someone other than a Krogan was dumb enough to try and drink Faegan under the table.
"I… I'll need to pass this up to my superior officer," the sergeant said evasively, and immediately Tela sighed.
"Look. I really don't have all day," she began as she dropped the pretense of humor. "Right now, Admiral Licinius is busy getting his crest ripped off by a Council rep, a few of my fellow Spectres, and probably a couple of your Primarchs. I'm here to take the alien you Turians captured into custody before he has time to give any more really stupid orders that could get more people killed."
The Sergeant's eyes slid away from Tela's and he sucked in a breath.
Tela didn't like that, and dropped one hand to the gun at her hip and primed her biotics. Beside her, she felt as much as saw Cloelia do the same as several of the Turians hefted their weapons.
"See, reactions like that tell me that the good Admiral might've already given another really stupid order," Tela coolly continued. "So Sergeant, I recommend that you and your unit forget whatever really stupid orders that you've been given and move aside, before I'm forced to conclude that I might have to do something really unpleasant."
"... Stand down," the Sergeant quietly ordered his troops, and Tela very deliberately took her hand off of her gun. "Spectre Vasir? You should hurry. They're in the middle of interrogation."
Tela's eyes widened, then she swiftly strode for the hatch.
"Faegan, stop playing with that boy and catch up," she absentmindedly ordered via her teams' comms. "Enyala, be ready for immediate evac."
The cell block of the cruiser-sized prison ship was quiet, with only a small number of cells visibly occupied by either Turians or Auxiliaries. It made the pained cries stand out all the more. Cloelia's mandibles went right against her mouth as her thin lips peeled back in a snarl. Tela was calmer, but not by much as they hastened to the source of the commotion, the last row of cells.
There were four Turians there, two outside of the cell and two within it, and a lot of red blood splashed on the floor.
"Council Spectre Tela Vasir, drop the guns and I probably won't kill all of you," she barked. One of the soldiers whirled and raised a gun; with a gesture Tela biotically slammed him against the ceiling hard enough that his hardsuit crumpled on impact with the snapping of bone being crushed, then she drew her gun and took aim as she let the soldier's corpse hit the floor. Cloelia gestured and Pulled the so-called 'interrogator' from the cell, just as he paused in mid-swing with a truncheon still clutched in his hand. The Stiletto pistol in the dimunitive Turian's other hand help to keep the other two soldiers from getting any stupid ideas.
"I really don't like repeating myself," Tela said in a steely tone as Cloelia dropped the interrogator at their feet. It wasn't until Faegan caught up to them with her LMG cradled in the giant Asari's arms almost like a toy, that the Turian soldiers grudgingly collapsed their drawn weapons and tossed them to the floor, followed by their sidearms. For that, Tela was grateful; if Faegan felt the need to fire that LMG of hers things would get metaphorically and very literally messy, given that it was a weapon meant more for vehicles than soldiers. Plus Tela's ears would be left ringing for days.
With Faegan and Cloelia to cover the interrogator and his two surviving cohorts, Tela strode into the cell.
Then for just a moment, she froze as the alien prisoner spat out a mouthful of crimson blood and tried to pick herself up.
She looked so much like an Asari that it was intensely unsettling. The shape of her eyes, mouth and nose, the slender five-fingered hands, the facial expressions that so obviously showed fear and anger and pain…
Were it not for her pale skin, the red blood dribbling from her mouth and nose and the messy dark fur that covered the top of her head (almost like Quarian scalp fur), Tela could have walked past her on the street and would have thought of her as just an disturbingly familiar Asari maiden.
"This is a restric-" the interrogator started to say as he picked himself up off of the floor despite the gun Cloelia had pressed against his forehead.
Without looking, Tela shot him in both knees, sending him screaming back down to the floor. Almost immediately she chastised herself, because she only meant to shoot him once. Shit, she shouldn't have shot him at all - her pistols were modified to fire large caliber high-velocity rounds. It was a small miracle that neither bullet hadn't overpenetrated through his legs and ricocheted; her target wasn't even protected by a kinetic barrier. One of the soldiers nearly went for one of the guns scattered on the floor, only to freeze when he realized that Faegan's LMG was aimed at his chest and was one trigger squeeze away from turning him into an especially gruesome abstract art piece. The Turian wisely backed away and kept his hands very visible.
It was then that Tela realized that she was more pissed than she thought. Despite being a different species, the bruised and bloodied face looking up at her didn't look all that different from a face that she used to see in the mirror when she was just a few decades old.
"I really won't mind killing the rest of you where you stand," Tela heard herself softly say in a voice that suddenly sounded strange, even to her. She was grateful that her gun hand was still steady. "You really don't want to annoy me right now."
The Spectre then forced herself to collapse and holster her pistol before she shot someone else, then very carefully and deliberately approached the Somtaaw female that was trying to shy away from her.
"C'mon, we're leaving," Tela said as she held out a hand, then almost immediately cursed in the privacy of her own head because there was no way in hell that the alien could understand what Tela was saying. The girl sure as hell didn't have reason to trust a strange alien after getting the shit kicked out of her by yet another alien for however lo-
Tela Vasir blinked when the girl's hand closed around her own in a surprisingly strong grip.
"Oh. Huh. Okay then," the Spectre blurted out. Then she very carefully pulled the alien to her feet, noting the way she was clearly favoring her chest and one leg. Tela wasn't one that was typically comfortable with physical contact in most situations, but at that moment she stomached her distaste and let the girl lean against her and throw an arm around the Asari's shoulders.
Carefully, she walked the alien out of the cell, and noted that the other two Turians were giving emergency first aid to the Turian officer that had been interrogating the girl that she was taking to safety. The interrogator was hissing in pain, but still managed a defiant glare.
"... Fuck it," Tela found herself saying, and in a single smooth motion she drew her pistol one last time, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. The officer's eye burst in a blue spray and the back of his head exploded, showering the floor behind him with gore as he collapsed to the floor one final time.
The girl squeezed herself all the harder against Tela's side, but she still stared at the corpse until it was out of sight.
~~~~~~~~~~
The girl was creepy in how Asari she was for something that definitely wasn't an Asari, how much she looked like Tela and it was disturbing her more and more with every passing second, which made Tela angry, which made things all the more disturbing because the alien girl was picking up on it and getting agitated and that was bothering Tela even more and it made her really want to fucking hurt someone.
It was worse once they got the blood cleaned off of the alien's face. It was like someone had gone back in time some two hundred and fifty-something years and kidnapped a much younger Tela Vasir fresh from one of her asshole father's 'lessons on discipline,' and replaced the speckled cobalt blue skin she'd had with a tone that was more… sort of a pale beige kind of a color, with hints of that weird Batarian color that had white mixed with a little red; she couldn't remember what it was called. Her mouth was Tela's, from the downturned corners to the split lip oozing blood. Her broken nose was Tela's, just like it'd been the first time she'd had her nose broken. The hard, distrustful glint in her grey-green eyes… Every time Tela looked at her, it was like she was looking into a mirror, and her hands would begin to shake and her heart leaped into her throat and she remembered the beatings, the screaming, being told over and over that she wasn't good enough that she'd never be good enough that she'd be just a stupid Asari whore like the mother that had left them, that she should be thanking him for not just tossing her out with the rest of the garbage until the day that she'd finally had enough and-
So Tela hid in her personal quarters while her team tended to the Somtaaw girl's injuries and desperately tried to calm the fuck down before she put a biotically-empowered fist through something or someone, because being angry was so much better than going to pieces over some shit that she'd thought she was long over. However she was discovering that just burying something deep down inside to never see the light of day wasn't exactly 'getting over it.'
The way that Cloelia and Faegan both began giving her that cautiously uncertain look when they took over getting the Somtaaw girl to the infirmary 'So you can report in, Boss,' did not help, not one damned bit.
It occurred to the Spectre that she probably should make an attempt to report in to the Council, but she desperately needed to get it together and get her head back on straight first.
In her mind she saw the girl curled up on the floor of that cell and her mind went right back to the way she used to cower in her bedroom and the next thing Tela knew her biotic amp was beeping as her biotics surged dangerously out of control as her heart tried to explode in her chest, and it took all she had to pull herself back from the edge of a panic attack before she triggered a biotic nova in the middle of her own damn ship. Almost too late to do any good, she frantically began the breathing exercises to help her calm down.
"S-Serrice Ice Brandy…" she whispered to herself between deep breaths. "Aged for a hundred and eleven y-years… in casks made f-from the wood of the Sha'ira trees that grow along the coasts of the Serrinian Sea. The inside of the casks are lined with frozen mineral water… to a thickness of .. of six centimeters. The brandy is added whe-"
A beep at the door to her quarters interrupted her mnemonic trick for calming herself, but that was okay; Tela was mostly cool and collected by then. She still briskly rubbed her face to obscure any sign that she might have been crying, because damnit she was Tela Matron-Fucking Vasir and one of the baddest and toughest bitches to ever get squeezed out by another Asari. She was a Spectre, not that helpless traumatized kid, not anymore. She checked her reflection one last time, then with a self-assured nod, made her way to the door.
~~~~~~~~~~
"So, uhh… Boss," Faegan tentatively began, but Tela cut the much-larger Asari off before she could pry.
"What's the Somtaaw girl's condition?" she asked authoritatively as she began striding for the ship's infirmary.
"Ah… well Boss, those Turians worked her over pretty good," Faegan said after a moment's hesitation and began to follow, her much longer legs allowing her to easily keep up with the older Asari's swift stride. "According to the Doc, the Somtaaw alien's physiology seems so much like ours that if it wasn't for the fur on her head and her skin being the wrong color, she could be a Maiden. Near as she can tell, broken fingers on one hand, bruises for days, might have some busted ribs too. You know, the usual 'beat them until they tell you what you want to know' shit." The Spectre let out a contemptuous snort at that.
"Figures. Soft-headed idiots," Tela muttered. "The girl's a matron-fucking alien. There's no way in hell that whatever she speaks is something we can figure out anytime soon." Melding was always an option of course, but using a meld that way was practically an art form. It didn't just take practice to use a meld in that way, it took a certain type of Asari to really do it anything close to effectively.
Tela knew herself well enough to know that she was definitely not that kind of Asari. She didn't even like melding; she had… trouble, letting herself be that open to anyone, and the few times she had hadn't gone well because of her issues. She didn't dare suggest that Faegan make the attempt, because the sort of finesse required by that sort of meld definitely wasn't the enormous young Asari's strongpoint.
Hell, Faegan once accidentally broke someone's hip during a one-night stand. The maiden was many things but gentle was not one of them.
"Actually Boss, I don't know how, but she seems to know some Palaven Standard," Tela paused in mid stride to stare up at the younger Asari, who responded with a shrug of her broad shoulders, "enough to manage. Couldn't tell you if her people were learning it to try and negotiate with the Turians or if she picked it up on her own in between violent beatings."
"... Well then, that'll make things easier," Tela mused thoughtfully.
Then the two walked into the infirmary, and almost immediately Tela's eyes narrowed as she took in the sight of the Somtaaw girl, sitting upright on one of the beds. She'd been stripped to the waist and her chest was carefully wrapped in compression bandages to hold her ribs in place. The girl happened to notice Tela's stare, and glowered right back at her. One of her grey-green eyes was nearly swollen shut, but the bruises and cuts on her face and bare arms had been carefully cleaned. It made it easier to bear looking at the girl and keep old and unpleasant memories pushed down deep enough to not affect her self-control, but…
"Is she wearing one of my tops? Are those my pants?" Tela said indignantly.
"She needed something to wear that wasn't stained with blood and grime, Spectre Vasir. You happen to be the closest to her in size, and I don't just mean in height and body shape," the ship's medic dryly commented. T'lessia was an older Asari, almost to her Matriarch years in fact. It showed in how she moved, how she spoke, how unflappably calm she always was, and in this particular instance, how she was built. As if to emphasize her point, she very pointedly glanced down at her own sizable chest, then looked at Faegan, then stared very blatantly at Tela's chest.
"I hate you all," Tela grumbled.
"... I hayte hue all," the Somtaaw girl very carefully parroted in a crude approximation of High Thessian, which had Tela taken aback. The Spectre blinked twice. The girl's tongue placement was off, and she wasn't quite putting the proper emphasis on vowel sounds, but…
"... Shit, Boss, she even sounds like you," Faegan said wonderingly, then almost immediately the big maiden nervously shied away when Tela glared up at her. "I'm uh… I gotta go clean my gun now." She swiftly turned and retreated from the infirmary so fast, she nearly forgot to duck to avoid hitting her head on the hatch frame.
"So T'lessia," Tela grudgingly said in Palaven Standard, and almost immediately the Somtaaw girl perked up, "how's our guest?" The ship's doctor quirked her brow, then replied in the same language.
"As near as I can tell she's badly dehydrated and has been beaten nearly to death," T'lessia replied in the same dry tone as before. "Other than that? Why, if her skin tone was different, I'd say she reminded me of you after that mess on Chalkhos."
"Fucking Terminus Warlords and their cattle shit; don't remind me," Tela grumbled with a roll of her eyes. That hadn't been a pleasant assignment.
"Terminus Warlords," the Somtaaw girl parroted a second time, eerily mimicking Tela's accent almost perfectly, then just before the Spectre could get creeped out, "The Turian asked things about 'Terminus.' I do not know this word."
"He was likely fishing for wherever the Somtaaw Homeworld is," Tela neutrally commented. "Your people have embarrassed them. Good for you, by the way. They've been needing to get knocked on their asses for a while now."
The girl let out an amused huff, and the corner of her mouth quirked up in a bitter little smirk.
"The Turian is many, many years too late and many, many light-years too far away to find either Hiigara or Kharak," she replied. "Our Homeworlds are dead and dust."
Tela kept her face impassive, though on the inside she winced. Nevermind that the girl mentioned two distinct worlds, but claiming that they'd been destroyed. For a moment, she wondered whether their worlds had been lost to ecological disaster like the Drell, or if they'd been ousted like the Quarians were… then decided that at the moment, it didn't matter.
"Well… sorry to hear that," she said as sincerely as she could manage, "but unfortunately, right now I've got much bigger concerns. Namely, what it'll take to convince your people to stop this war with the Turians."
"That… is difficult," the girl said with an expression that Tela could only call troubled. "Am not Kiith-sa, not Clan Leader," she enunciated very carefully. "Am merely Kanya Somtaaw. Cannot speak for Clan Leader, and do not dare speak for Sajuuk."
Just like that, Tela knew that this shit was getting even more complicated, but she wouldn't be a Spectre if she gave up at the slightest obstacle.
"Okay, sure… Kanya," Tela said, taking her time pronouncing the girl's name or title or whatever, "but you're the first member of your people that I've been able to speak with. The Citadel Council sent me here to stop things from getting anymore out of hand. So I figure if I get you back to your people, you can get me a meeting with your Kiith-sa and we can-"
"No," Kanya all but hissed as she rose unsteadily to her feet, then waved off T'lessia's approach before the older Asari could attempt to steady her. Tela very deliberately did not go for her gun, but it was a near thing, because the hard look on the girl's face was only too familiar.
"Too late," Kanya continued somewhat breathlessly, but she met the Spectre's eyes without flinching. "Ecks… Exec... Slayer Benyamin Somtaaw, already reported to all Kiith-sa and One-Who-Speaks-For-Sajuuk. Sajuuk - He Whose Hand Shapes What Is, come, very soon now."
"Okay, so…" Tela began. She did her best to ignore Kanya name-dropping someone who was called 'Slayer.' People with that kind of title tended to be problems, but that was a problem for Future-Tela Vasir. "This… Sajuuk or Shaper, is what, the leader of your military then? And they're over your Clan Leader, this Kiith-sa?" Tela's mind was racing, because if these Somtaaw were only a fraction of Kanya's people and one of their military leaders was on his way, then this already fucked-up mess was well on its way to becoming a matron-fucking disaster. The more information she could get, the better informed the Council would be, and if they could get the Turians to stand down before this Sajuuk-person and their fleet arriv-
Of course, the very moment Tela Vasir thought that alarm klaxons began screaming all over her ship. Turning on her heels she immediately sprinted for the bridge, inwardly thankful that she hadn't yet peeled out of her hardsuit just in case she was about to dive into another combat situation.
"Enyala, sitrep!" Tela barked as she opened a comm channel to the cockpit, and absentmindedly realized that Kanya was right on her heels despite the alien's busted ribs. A much larger concern was that her pilot wasn't answering. "Enyala!" she yelled again, but still nothing.
When Tela got to her frigate's cockpit, she found her pilot deathly pale and staring dumbly at the holographic screens hovering in front of her face. Tela fully prepared to verbally tear a chunk out of the other Asari, then froze as something caught her eye.
There were hundreds of … of panels of light, just hovering in space, so massive that even thousands of kilometers away, their distinct shapes were obvious. The ship's sensors couldn't make sense of them, but they were bright enough that they filled the cockpit's viewports with distant twinkling orange stars. Most were squares, though the bigger ones were massive rectangular shapes.
Then ships began emerging from them.
Some of them were the Somtaaw ships that were supposed to still be several light-minutes away… but most of them weren't, instead being distinctly different. There was that two-kilometer-tall monster of a ship, drifting free of one of those big rectangle energy fields… then almost a half-dozen more just like it, just with different paint schemes and subtle differences in profile.
There were hundreds of ships as big as dreadnoughts or bigger disgorging from those fields. Some of them were fat and ungainly seeming things, others that looked as if someone had made a ship to look like the blade of a knife then covered the thing with weapon emplacements. There were ships that looked like they were covered in bronze or gold, ships that disgorged smaller craft by the dozens, but there were two ships that dwarfed everything else.
The first was a ship so big that Tela had trouble grasping that it could even exist. It was a behemoth of a ship, its golden hull broken by a band of vibrant red. It was so big that the other alien ships were very clearly giving it space, so big that the only thing Tela could think was that there was no way that any of the Citadel's capital ship berths had a prayer of being able to handle that thing.
"Sajuuk has come," she heard Kanya reverently whisper at her side.
"That is Sajuuk?" Tela was proud of herself. Her voice didn't break. Not even when her eyes drifted to the even bigger thing that hovered just above that massive ship. "Then what the hell is that?" Tela pointed at the thing. Her mind refused to call it a ship. It couldn't be a ship. It had to be a space station or something… which was pretty terrifying all by itself. If Kanya's race could FTL a matron-fucking space station… The Spectre ended the thought rather than let it continue to its inevitable question, because she wasn't sure if she could handle asking it even in her own head.
"That is Kharos," Kanya said in the same soft tone. "Named for the lost world. Kharos shelters the children of Hiigara, as it did when its builders first carried the children across galaxies to Hiigara."
Tela couldn't think of what to say. She could only stare at the thing that was so big it dwarfed every space station that she'd ever set eyes on, save for the Citadel itself. She'd had doubts before, but at that moment, she was absolutely certain that the Turian Hierarchy had just poked something that they damn well should not have.
What she didn't know is whether or not all of them would pay for it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Okay, that's it for the prologue! Time for me to go back to work on my other stories (I really need to stop starting new projects and just focus on my current ones, but my muse just found a new dealer so...)
Edit: due to borking my math a bit (or a lot) regarding the dimensions of the citadel in comparison to the Progenitor Mothership, I've adjusted the last paragraph of this chapter.
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Alexander Snow
Mad Artificer
So how big is the citadel fleet? Because they don't have nearly enough gun
Guardsman_Sparky
The Clueless Wonder
- Location
- Virginia
I'm just imagining Crappus or whatever his name is trying to order his ships to attack the new Homeworlder fleet, only for the bridge crew to immediately mutiny and hogtie him, then calling the Homeworlders.
"Hi, yes. Our leader is an idiot. We'd like to surrender please."
- Location
- Pale Blue Dot
Oooor... you have someone going "Oooh! Hugest ship! We obviously have to decapitate them by blowing it up." And manages to damage it. I suspect that would tip the whole situation into "holy war" territory.
Or, even worse, you have both happening in two different ships, if the Turian admiral orders it to happen. Even if "dead captain" then "advance quickly to the rear and get back to base" is more probable. Turian rule #1 seems to be "follow orders". Sanity, laws etc seems to be at #2 and below, if you go by canon - at least for most. Not all. Garrus comes to mind. Obviously suicidal orders for no good reason.... eh. Could go either way.
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- Location
- California
It was at this point Tela knew, they were fucked.
Unoriginal I know, but there is nothing else that encapsulates how badly the Turians messed up. Also, Tela might have won some brownie points with Kanya for letting her see her people's fleet. It's not much, but it should help the adoption process.
- Location
- The Hub
...I want Faegan to step on me.
- Location
- Pale Blue Dot
The good thing is that the council is now very much shown as how they really are, diplomatically speaking.
"Weak target and nobody's looking? STABBING TIME!"
"Oh, powerful entity? We're veeeeeery peaceful and diplomatic and whatabouttradeandspies?"
Basically, only really possibly trying for diplomacy once the military situation is not in their favour, and after having acted like violent thugs a few times already? The word of the Council will be worth approximately... nothing. Which has always been mostly the case, but they often manage to hide it.
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Hexcalibur
Not So Ordinary Sword
- Location
- Somewhere
- Pronouns
- It
Now that makes me wonder what they'll think if they saw a Death Star from Star Wars or planetoids like Dahak from the Fifth Imperium.
- Location
- California
Tbh, I'm not sure diplomacy will save the day. Like, I could see the war going on for years if only because Somtaaw can't find Turian worlds as they don't understand the Relay system. A lot of people will die in the crossfire.