Jackson walked over the carnage that remained of the colony. It had been devastated and right now the army was searching the shattered husk of civilisation.
"Lot of damage." his visor lit up with a small image of Luna his EDI or Enhanced Defense Intelligence spoke to him over the mental link an advanced computer that interfaced directly with his brain.
"I've seen over a thousand gun shots, and no trace of radiation burns. Say what you will, butthis was not the Hierarchy."
"Lovely." Jackson said looking a dead body over noting that it had some form of hole in it. "Can you tell what killedthis man?"
"Hard to tell," she said after a half second "I sense a large temporary cavity was opened but its hard to tell accurately what kind of weapon caused it. Nothing we have on record thats for sure."
"Damn, a new alien race opens the proceedings with war."
"Commander." Jackson turned to face the Spec op's trooper behind him, Willem had a long service under his belt and had been fighting the Hierarchy his whole life. Took a radiation blast from a Grunt radiation shot gun about three years back and had almost half his face replaced with the silvery metal of Novus, the metal meshing with the flesh with ease.
He also took the opportunity to have an addition installed the three, three inch sensors that were just below his eye that currently lay flat on his face which gave him some scanning ability.
"We found some recordings, some unknown alien race decided it be fun to raid our world." The sensors flipped on his face in rage "The videos show them taking people alive and torturing some of the defenders. Nasty stuff."
"Do we know where they went?"
"No sir. Colony's Assemblers had yet to get some basic flow fields up and interplanetary sensors were a lower priority compared to that."
"Did we kill any one?"
"At least one. The video shows he got too close to a blade trooper. But they cleaned up their dead so we couldn't get any samples, they clearly knew this was a first contact."
"Well my orders are to get ourpeople back, time to find them."
"Ya now we get to play big Goddamn hero!" Luna added.
"Shut up." He pointed a hand to his head to let Willem know he meant the AI not him then he pointed back to Willem. "Find what data you can find and send it back to the ship, I'm going back to have the Cruisers perform some long range patrols."
"Sir." Willem saluted and he turned around and walked off to search for the data and report it to the capital ship in orbit.
Jackson moved though the colony till he got to the landing pad. He stepped onto a small shuttle which thenlifted off and set course towards the cruiser Alexander in orbit.
SHIFT
"Erug." Chris slowly stood up, the last thing he remembered was falling asleep and now he was here and his head was pounding.
Strange voices speaking in strange languages surrounded him as he tried to stand up.
"Easy, easy." the AI he had synerged with said in his head. "Don't know what happened but we took a pounding."
"Don't think I don't know that?" he muttered back as he got up into a seated position only to find a alien looking at him.
It had orange skin, a wide set mouth, big eyes, and, things, on its head.
As his surprise grew the alien raised a hand with a smile.
Another odd voice spoke seaming to scold the orange one and a blue skinned alien with what looked like a squid on her head appeared in his vision. She shooed him off and sat down in front of him.
Chris looked around.
It was some sort of cage with a number of different alien races in it. Though he was the only human. The Alien cleared her throat and he turned to face her. She had some kind of dark purple tattoo on her face that framed it. She pointed to her self to give her name.
"Helmi." she pointed to him.
"Chris." he said back slowly unsure of his location he was sure if his head hurt less he would be panicking.
She then pointed to a second blue skinned girl then to her self showing the name of her species."Asari." she pointed at him.
"Human?" she nodded, Chris may not know but he sat across from a former linguist before the ship she was on was taken in the Terminus Systems. She knew no one had met this race before and the Batarians had to go and fuck up first contact.
SHIFT
"Sir leaving FTL in 12 seconds."
"Look alive." Jackson said as the Alexander left the blue glow of the Mass Effect fields as the mass catapult's effect wore off. The catapult was newly activated so they assumed the invaders had activated it.
"Good shot." Jackson commented as the Alexander began to move though the void of space.
"Ping the whole system with active scanners lets make our selves known gents."
The Alexander sensors flared with a flash of light across the visible spectrum as they flared into life scanning the system with their immense power. They found two ships.
"Sir two vessels, one of them a Cruiser the other a Frigate sized vessel orbiting around the localgas giant."
"Put us in orbit and set all men to combat stations and ready the EMP cannon."
SHIFT
"Any idea if the Turians are going to let us go?" Captain Mafin'Elm Vas Wanderer said as she took a drink though her suits feeding tube.
"Don't know sir, they think we may have activated the mass relay and you have to admit it looks bad." Helmin Kalm said back he was head of the marine detachment to the small Quarian exploratory vessel.
"We didn't though we showed them are history, hell we let them pick though are systems to prove we had not!" Her arm shot up.
"No need to tell me ma'am."
"Sorry Helmin." she said sheepishly "I'm taking my frustration at the bosh'tet out on you."
"No need to tell me ma'am." He said with a smile and a happier tone of voice.
Suddenly alarms screamed. "Unknown cruiser detected!"
The Alexander emerged from FTL 12,000 Kilometers from the two vessels. Before the surprised Turians could react the front of the ship glowed and a gout of lighting exploded out of the controlled EMP cannon shorting systems and frying computers, aboard the Quarian ship.
"What the hell going on!" the Turian Captain yelled as the pulse of blue energy flew by them and their systems dimmed.
"Sir a DEW just missed us and hit the Wanderer. We got hit by the edge of it."
"What?" the captain was shocked how the hell could they do that? A direct energy weapon of that size? And power?
"What did it do? The Wanderer looks unharmed."
"Unclear. Sir the ship is approaching us."
"Open fire." he said calmly the shock of the unknown gone as he now slippedinto the state of mind required for the battle he knew was coming.
The Turian ship Battle swung around and fired its spinal mass cannon. The shot was absorbed by the shields and the Alexander responded with a hail of rounds blasting out from three dozen gun points on the ships hull.
The blue trace of Mass Effect Autocannons lit up space. With a bore of 240mm they were not nearly as powerful as other weapons available but their rate of fire and numbers made them very effective along with the fact they were currently formated to fire ASR, or anti shielding rounds. Basically the same as a disrupter round. The rounds and their sheer rate of fire tore the Battle shields apart.
"Shields down to 20 percent sir." The captain nodded. What ever their weapons were they packed a punch.
"Break engagement and prepare FTL drive."
The Battle swung round and its drive flared into life as the maelstrom of rounds tore into them. Alexander shifted its guns to the APHP protocol. Or the Armor penetrating high precision.
The guns took five seconds before each shot to get a good target lock and began shooting at engines.
The Battle took some good hits but it managed to get away.
SHIFT
Jackson huffed.
"Damn I wanted to get them both." Luna added over his head set.
"How do you know that either of them were ourtargets?"
"I didn't, thats why I aimed to disable the ship. Why the Emp had to miss the cruiser I'll never know."
"The distance was a bit much." Luna added as an observation.
Jackson nodded from his place on the command deck.
"Right, now send the modified first contact package I want to talk to them, so I can interrogate them."
-Codex Alliance weapons and Protocols-
Alliance ships are built with a large number of far smaller guns then what the council accepts to be viable. The standard weapon of the Alliance is the Autocannon with a bore of either 240mm on the low end and 390mm on the high end. Additional a secondary spinal weapon is added often a EMP gun, black hole bomb, or a massive field inverter that can generate either a massive shield or fire an almost one ton projectile at speeds approaching light speed.
The thing that makes autocannons viable are Protocols.
The Autocannons fire so called tech shells stored in 'buffers' similar to what the Vertigo class electronic warfare unit uses save much larger. The tech shell is a self contained unit of nanobots who in the three seconds before firing, and the reason for the one round every three seconds rate of fire, recieve the programing for the protocol then adjust it self based on the protocol.
Depending on the programing uploaded its behaviour changes. The ASR protocol adds small scale EMP functionality though the reconditioning of the shell to hold more fragile electronics adversely effects its penetration power while APHR both makes the shell take a more dense form and reshapes into a conical shape, and changes the programing on the gun.
The list of unclassified protocols are.
ASR:Anti shielding rounds
APHP:Armor penetrating high precision.
FW:Fragmenting warhead
DR: Deforming round
Antimatter round
