2157 AD
Shanxi System
L2 Orbit around Shanxi Colony, Geosynchronous above the capital city of Taiyuan
Kosovo-class frigate SSV Masada
Lieutenant Commander Hannah Shepard, Executive Officer SSV Masada, was honestly somewhat bored. She was near the end of her current shift as Officer of the Watch, and as amazing as it was to be dozens of lightyears away from Earth, sitting in the command chair of a warship (just like she had always dreamed!), watching atmospheric shuttles going to and fro on the readouts and listening to her Comms Station confirming the clearances of anyone that would be remotely close to her ship's airspace.
As often happened when she had no immediate, engaging duties to perform, she allowed her mind to drift to her daughter. Her beautiful Cassandra, her incredible little miracle, had turned four just before her deployment. The party had been wonderful, phoenix and fire themed, which had caused a bit of a stir amongst the other mothers and some of the fathers. Most people expected ponies, or princesses, or unicorns, or something of the sort, but that wasn't what caught her Cassie's attentions, oh no! No, she had (somewhere) come across the immortal firebirds of rebirth and decided that they were the greatest thing she had ever heard of. Drawing them since she was old enough to hold a crayon, and reading (or, more accurately most of the time, having her parents read to her) every piece of material she could get on them.
It was all very bemusing to her, but Faolan had been absolutely thrilled with the fact that his darling princess wasn't like all those other girls, wasn't like every other daughter on the base. The loveable fool had actually taken to using it as a point of boasting to the other parents whenever possible, not that anyone seemed to take it all that personally. It wasn't as if the other parents didn't brag about their own children whenever possible. It was exasperating, but endearing, and she loved him all the more for it.
"Relay activation! We have a ship coming through from Theta!" the sudden cry of the sensor officer on watch drew her sharply from her thoughts, and she straightened, glancing quickly at the transit schedule in her omnitool, though she already knew what it said. There wasn't a ship due any time soon, not for the whole day in fact. The moment spun out, before the officer spoke again. "IFF confirms new arrival is the science ship RV Alexander Fleming. Commander, she's been damaged. I'm detecting breaches in the hull, and she's leaking air."
"Hail her immediately!" Hannah ordered, getting to her feet and hastening over to the communication station, leaning on the console beside the officer on duty obeyed.
"Alexander Fleming, Alexander Fleming, this is SSV Masada, do you read me?" the young woman asked, and Hannah frowned as the call went unanswered. So did the three following it, the final one broadcasted 'in the clear', which meant entirely without encryption or scrambling of any kind, before the officer finally looked up at her with worry in her eyes. "There isn't any sort of response ma'am, on any channels. I'm not even picking up emergency Morse pings."
Hannah nodded with a reassuring smile that felt distinctly hollow, patting her on the shoulder and instructing her to keep trying before making her way back to the command station. Sitting down, she was silent for a long moment before looking up again.
"Bosun!" she called, and an older man rose from his console and turned to face her.
"Bosun's Mate, aye sir." He responded, and she took a deep breath before saying the words that she had hoped not to say for a long, long time.
"Sound General Quarters."
"…Aye, sir."
Sitting back down, he reached into his shirt, extracting a long, thin silver whistle on a chain and lifting it over his head. Chain dangling, he tapped several buttons on his console before placing the whistle to his lips and blew. The clear, piercing sound rang out from every speaker aboard, and as the final notes faded he flipped open a clear, plastic cover to reveal a key and a button. The first was turned, the later was pressed, and a loud, dolorous clang began to resonate as the Bosun spoke into a microphone, speaking strong and firm and clear.
"General Quarters, General Quarters! All hands, man your battle stations! The route of travel is forward and up to starboard, down and aft to port! Set material condition 'Zebra' throughout the ship!"
"Helm, break orbit, get us underway towards the Alexander Fleming. Comms, I want to talk to the captain of that ship the instant we're able to do so. Sensors, keep your eyes on that ship and that Relay. I want to know the moment it so much as looks like another ship might be coming through."
"Aye, Commander. The rest of the squadron breaking their own orbits or patrol routes and laying in courses for the Relay as we. The Warsaw will take the longest to arrive, nearly an hour." The Sensors officer responded, and Hannah bit her tongue unhappily. The heavy cruiser, under Captain Raginis, was the flagship of Patrol Group 77, and the fact that it was currently on the farthest point of it's route was a problem. Frankly, she would have kept Warsaw in orbit where it could react to any point in the system relatively quickly, but Raginis had been concerned about looking lazy or cowardly and allowed that to influence his thinking. And far be it for one almost-freshly-minted Lieutenant Commander to try and correct an experienced, senior-grade Captain on his tactical and strategic thinking.
"What about the rest of them? And where is Captain Evans?" Hannah asked, referring to her own ship's commanding officer, only to be answered by the hiss of the bridge door sliding open. Shooting to her feet and saluting, she abandoned the command chair as it's rightful owner finally arrived and slid into it. "Captain Evans, ma'am!"
"At ease, Shepard. Bring me up to speed." The tall, willowy brunette ordered briskly, and Hannah obeyed, providing every scrap of detail that she possessed. The moment she finished speaking, Sensors piped in.
"Ma'am. Scanning has sharpened up as we closed, I can confirm the presence of carbon scoring on the hull of the Alexander Fleming indicative of weapons fire, and other signs of battle-damage on top of that. Her comms section is badly damaged, which explains the lack of response to our hails, but I honestly don't think that they can hear us either. Gaixia, Numantia, and Katsurayama will rendezvous with us within ten minutes. Chamkaur, Alamo, and Osowiec over the course of the thirty minutes after that."
"Get a Kodiak in the air, I want them on-board that ship and talking to me as soon as possible. Comms, provide Captain Raginis with our new information. Keep us at minimum safe distance, if something comes through that relay I want us to be able to manouver!" Evans ordered, and there was a flurry of motion as her orders were carried out or transmitted to those that would. A Kodiak shuttle, with a fire-team of marines and a pair of engineers, was in the air in under two minutes, arcing towards the heavily damaged science ship at emergency military power, even as it continued to limp away from the relay at a speed little better than that which it would have been moving with nothing more than emergency reactive thrusters.
The next hour was a tense one, filled with periodic increases in relief as the squadron continued to coalesce, but that relief quickly vanished as the team aboard the Kodiak, who had had to cut their way into the Alexander Fleming, finally reached the bridge and reported in.
An attack by an unknown alien race, in force, with no attempts to communicate. A multi-way communication conference between the squadron ship commanders, the commanding officer of the Shanxi garrison, and the planet's governor was promptly called to discuss the situation, a small cluster of images on the screen of Evan's console.
"I don't see that we have any choice but to declare a Case Zulu, Governor. It would be unreasonable in the extreme to assume that an unknown race, one willing to attack people they have never met before without so much as a single attempt to communicate, wouldn't follow them through the relay eventually." General Williams sighed heavily when the Alexander Fleming's third officer (the captain and the XO having died in the attack) finished his stuttering report. Poor kid probably wasn't even in his mid-twenties yet, and had just seen all kinds of hell.
There was a moment of painful silence as they all digested that. A 'Case Zulu' was an emergency code amongst the Alliance Military. Perhaps the emergency code, the only one that had never been used, not even as part of a drill. It had one meaning, and one meaning only: Invasion Imminent, All Forces Respond.
"I have to agree, governor. The most important thing right now is to send a message to Arcturus Station. It could take days, even a week or two, for reinforcements to be concentrated, never mind deployed here. We also need to evacuate as many elderly, women, and children as we can. Every non-military ship that can fly needs to start making runs further into Alliance space with as many people as they can hold." Captain Raginis agreed, and the harried-looking middle-aged man in charge of the colony ran a shaking hand through thinning hair, nodding unconsciously in acceptance and agreement. "My squadron will do their best, but depending on the numbers and tactics of the invaders, we may not be able to prevent enemy forces from making landfall. The less people in the crossfire at that point, the better."
"Very well then. General Williams, call up the militia and begin distributing arms. I want your regulars at the spaceport and local aero-space fields to help maintain order during the evacuation. As of this moment, I am declaring a State of Emergency and Martial Law. Any and all resources on this planet necessary for evacuation or to resist foreign invasion are now under military control. Captain Raginis, I am trusting you to call for the local defense squadrons as you require them."
The two men nodded, and Hannah quietly brought up the relevant information on those squadrons for her own perusal, while her superior continued to plan the evacuation and defense of Shanxi, should it prove as necessary as they all believed it would. Two full Air Divisions, six entire wings, of mixed small craft were assigned to Shanxi, dedicated to defending the planet while Patrol Group 77 (or whoever was assigned to the area) was patrolling out-system. Four wings of interceptors, one wing of heavy gunships, and one wing of bombers. A significant number of small-craft to dedicate to a system as freshly-settled as Shanxi, but this was the very edge of Alliance space. Between communications lag and the dispersed nature the Alliance Navy was, by virtue of it's small size compared to the amount of stellar distance it was responsible for, forced to adopt…well, as Raginis had said, any reinforcements might be days or weeks away at any given time. A large ground-based aero-space defensive force that could see off minor threats and slow down larger ones long enough for help to start arriving had been the solution of choice, until they could expand their fleet and defensive satellite networks further.
"Relay activation! Ships coming through from Theta!" Sensors called out for the second time that day, and all turned their eyes to viewports or sensor readouts, hoping against hope that it was more ships from the research and exploration squadron. Alexander Fleming had not been the last ship standing when it had fled, after all, so surely some others might have been able to escape?
It was a naïve hope, one that bordered on delusional, in all honesty. After all, none of the ships had the ability to fight of warships, and they would have come through the relay long ago, within minutes of the Alexander Fleming's arrival, if they had been able to escape the invaders.
"All ships, activate barriers! Arm weapons! Whatever comes through that relay, we will give it one chance to stand down, and then we blow it straight to hell!" Captain Raginis ordered as the conference broke up, images fading away as excess signals were cut in response to imminent battle. "I want all local aero-space units ready to launch, but stay on the tarmac until I give the order! There is no reason to display too much of our hand too quickly!"
"Barriers online. Guns, warm up the spinal and point-defense systems. I want all torpedo tubes loaded and ready, but keep the ports closed for now." Evans ordered calmly, before glancing over at Hannah. "Shepard, get down to the auxiliary bridge."
"Aye, aye, Captain." Hannah nodded and saluted before hastening to obey. The auxiliary bridge, located in the deepest part of the ship, was manned only when battle was imminent. As the executive officer, Hannah would command the Masada from there if the main bridge and it's crew were killed or injured during combat.
As she made her way through the ship, Evans' voice echoed through the halls via the intercom.
"Two ships, frigate weight. Captain Raginis is attempting to hail them…they've opened fire! All hands, brace for weapon's fire and combat manouvers!"
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Captain Tarquin Avilius of the Hierarchy frigate Arrow grimaced slightly as another barrage of cannon rounds from the fleet of the unknown criminal race swept through space that his hastily manouvering ship had just moments before vacated, staggering slightly as two struck her barriers regardless. Cleaning up the rest of the oddly-unarmed fleet that had been opening the relay had taken more time than expected, for they had scattered like frightened pyjacks the moment the patrol group Arrow and her sister-ship Lance belonged to had attacked. Indeed, even now the two cruisers and four frigates that were the rest of the unit were still on the far side of the relay collecting survivors, what few there might be. Unfortunately, that meant his ship and that of fellow captain Aulus Calvus were now confronting a half-dozen frigates led by a heavy cruiser all on their own.
Not a winning proposition by any stretch of the imagination, not even for the mighty and talented Hierarchy Navy.
"Barriers are down to forty-three percent, Captain. Lance is taking hull damage, she's venting into space! With all due respect, we should withdraw through the relay and rendezvous with Admiral Livius." His operations officer didn't say the words urgently, but there was a note of earnest haste in his tone, and he couldn't resist the slight expression of distaste that crossed his face. Not for the officer specifically, or even entirely for his advice, but for the implication therein. Even though he knew, intellectually, that this was not a fight that they could win (Spirits, he had just been reflecting the same fact to himself moments ago!), his pride and training told him that he should stand and fight. That no race so new that they had never been seen before could possibly stand before the Hierarchy.
But pride and fervor, while able to turn tables and allow the righteous to push through disadvantageous positions, could not change the immutable laws of science. They were out-numbered, out-gunned, actively being out-manouvered, and were in enemy territory.
"Agreed. Inform Captain Calvus that I intend to cover his retreat through the relay and then follow him through. As Lance manouvers to withdraw, I want us running a parallel course to try and shield them." He ordered, his bridge officers quickly moving to obey. Through his view-screen, he watched as Lance responded, the damaged frigate turning away from the enemy ships in an effort to limp to safety. Beneath his feet, he felt his own ship rumble into motion as it sought to interpose it's own barriers and undamaged armor between ally and enemy. All that he had to do was hold long enough for Lance to reach the relay, and they would be able to regain the advantage and bring this race to justice and into the fold of the Hierarchy.
Alarms sounded as a swarm of new icons appeared, and Tarquin closed his eyes with a sigh as his sensor's officer announced the launch of several dozen torpedoes. Broadside on to the enemy squadron as he attempted to shield Lance, more than half of his point defense was now useless, and his ship was now a very large target indeed. If that many warheads didn't destroy Arrow outright, she would be crippled and defenseless against follow-up cannon fire.
At this point, the only hope was that Lance would make it through the relay before the unknown race brushed aside Arrow's wreckage to tear her apart as well. In his final moments, he wondered if perhaps, this time, the Turian Hierarchy had found an enemy that they should have left alone.
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1 Month Post Invasion
Fen River Basin
12 Miles outside Shanxi's capitol of Taiyuan
101st High-Altitude Shock-TroopEr Company, Drop-Site E
19:00 hours
Master Sergeant Faolan Shepard grunted as he hit the ground, quickly hitting the emergency releases on his null-grav harness, sending the bulky form of the combined eezo core and reaction thrusts thumping to the ground. All around him, his fellow HASTE troopers were doing the same and scanning the area around themselves, even as more and more of their comrades continued to rain from the skies, failing like hail from the drop-ships Admiral Drescher had dispatched the moment she had engaged the occupier's fleet in orbit. Glancing up, he could see, through the light cloud-cover, the two glittering swarms of the battling fleets, streaks of light and blooming pinpricks indicating their gunfire and it's resultant destruction.
"Welcome to Shanxi, Eagles! The platies are dug in tight, with vehicles and heavy turrets set up around a trench system, in the middle of which are the bunkers they've set up to use as their main base on-world. Now, the boys and girls that survived the occupation and the regular troops are going to link up in Taiyuan and make a push across the plains in a frontal assault, starting in an hour. Our job is to soften up the platie defenses and cause some havoc before the hammer hits them." Major Sink, the 101st's commanding officer, said over the radio, and there was a rumble of anticipation at that. The last month had been tough on all of them, sitting aboard ship and waiting for the Navy to get them into the goddamn fight.
God, that reminded him, Hannah was on Drescher's flag as her advisor, and he prayed for her safety. For their daughter's sake. Brevetted to Captain for her actions during the opening days of what the press back home was already calling The First Contact War, she was probably the only naval officer still alive that knew how to fight the invaders, and that made her too valuable to leave behind with Cassie.
His own presence here was accidental. In the scramble to gather sufficient forces to liberate Shanxi, he had slipped through the cracks instead of being sent home. Not that he regretted being in the fight, but if this battle went poorly, his baby girl might find herself an orphan in a matter of hours. Oh, her grandparents would raise her well, loving and patient and stern, but that wasn't really the point. The point was, he didn't want to put his princess through that, and tightly gripped the confident knowledge that Drescher had been ordered to preserve her forces (especially her flagship, SSV Tai Shan) and their experience fighting the platies if the battle turned against them.
"Now, Admiral Drescher and her Navy pukes are up there, pounding these bastards into scrap. All to the good, but the Navy has been doing all the goddamn work this entire godforsaken incident, and I'll be damned if the real soldiers don't make their own mark! Hooah?" Sink continued, getting a unified 'HOOAH!' in response from the gathered troopers. "Good! Now get in there and kill some of those fuckers for me!"
The 101st raised their rifles and advanced, intent on fulfilling their purpose and their unit's motto: Rendezvous with Destiny.
Three hours later, amidst the burning hulks of tanks, turrets, and bunkers, surrounded by the dead and the dying upon ground soaked with blood of red and blue, the tattered remnants of the 101st met their destiny, and their fates. Overrunning the shattered occupiers' desperate last stands and shooting at the fleeing platie shuttles with everything they had, as the deck guns of the Turian dreadnaught The Shield of Palavan brought the sky itself crashing down upon them.
Faolan Shepard died fighting, love and hope for his wife and daughter the final thoughts he would ever have.
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1 Month, 10 hours After Invasion of Shanxi
System 314
15,000 kilometers from Relay 314
Matriarch Benezia of House T'Soni had been all over the galaxy in her many centuries of life, and seen an incredible number of things. She had met dozens of races, visited thousands of star systems, walked on the surface of hundreds of worlds. She had seen governments rise and fall, wars and peace, political movements and ruthless oppression. She was one of the most trusted and respected individuals in Citadel Space, and one of the most followed Matriarchs in the whole of the Galaxy. Hundreds of maidens tried to become her Acolytes every year, and the number of influential and powerful people she counted as friend was…rather high. It would not be an exaggeration to say that rumours of her assignment to a diplomatic duty, never mind actually arriving and performing said duty, had brought opposing parties to the table.
All of which was why she had been chosen for her current task, and none of which made her feel any more comfortable with the situation. After all, she had never been handed the mission of trying to prevent a newly-discovered race from declaring war on the whole of the Citadel because the Turians had gotten overzealous and slaughtered a fleet of civilian researchers for opening a Relay. And as if punishing a race for breaking a law they didn't know existed in the first place, perhaps one of the most absurd and brainless moves she had ever heard of, wasn't bad enough, they had gone ahead and invaded a planet. Bombarded it's cities from orbit when the new race (humans, according to the reports she had read) had possessed the sheer temerity of refusing to roll over and surrender when a foreign star-nation had killed their people and invaded their home!
Now the Turians had lost an entire Sector Fleet (unless the last few ships fleeing the humans now managed to escape) and were trying to deploy the entirety of their military might. It was unconscionable, and she had made her opinion clear to her many, many friends in the upper echelons of every galactic government. Not that her words had been required to chivy The Council into action, Tevos had been furious, and Valern had been less than inclined to support Sparatus. Thank the Goddess for Salarian caution.
"Relay activation, ships passing through." Her personal cruiser's captain reported dutifully, and Benezia felt an upswell of trepidation as she turned to face the massive pronged shape of the mass relay that dominated the view-port. Or, rather more accurately, to face whatever ships were passing through. The second crawled by, before the captain spoke again. "Confirming the arrival of dreadnaught The Shield of Palaven, cruisers Thunderer and Defender, and the frigate Swift. They're all heavily damaged, Matriarch, barriers gone and leaking significant air."
"Inform the Turian ships that they are to withdraw at best speed. I don't want them within three relays of the negotiations." Benezia ordered immediately, resisting the urge to scowl at the distant warmongers, the sight of them reminding her exactly how they got into this situation. Typically, Turian zeal for enforcing the law and protecting Citadel space was helpful, if occasionally exasperating. Now, it could prove nothing short of utterly disastrous.
"Relay activation! Ships passing through! Unknown signatures! Readings suggest three cruisers and nine frigates. Turian ships are attempting to manouver…unknown ships are firing!"
Benezia and her trusted crew could do nothing but watch as the human ships (and they had to be human, it was the only thing that made sense) ruthlessly tore the battered Turian ships to shreds. Escape pods and evac shuttles were few and far between, likely a testament to the quantity of damage and casualties that those ships had taken in the fighting within the human star system. They watched with a hitch in their breath as human targeting systems swept the tumbling wreckage and barely-moving evacuee transports, but despite their wrath the humans didn't fire on them. Admittedly, they went to no effort to collect them either, merely orienting themselves against the Radiant Wing and it's protectively-hovering escorts.
"Significant readings from the relay, Matriarch! Unknown ships entering the system! Ten…fifteen, twenty, thirty…forty-five, fifty ships! By the Goddess! What have the Turians gotten us into!" the captain sounded deeply shaken, more shaken than Benezia had ever heard her, but the Matriarch found that blaming her friend and acolyte would be unreasonable in the extreme.
The human ships had exited the relay behind their advance force in perfect formation, equal to any Turian fleet she had ever seen, and better than many Asari or Salarian fleets she had witnessed on manouver, centered as a precisely laid out half-moon around five dreadnaught-tonnage vessels.
"I need more information, Captain! What are we looking at!" she snapped, shaking the younger woman out of her reverie.
"Y-yes! Combined with the advance force, human fleet numbers stand at thirty frigates, ten cruisers, five dreadnaughts, and…five civilian ships? Mass conveyors of some kind, ammunition ships maybe? A-and four of the dreadnaughts, their readings are unusual. I'm not seeing any sign of a main gun along the spine." The captain reported, and Benezia frowned. Dedicating the material and element zero required to build a dreadnaught tonnage ship, but providing it with no main gun? Surely the humans hadn't indulged further in the madness the preliminary reports had mentioned about broadside cannons? "Goddess! Additional signals launching from the five conveyors and the four unarmed dreadnaughts. Fighters! They were carrying fighters! Two-thousand and rising!"
Benezia swallowed heavily, though she allowed no sign of her sudden throb of fear to betray itself on her expression. Her crew, and thus the squadron as a whole, was hanging together by a thread at this point. They had known that this race wasn't as small or as weak as the Turians seemed to have believed when they launched their invasion, but it was now obvious that this race didn't fight exactly like the Citadel either. No wonder the Turian fleet had been all-but-annihilated and forced into not just retreat, but a rout. Citadel point defense was limited, meant to target the powerful but slow and sparse salvoes of disrupter torpedoes that frigate wolf-packs made use of. Against hundreds or thousands of fighters, a Turian battle-fleet would very quickly find itself swarmed and torn to pieces. Pinpricks they might be, but a thousand pinpricks can bring down the mightiest beasts.
"Send the prepared message package to the human fleet in the clear. All ships are to maintain their current positions, barriers at full strength but all weapons systems inactive." She ordered with a thin veneer of calm, hoping that her efforts here would keep the galaxy from getting embroiled into a new war that no one needed or wanted.
The minutes crawled by slowly as the small squadron of Asari ships waited for the humans to respond to their peace offering, long enough that Benezia had begun planning how best to get her ships and acolytes out of this system to safety. Would the humans see her as a neutral party, trying to make a lasting peace, or would they see her as an ally of the Turian race and attack?
Then the response finally came, the image of a human matron appearing on screen. She cut a fine figure in her uniform, precise and martial, as she sat in her chair, but for some reason Benezia found her eyes sliding to the much younger, crimson-haired woman standing at her side. The maiden's expression was tight, controlled, but there was such grief and rage in her eyes that Benezia found herself taken aback.
"I am Admiral Kastanie Drescher, commanding officer of the Systems Alliance Second Joint Fleet. You claim to be allies of the invaders, here to broker peace?" the matron spoke with a voice of cold steel, and Benezia took a moment to consider her response.
"I am Matriarch Benezia of the Asari Republic, assigned by the Citadel Council to bring an end to this foolish and unjustified war." She said slowly, carefully. "While the Asari Republic is allied with the Turian Hierarchy, and both have seats on the Citadel Council, the Hierarchy engaged in battle without either informing the Council or seeking its approval. The Asari Republic, along with the Salarian League, have officially protested their assault on your people and vetoed any further action."
"Engaged in battle? Is that what you call the attack, without warning or communication, of unarmed civilian ships? Of their destruction, while ignoring their desperate attempts to communicate? Of invading the sovereign space of a foreign star-nation and killing its citizens for breaking a law that they didn't even know existed? Of bombarding their cities from orbit, reducing their homes to rubble and their bodies to ash, of exporting them as slaves even as you seek to enslave their entire nation?" Kastanie's voice started low, almost incredulous, rising to a shout as she rose to her feet, and Benezia swallowed again at the litany of Turian sins, sins that were either true or were madness to attempt to argue. What could she say in Palaven's defense? That making humanity a 'protectorate' or 'client' race by bloody conquest was fundamentally different from enslaving them? "Now, prim and proper and perfectly composed, you stand there and tell me that you are friends with such people? That you have formed a government with them, and with others? That you appear from the dark of space to stop the fighting at the very moment we are striking back? Convenient, is it not, that peace is offered only when we prove we are not lambs to be led to slaughter?!"
"Admiral, please! The commander of the patrol group over-stepped his authority greatly, and the Hierarchy overstepped again when they deployed an entire Sector Fleet against your people in response to you defending yourselves. My people in particular are furious that we were not consulted, that diplomacy wasn't given any thought until we forced it to be." Benezia responded in something close to a cry, spreading her hands in a gesture that was a cross between appeal and submission. "Yet, diplomacy is being offered now, and I beg of you to give it a chance. Defeating a single Sector Fleet is impressive, something that hasn't been done in centuries, but the Hierarchy has twenty of them! If this war continues, it can only end in the loss of unfathomable numbers of lives and Humanity's defeat. Let my people, let me, advocate for you and speak on your behalf. Let me help you find justice."
Admiral Drescher watched her silently, jaw working, for a short eternity before turning to the red-haired maiden.
"What do you think, Captain Shepard? After all, it was your squadron that was butchered in Shanxi's defense. Your ship battered into a wreck, your sailors and marines slaughtered. Your husband that died in an effort to push the invaders off our world, blasted from orbit as a parting shot when victory was already achieved." She asked, and Benezia restrained a groan of dismay, sending a prayer of protection to The Goddess. Someone with a deep, recent, profoundly personal loss was not going to help matters in the least. "Do you think we should rely on their friends and allies to bring us justice? Have faith in their desire to ensure a lasting and beneficial peace?"
"What do I think? What I want is to see how the Turians like having their civilians butchered, to have their worlds invaded and their people stolen, their cities bombed mercilessly from the sky! To hear their lamentations, to watch them identify the mangled remains of their wives and daughters, their fathers and sons, if remains could even be found! To go home, bloodied and battered and tell their baby girl that her father will never come home!" the maiden responded immediately, eyes burning with hate, and the mother in Benezia couldn't take issue with her words. Despite their separation, she knew how she would react to Aethyta being unjustly killed, how hateful she would be towards those who took her daughter's father away from the universe, and she knew Aethyta would do even worse were the situations reversed. Yet, to her surprise, the maiden closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath before continuing. "But I wouldn't ask for it, Admiral. I would never want to see us drown the galaxy in blood. That wouldn't be justice, but revenge. 'Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another even as God in Christ forgave you.' I want them to suffer, Admiral, as a widow and a mother, as a soldier and a human. But I won't have us become the same kind of monsters we fought."
"…well, it seems that Captain Shepard is a more admirable and merciful person than I." Drescher said after a long moment of silently staring with genuine surprise at the young woman, before returning her attention to the equally surprised, very surprised, and rather moved Benezia. "Very well, Matriarch. As the commanding officer for this theatre, I will accept your offer of a ceasefire and will pass on your request for diplomatic talks to open to my government. In the meantime, both of our forces will remain precisely where they are. Understand that, the moment I believe this has been some sort of ploy to wait for you to bring reinforcements up, I will turn you and everyone else on your ships into shadows and dust."
The signal cut out, and Benezia slumped slightly where she stood, running a hand over her face, before straightening again. Informing the captain that she was going to her quarters to compose her report back to the Council, she swept from the bridge as gracefully as she could, sailing her way sedately to her state-room and waiting for the door to slide shut behind her. Then she allowed the emotions to show, the shaking hands and unsteady legs as she made her way over to her desk and sat down.
It was strange, how affected she was by this. She had been alive for a long, long time. Brokered literally countless agreements, deals, treaties, and trades. She had fought as a commando, fought amongst commandoes, battled krogan warlords that had fought in The Rebellions and laid waste to slaver nests. Yet, despite all of her experience, one young race and the prospect of their wrath going unfettered left her more shaken than anything from her past.
Perhaps…perhaps it was because of the potential, good and bad both, the Humanity seemed to hold. Though young, they were obviously a highly capable race, one familiar with war yet willing to listen to peace. Crushing, no, annihilating a Turian Sector Fleet was no mean feat. Her words to Admiral Drescher had not been false in the slightest. On the other side of the credit-chit, however, was the fact that achieving peace was nothing short of vital. Such a capable race, if they engaged in a state of total war against the Turians, could drown Citadel Space in blood. A level of carnage that had not been seen since the Rachni Wars or the Krogan Rebellions.
The Asari and the Salarians would be forced to aid the Turians, against all morality and justice, or else risk the Traverse and the Terminus Systems taking the chance to attack the weakened Citadel. Everything that the Citadel had achieved over the last two-thousand years would be washed away by a crimson tide.
She glanced to the image of herself and her daughter, standing beside the solo portrait of her estranged bond-mate, and felt an adamantium resolve take a hold of her. If she failed to broker peace, if she failed to convince humanity to let the Citadel seek justice for them, her daughter and Captain Shepard's could well find themselves trying to kill one another on a battlefield one day.
Turning on her terminal, she started crafting the most important report and series of recommendations that she had ever written. No one else was going to die for this, no one else was going to lose the ones they loved over the misunderstandings and missteps of Relay 314.
#######################################################
Six Months Post-Shanxi
Fen River Basin
12 Miles outside Shanxi's capitol of Taiyuan
The First Contact War Memorial
The high, mournful notes of what the humans called a 'trumpet' rang out across the silent, black-clad crowd, and Benezia was glad that she had asked specific questions about human mourning practices when she had accepted the offer to visit the memorials and funerals of those killed in what the humans now called The First Contact War and what the Turians continued to insistingly call The Relay 314 Incident. Asari mourning garb tended to be richly colored, a celebration of the lives of those they mourned, which (she had been told) would have been deeply offensive to humans. Seen as a celebration of their deaths, a lack of mourning. Far from the impression she wanted to give.
Beside her, the silent form of her Little Wing stood, head bowed respectfully as 'Taps' played, still a little shaken from the sudden series of three volleyed gunshots that had rung out not a minute before. Done, Benezia had noticed, with old, pre-eezo weapons. Three spent cartridges had been placed on the flag that shrouded the casket afterwards, which (according to her research) represented the three martial virtues of duty, honor, and sacrifice.
On her other side stood Hannah Shepard, something that would have shocked her not four months ago. The woman whose husband was, spiritually and metaphorically speaking, being buried here today, and whose right hand was gently but tightly clutching the hand of the silent, confused and heartbroken, red-eyed and tear-stained child by her side. Little Cassandra, struggling to understand everything that was going on, but knowing that the ultimate purpose of it all was to say goodbye to her father, forever.
Somehow, over their mutual desire for, and efforts to secure, a lasting peace for their daughters, they had struck up something that was (if not yet a full-blown friendship) at the very least a healthy mutual respect and appreciation for one another. In fact, the older Shepard had been assigned as her escort and, essentially, attaché. Their daughters had become tentative friends, Liara's genuine gentleness and Cassandra's relative youth allowing them to bond when an older child might have rejected and hated her child for Faolan Shepard's death, no matter how little sense it would have made.
The time since the end of the conflict had not been without it's difficulties, many amongst humanity baying like rabid dogs for Turian blood, but cooler heads and the provision of steep reparations had carried the day. There was resentment there, resentment that spilled to the rest of the Council races for not 'doing enough' to punish the Turians (and the less said about how Humanity had reacted to the knowledge of the Genophage, the better. That had almost kicked of a war again on it's own, and led to an immediate and universal ban of Citadel ships entering the airspace of populated human worlds for the forseeable future), but there was also a kind of…wary approval.
Approval that the Turians, for all their attempts to politically minimize the events of the conflict, returned. Even the Turians that hated humanity and considered them a violent, unpredictable race that wasn't ready for the 'tranquil' galaxy the Turians had lost so much blood defending respected their tenacity, fighting spirit, and innovation. She had it on very good authority that the Turians were designing their own version of the human Fleet Carriers, though with a typical Turian flare to it. Smaller, more dispersed flight decks protected by heavy armor, rather than one large and lightly-armored one, for example. A surer sign of approval, even if it was bitter and grudging, could not be found amongst the Turians than their willingness to copy something military related from you.
She watched as the casket team folded the flag in precise movements, trapping the three cartridges at it's heart, before handing it to their officer and saluting. She, in turn, marched over to stand before Hannah, offering it to her in white-gloved hands, saluting to her as she took it.
"Captain. The loss of your husband was not in vain. He gave the ultimate sacrifice, offering his life on the altar of war for the sake of peace and security for all of mankind. He is a hero, and shall be remembered as such. Please accept my gratitude and my condolences, and those of every officer and enlisted under my command." The woman said quietly, genuinely, as Hannah pulled the flag against her chest, nodding slightly and silently in appreciation of the words.
As the officer made a precise about face and marched back to her subordinates, the high, mournful wails of what the humans called 'bagpipes' washed across the field, and hundreds of throats followed the human priest into song.
"Amazing Grace
How Sweet The Sound!
That Saved A Wretch Like me!
I once was lost, but now I'm found!
Was blind, but now I see!"
######################################################################
Eternity Lounge
Illium
Aethyta, disgraced Matriarch of House T'vala, watched the extranet feed as her estranged bondmate and their precious daughter stood beside the crimson-maned human and her daughter, burying the woman's husband. Or an empty casket at any rate, the fucking Turians having turned him to ash by bombing their own base from orbit instead of just retreating like decent, morally conscious sentients.
How she wished she could be there, helping Benezia through this situation, helping Liara handle the grief of barely understand what it was that her mother had helped put a stop to. But she couldn't. The angry words that she had spoken when Benezia had refused to support her and her ideas, her hopes and dreams for their race, could never be taken back. Anymore than the words Benezia had spoken to her, the mockeries echoed by the other Matriarchs, could be taken back.
Watching as the service ended, watching her Little Wing move to embrace both humans before gently taking Cassandra over to a chair and sitting with her, helping her deal with the grief of a loss the poor child wasn't yet old enough to truly understand, though her distant daughter was hardly more matured, by Asari standards, she came to a decision.
Rift with Benezia or not, she would reach out to Hannah Shepard. The woman's husband had died a hero, and she had come close. Now she was front and center for the entire galaxy, humanity's emblem of heroic defiance and heroic loss alike, and the vultures (human and Citadel both) would soon be circling.
If there was one thing she was better than Benny, it was keeping vultures at bay and dealing with them if they kept on pushing. And neither the woman nor her kid deserved to deal with that sort of nonsense.
########################################################################
Propspective SPECTRE Trainee Nihlus Kryik
Hierarchy Training Ship Citizen's Duty
Nihlus couldn't help but hum the song that had been part of the human memorial for the 314 incident. It hadn't been catchy, hadn't even had much of a beat. Just a droning that seemed almost mystical, low and deep. So, perhaps it was more fair to say that he was humming the cadence of the words, words he had listened to enough times to memorize.
Lay me down in the cold, cold ground
Where before many more have gone
When they come I will stand my ground
Stand my ground, I'll not be afraid
Thoughts of home take away my fear
Sweat and blood hide my veil of tears
Once a year say a prayer for me
Close your eyes and remember me
Never more shall I see the sun
For I fell to a German's gun.
Nihlus had no idea what a 'German' was, there wasn't anywhere near enough information about humans available to the wider galaxy yet despite Matriarch Benezia's best efforts, but that didn't really matter. What mattered was the words and the meaning behind them, words and meaning that he considered to be profound in their simplicity. Humans, he had decided after listening to that song, were little different from Turians. Though they had fought, it was due to a mistake, to foolishness, not because of irreconcilable differences.
That song, the call to stand your ground without fear, thinking of your home and your people as you fight and die to protect them? No different from what any Turian would do, no different in fundamental meaning than many a Turian song.
His fellow Turians probably wouldn't agree with him, but in that moment he had decided that Humanity had a great future amongst the Citadel and it's people. Perhaps, someday, he would fight alongside them himself. Perhaps, someday (he smiled a little at the thought) he would be a SPECTRE, fighting alongside a human SPECTRE. Delivering salvation and peace to the people of the galaxy as friends and allies, not as enemies.
Laughing softly at himself, he shook his head.
Best not to get ahead of yourself, boy. You still need to pass training and get selected for candidacy. He reminded himself, glancing at the chronometer and heading for his bunk. It was late enough as it was. He needed to be asleep, not daydreaming.
Spirits new the trainers wouldn't cut him a break for staying up late to watch human memorial services.