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/-/ 7th November 2183 /-/ Milky Way /-/ Serpent Nebula /-/ Widow System /-/ Citadel /-/
/-/ Command Deck of Pan-Human-Union/XCOM "Survivalist" Class Frigate "Omaha" /-/
Jane Shepard averted her eyes a moment too soon and her retinas caught the after-glare of another vessel violently exploding. The after image of the Reaper's main THANIX cannon was burned into the back of her eyes – she could feel thefinal moments of the vessels crew as they died violently.
Some were incinerated outright by the controlled ferromagnetic beam as it sliced the vessel forward to port and then across to starboard.
Others were killed by the explosive aftermath. A few by sudden decompression, some impaled by debris – others suffered a slow strangulation in space as shock forced their bodies to inhale in raw vacuum.
Shepard's eyes rolled in her skull as she felt the afterglow of pain and loss flow through her, forcing her mind back into the dark recess she had created a century and a half ago to hide her psyche from the sheer horror of the battle before her.
Another war, the First Ethereal war. Another race hell-bent on the systematic annihilation of every species they could find for their own perverse goals.
"Holy HELL, That was the 'Valentines Kiss'!" Pressly swore aloud as he too held on to the edges of his crash-couch – watching the scores of Pan-Human-Union vessels, Turian warships, Asari warships and a rare few Salarian vessels attempting to fight off the 2 kilometer long form of Sovereign and it's allies.
The hull shuddered as the Omaha took another, lesser blast from the enormous flotilla of Geth warships the Reaper had brought with it from beyond the Persius Viel – but the vessels Primary shields held against their less than impressive plasma rounds. In the molded crash-couch of the pilots seat Flight Lieutenant Jeff "Joker" Moreau was blasting curses both physically and mentally into the void, despite the man's assured non-psionic status he had little to no mental barriers and was busy mixing his own piloting skill, scathing insults, professional knowledge of his enemy and sheer anger at the fact that -YET ANOTHER GODDAMN ALIEN WAS SHOOTING AT HIS BEAUTIFUL FUCKING SHIP- so loud almost every psionic crew member on the deck could hear him.
He rapidly moved a series of holographic interfaces using both his hands and retina targeted motions to reposition the Omaha to present her primary weapons to the enemy, the 790 meter long "Frigate" turned on a dime, pouring primary power from it's three Elerium power plants into the twin spinal mounted Particle accelerator cannons that ran down the ships cental line.
Split seconds later the ships already dimmed lighting faded out completely for milliseconds as the combat lights and other non-essential systems shut down so the Mass Effect compressed Superconductive coils that allowed the particle accelerator to achieve it's gigatons of space-borne destruction into birth.
Sheppard watched as the twin white beams surged forth from the ships nose and impacted against their target – a Geth "Dreadnought" twice the size of the Omaha. It's kinetic barriers registered for a moment as the Particle beam dispersed against them, and then pierced through – burning through the Armour of the offending vessel and burning through decks, power conduits and data-cores. No atmosphere vented from the ship, the Geth simply didn't need to have one – so the internal fires didn't catch or burn for even a fraction of the time they would have done on an organic vessel. What did happen however, was the internal and external lights on the Geth ship dimmed and the Mass Effect cores deep within the ship ruptured – unable to hold their keep against the several million ton vessel, the Dreadnought simply split apart along it's previous heading through the conservation of motion.
Moments later the wreckage of the first ship impacted on another, acting akin to a giant shotgun. The second vessels kinetic barriers held for moments longer until they too failed and the second ship was impaled by the wreckage of the first and both vessels where incapacitated.
"Weapon officers!" Pressly called aloud to the dozen or so other crew members along the Omaha's corridor like bridge "I want a Plasma Barrage along these co-ordinates so we can move in towards the Citadel!"
Along the Dozen monitors, the navigation holo-pit and Joker's own displays a dozen targets where marked for annihilation by Superheated Plasma-fire.
"Joker!" Pressly continued "Give me line of fire on that god-damn super-dreadnought as soon as you can and send the firing patterns to every P.H.U in the fleet, I want that thing DEA-"
Pressly never managed to finish his sentence however, as his voice was overpowered by the thunderous roar of inhuman tones, the Reaper Sovereign had finally managed to hack the Pan-Human-Union Naval data Arrays linking each ship's combat intelligence systems, and a new voice threaded with hatred, superiority and death flooded through the decks of every single ship in the Widow system regardless of race or purpose.
"WE IMPOSE ORDER ON THE CHAOS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION. YOU EXIST BECAUSE WE ALLOW IT. YOU WILL END BECAUSE WE DEMAND IT. NOW DIE."
The effect was universal – Jane knew exactly what it was, and technically as a Psionic she was supposed to be immune, but she could feel the clutches of the mechanorganic being known as Sovereign clawing at the edges of her mind.
Indoctrination.
Her grasp on the steel grips of the crash-couch tightened as her inner light flared. To those not initiated or non-believers of Psychic powers, the force of will imposed from within flares out through the eyes and palms as a purple/blue glow that spreads and expands where the user demands it, much like the blue/white glow of Citadel Biotic abilities.
But no Biotic could achieve what she and a thousand other psychics in this battlefield could do – it was a simple ability, a means to enforce one's own will against external stimulus, not too unlike the indoctrination the Reaper battleship was successfully pushing through every open comm channel, video link and even the vacuum of space itself as the impossible ripples of not-heat spread across the dull blue crustacean shaped starship.
Waves of Psionic "Solace" spread from herself and the thousand other Human Psychics – forcing an aura of calm aboard every Human vessel, and a few non human ones where XCOM had allowed psionic operatives to be placed – in effect she was forcing the entirety of Sovereigns indoctrination into herself and cancelling it out so the others around her would not have to bear it's burdens. An ability that unfortunately had a cost to pay as blood began to ooze from her tear-ducts and every inch of body hair turned bone white from root too tip.
The effect however was instant – Human vessels began to separate themselves from their Combat Intelligence networks and operate independently – turning what would have been a rout into a renewed fight.
The Pan-Human-Union fleet turned half their attention towards the Geth, and the other half towards Sovereign directly. It needed to be stopped at all costs, not just because of the rest of the Reaper fleet waiting in dark space but for what this meant for Humanity having suffered 36 years and 6 billion lost souls at the hands of the Ethereals and their thrall races and the ADVENT coalition to create their Avatars to fight these ancient machines.
Now however, the Ethereals where long dead, and Humanity was all that stood between the Reapers and the systematic extinction of every sentient life-form in the galaxy.
Particle beams cut paths across space, splitting Geth Vessels asunder. Pulse lasers and beam lasers lanced from point to point at the speed of light itself. Coilguns and Mag Cannons spat out thousands upon thousands of mass effect field contained depleted uranium slugs per second, green/blue plasma-fire cut between ships which was then followed by Fusion beams and launches of Elerium enhanced nuclear warheads and yet humanity was still being cut asunder.
A death by inches.
Pan-Human-Union ships where shattered by combined Geth fire, turned upon by Citadel ships now indoctrinated by Sovereigns wrath, or worse still – decimated by the Reaper itself as it lazily turned a tentacle every so often and cut a blood red line against the purple hues of the serpent nebula.
XCOM shields, reverse engineered from ADVENT shield-bearers so long ago and upscaled to capitol-ship sizes could only withstand for seconds before they failed against such an onslaught. The kinetic barriers beneath them failed in even quicker time, and the Human vessels so often flaunted by the Citadel races as being an affront to the treaty of Farixen churned, boiled and burned.
Tens of thousands dying by the second. Yet XCOM and Pan-Human-Union ships continued forward as they burned themselves apart.
"Distance to enemy ship 50 thousand kilometers and closing!" Joker yelled from his crash-couch, as he keyed in the mathematics required to fire the twin particle accelerator cannons the weapon control teams did their best to move and fire with VI support to keep the Omaha free from enemy fire.
"I Have a firing solution!" Joker yelled aloud, he didn't want or need authorization to fire as the twin particle accelerator cannons spooled up, the combat lighting dimmed again and the Omaha spat force the dual streams of apocalyptic energies.
Nanoseconds later, too fast for most sentient minds to accumulate, let alone react too – almost every other surviving XCOM and Pan-Human-Union vessel fired in unison.
The void between the Human ships and Sovereign wavered and par-broiled as the beams of energy combined and coalesced together and punched at 99% the speed of light and impacted the reaper and the combat view screens where blinded by the combined energies, even the holo-pit's sensors before Pressly and Shepard couldn't tell them if the offending vessel had survived the barrage.
A heartbeat later however, they did.
The human race never knew the capabilities of the Reapers, only that the Ethereals feared them to the point of nearly driving themselves extinct to perfect their psionic energies to not only withstand indoctrination, but also fight back against them. Before they could go extinct however the Ethereals then moved through the stars at STL speeds moving from world to world culling entire species, destroying their culture, languages and even their genetic codes as a means to belay or reverse their self imposed entropy so they -could- still fight the eldritch machines. The last race to nearly suffer this fate was Humanity, and although the Citadel and it's races thought the tales of the First Ethereal war, ADVENT Occupation and Second Ethereal war where fabrications with "some" elements of truth they never truly believed the fact that the Prothean race had never built the Citadel nor the Mass Relay network.
Humanity however knew that fear of extinction all to well, the events that started in 2015 and cascaded through to 2041 had wiped out three quarters of the human race. 6 billion souls lost. Now the fate of the galaxy may hand trillions more to a future worse than death itself.
The holo-pit's fuzzy white spheres of projected energies faded and the shape remained, illuminated in blood red target recognition reticules – not only was Sovereign undamaged, it had taken the full brunt of the attack against it's hull instead of it's impressive shield arrays, an act the arrogant machine-god simply did not need to undertake.
For the first time since 2019, on the bridge of the Temple Ship where Jane Shepard had thought she had saved the human race by shunting the entire vessel somewhere . . . outside of reality, she felt fear.
"THIS IS WHAT YOU FACE. WE KNOW THE GIFTS THE BACTERIA RACE LEFT TO YOU AND THE UNIVERSE BENDS TO -OUR- WILL."
Every word cut like a knife through the skulls of every Psionic human in what remained of the combined fleets – despite the Solace fields projected by those with the ability to do so, they could feel the claws and desperate biting, gnawing, devouring presence the Reaper was projecting against them.
"NOTHING STANDS AGAINST US. WE ARE YOUR DESTINY."
Sovereigns tentacle machadendrites twitched and targeted the Human fleet and the Omaha directly.
"END."
"Evasive Acti-" Joker started as the Omaha fired it's emergency thrusters, but the action was a moment too late – the Omaha caught the ferromagnetic blast from it's forward plating, cutting directly through the main Particle cannons and moving up through the crew quarters. The primary shield arrays had sprung to live but failed under the sheer power of the weapon and the kinetic fields had done the same.
Fire erupted from the ships midsection and Jane Shepard's world lurched violently to the left, her vision was filled with sudden, painful white light and she passed into unconsciousness.