Going In For Guns: A Memoir of the Reaper Wars

Book 1: Intercept Course

Maj. Christopher "Nice Boots" Z. Valentine

Systems Alliance Marines Tactical Aerospace Command (ret.)

Systems Alliance Naval Intelligence (aux./ret.)

Citadel Office of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance (aux.)

All good things have to come to an end. I could have happily spent hours more in that cockpit, perhaps familiarizing myself with the training mode of the Mantis, dead arm or no dead arm. But as amusing as my enthusiasm for the gunship was, the pilots did have a card game going, and I could hardly keep them from it for long.

Just an hour or so.

Marie shook her head as we clambered out of the gunship along with Trick and Cornstarch. "I've created a monster."

"Tell me about it," complained Trick. "I haven't been quizzed so hard about the cockpit since academy."

"Don't feel bad." Cornstarch elbowed Trick with a grin. "At least he didn't know what you got wrong."

"You..!" he exclaimed, before catching himself. "I know my damn cockpit."

"Yeah, but they quiz on standard, not custom."

Trick just rolled his eyes and scoffed. I frowned. "What am I missing?"

Cornstarch chuckled. "Academy classes are based on the factory setup."

"Which no one, and I mean no one, uses." Trick gave me a look. "Little tip. If you want to fly the Mantis, brush up on your VI programming."

I filed that away for my list of 'skills I would need to learn from scratch' as we buttoned the gunship back up. "Got it. Anything else?"

"Brother, I could do an extranet series on the subject." He laughed. "But right now, it's back to taking Munchkin's money." At my slight frown, he smiled. "Tell you what, though. Come on back later and we'll see if we can't get you looking like a sure pick for gunship training."

This cheered me up quite a bit. "Sounds good."

"I get the feeling you know what you're going to try for," mused Marie as we headed away from the hangar.

"I'd call that a safe bet." I took another swig of the Paragade, one that did little but wet my mouth and make me wince at the taste. A wave of weakness crashed over my body, forcing me to grab at a zero-g translation handle. Unfortunately, I tried to do it with my dead arm. "Whoa!"

Marie was right there to keep me from cracking my head open on a bulkhead, grabbing my arm and yanking me upright. Something popped in my shoulder and I gasped in pain. "Are you okay?"

I gave the shoulder an experimental roll, suppressing my wince at the pain. "Yeah, just feeling a little weak."

Her brow furrowed in concern. "Let's get you back to sickbay."

I couldn't argue the logic. Just the same, I couldn't keep a frown from spreading across my face. "Yeah, I guess that's a good idea."

She snorted. "Buck up. I'm sure Dewey will let you out again."

"Do you try and injure yourself?" asked Dewey after Marie left me in his care.

"Not especially, no."

"News to me," he grunted, pressing his fingers about my fleshy shoulder, drawing a few winces from me. "Well, you should be fine. A little RICE and the regenviruses should clear this up by the end of tomorrow"

"So…sprain?"

"Sprain." He started rummaging through some drawers for bandages and cold packs. "Keep it as still as possible, all that jazz."

I sighed. "A few hours out of this place and I'm down another arm. I hate to think of what I'd do if I was looking for injuries."

"If it makes you feel better, you can at least use your hand." He started wrapping up my shoulder.

"Some, yeah." I flicked open my omnitool, bathing Dewey's face in orange light.

"Gah! Have you been working with the AR functions on the Heimdalls?"

I suddenly realized that I hadn't spent any time on that at all. Way to stick to the plan, Valentine. "Uh…no. Why do you ask?"

"Because you nearly put my eye out with krogan/asari fetish porn."

"HEY!"

"Sorry, sorry. Erotic art."

I had never wanted to strangle a doctor so much. It's probably a good thing I had, at most, 40 percent of a working set of arms. "I have not been looking up porn."

He scoffed. "Right, right. What is that anyway?"

"A Concise History of Citadel Biotics." I skimmed over the latest page before groaning. "Which happens to have an embedded file of some krogan and an asari getting it on. Oh, for the love of God." My arm twitched towards a facepalm, but Dewey kept it immobilized.

"Seems more exhaustive than concise to me," he opined with a grin. "Or maybe exhausting. It can't be easy to float like that."

I winced. "I don't suppose you'd find it in your heart to be quiet?"

"And especially not to hold position against those thrusts." He finished wrapping my shoulder and bent down to look at the omni's screen. "Whoo. A two-hour video?"

I closed the file. "Why would they need that?"

"They say the extranet is for porn after all." Dewey busied himself with putting away the unused supplies. "Joking aside, you should start playing around with the AR. If nothing else, it'll let you check your omni without the light show."

"Yeah, I'll do that." I rummaged through files until I found the list of mnemonics. A quick set of blinks removed the orange glow from the air. "Was that it?"

He laughed. "Well I certainly can't see it."

"So either you've gone blind or I got it right." Dewey rubbed his chin. "What?"

"Nothing, I'm just crunching some numbers."

I winced, smelling the incoming joke. "Do I dare ask on what?" I've often thought that my need to see humor through is one of my larger personal failings. At least it elicits the most groans.

"The probability of my going spontaneously blind versus your getting the mnemonics right."

I really couldn't help myself. "And?"

He smiled. "Would you be so kind as to give Alenko a call?"

I laughed. "Jackass. I should have stayed on Tiptree."

He opened his omni, interfacing with mine. "How is the virtual projection?"

I stopped myself from shrugging myself into further injury. "Pretty solid. I don't know that I could tell the difference if it didn't remove a light source."

"Good." He peered at his projected screen. "Everything seems to be in order…why don't you cycle through some of the other functions?"

"Might as well take advantage of the time, huh?" I looked at the list. "Let's try AR, I guess." Another timed series of blinks and a stunning variety of information was overlaid on the world. A quick glance over at an auto-surgeon highlighted it and provided it's model number and other salient information, along with a tag providing an extranet link for further information. "Wow."

"Cool, huh?"

I nodded slowly, turning my attention back to Dewey, learning his first name (Steven), his age (38), that he was indeed a Commander in the Alliance Navy, he was from the UNAS back on Earth, and a great deal more besides. "Yeah. I could see it getting overwhelming, though."

He nodded. "It can be. Most people end up fiddling with the settings on the AR mode to get to a level of mist they feel comfortable with." At my raised eyebrow, he clarified. "AR users have taken to calling the entoptic data that overlays the world 'mist'."

"Mist." I rolled the world about in my mind. "I can get behind that. What's the relative level that I'm at?"

He checked his omni. "On the very low end of moderate."

"You have got to be kidding."

Dewey smiled. "Oh no. But then people simply can't filter everything the Heimdall's AR interface can throw up."

I sighed. "Why would you put that much in then?"

Dewey gave me a disappointed look. "Well, obviously you wouldn't want to have it all up all the time. That's why you tweak it to only show the parts you want, when you want. Your settings are currently pretty static, with only basic information."

"Basic, huh? So all of these tags are normal, Steve?"

That got a laugh out of him. "You have no idea how long it's been since someone called me that. Seriously, it's been Dewey or Doc for months now. And yeah. It's nothing you couldn't find with an omni, just presented differently."

"And without the work."

"Well, not on your end. There's a LOT of work that went into that on the software, hardware, and wetware sides. But it is pretty intuitive for the end user."

"Thank you Doctor Dewey," I sing-songed.

He wiped an imaginary tear from his eye. "Actual gratitude. A pearl beyond price. Keep working on that, huh? I've got some paperwork to do."

That filled up more than a few hours, Dewey with his paperwork (which, of course, involved no actual paper), and me with my extranet research and AR experimentation. It wasn't until Friedman strolled into the medbay that I looked up.

"So, what'd I pick up this time?" Friedman asked Dewey, with a grin of perverse glee.

Dewey just shook his head. "It's a new one for you, Bella."

Friedman's eyes went wide, mouth opening in anticipation. "Oooh! What species?"

I raised my good arm, clad in an invisible omni-tool display of the engines of the A-61. "Should I even be here for this conversation?"

Friedman laughed off the question. "Well, I've got to have a witness don't I? Besides, I heard you were practically dry-humping the Major's Mantis, and I wanted to share some tips."

That stunned me for a second. I can be pretty brazen. Hell, see my callsign for proof. But Friedman has never failed to simply out-do me in shamelessness. I looked over at Dewey for help.

None was forthcoming. "Her call, Valentine. It's asari, this time. Asymptomatic in humans."

At this, Friedman looked a bit disappointed. "No playing with the azure when we get back to Arcturus?"

Dewey gave an empathic shake of his head. "Oh no."

It is quite a sight to see a mohawked, two-meter tall, assault specialist pout like a schoolgirl. "Damn. I was going to take bumpy and sparky here to see this girl I know. Does the most amazing things with her tongue and biotics."

I screwed my eyes shut with a wince and excused myself, hobbling off to escape a private conversation that Friedman had deemed generously public.

I'm still not sure who she was trying to scandalize, me or Dewey. It certainly brought back memories of that so-called Concise History.

What? Fucking sue me. It was interesting on a xenobiological level. Two separate species with only loosely compatible genitals having one hell of an enthusiastic good time with each other? Intellectually stimulating.

And, to be fair, in other ways too. I had been going through a little dry spell before I stepped onto Tiptree, and what with the scars, glowing eyes, and other cybernetics, I figured that my little spell might be extending for the foreseeable future.

"Well she won't be doing them to you until you're clean."

"Oh?" The hatch shut behind me, cutting off whatever else they were saying. I flicked at the AR image of an impeller torus, sending the simulated image spinning in front of my eyes.

What in the hell am I doing? I slumped against the wall, sliding down to sit, curled up and out of the way. I didn't fit here. Not on a military ship, and not more than a century in the future, in a universe where the physics ran distinctly different from what my mind accepted as 'reality'. I was a scared geek desperately trying to assimilate a whole lifetime's worth of information and habits, while adapting to the fact that I was now part machine, and frantically using all the acting and psychological tricks I knew to keep my mind from spinning off into some new disorder while presenting a consistent mask to everyone.

On top of that, I layered the altered cognition from the gene-modding. I mean, who the hell was I? Little as I like to admit it, I doubt that my pre-modded self would have held up as well as I did. I was well on my way to a psychological meltdown. In another world, Friedman would have walked out the door to the medbay and found me sobbing. I can only imagine where that would have led.

I'll tell you what you're not doing, I told myself, You are not giving up. Who are you? You are Christopher Zachary Valentine. And the question isn't who are you, but what does it mean?

In a vid, that moment probably would have been accompanied with a swell of orchestral music and a scene change.

I got Kaidan instead.

"You know, you're technically breaking the captain's orders."

I looked up at the biotic. "Huh?"

"Gotta be accompanied anywhere but quarters and mess, right?" His grin was odd. Later, I would understand the nuances. Not then.

"Oh, right." I gestured weakly at the medbay door. "Friedman…"

"Ah." He reached down to help me up. "Has another one, does she?"

I nodded as he pulled me to my feet, avoiding my injured shoulder. "Asari. Asymptomatic in humans."

Kaidan took on a grayish pallor. "Oh." He didn't elaborate. For good reason, I would later find out. "Anyway, I've got your application for citizenship. Care to get it out of the way?"

"Good a time as any." I gestured. "Lead on."

No one who knows my story should be surprised that I've got regrets. My first is how little time I spent with the crew of the Mogadishu on the trip to Arcturus. Really, it shouldn't surprise anyone that I limited my time spent interacting with them. I had so much to learn, so many lies to get straight, and so much healing to do, that getting time in to socialize was just about impossible.

Doesn't mean I don't regret it. I owe the men and women of the Mog my life. Some of them count among my best friends, and whenever I raise a glass to the fallen, you can bet the honored dead of the Mog are some of the foremost in my mind.

But on that cruise, I barely talked to anyone other than Marie, Dewey, Kaidan, Friedman and the flight crews. I wish I had time to really understand the ship I was on, the traditions, the complex social landscape of the crew, the idiosyncratic quirks of Irene, the groans and hums and creaks that told you exactly what the frigate was doing. I just thought of the ship as a collection of alloys, eezo, and technology that allowed us to cross the gulf between worlds.

Some spacer I was pretending to be.

I eventually learned what I was missing, deep in the womb of the extranet and my plotting, and while I can't say I'd do anything different, I'll always regret missing it. Maybe I could have spared the time. But maybes aren't worth anything. Maybe if I did spare the time, I would be one of the honored dead. Or perhaps an unmarked grave.

Maybe.

God, I hate maybes.

I was educating myself on the bewildering array of A-61 Mantises in the galaxy when we finally made it to Arcturus. Cord-Hislop had really hit it out of the park with that fine lady. Not only the Alliance, but the Asari Republics, the Salarian Union, and any mercenary corporation worth a damn fielded them in a variety of roles. Practically the only galactic powers that didn't fly them at the time were the Turian Hierarchy and the Batarian Hegemony.

The Mantises in the hold that I had spent so much time fawning over were some of the first of a new breed. The original spaceframe had been largely wingless, discounting the massive stabilators that are a trademark of the design. Lift was achieved by brute force, the two main engines mounted on rotating rigid arms. At typical flight speeds, at least some of the thrust was vectored downwards to maintain lift. The Block 50s and beyond had a low aspect ratio anhedral trapezoidal wing shoulder mounted in place of the engine arms. Improved engines were gimbal-mounted on the wingtips.

For the loss of a little roll rate, the Mantis gained much improved aerodynamics, and four mounting stations for various ground attack and anti-aerospace munitions. Various fuselage and control surface tweaks, along with other improvements nose to tail, practically turned the Block 50s and beyond into a whole new bird. Some old jocks cursed the loss of roll rate, but having flown both, give me a winged Mantis anytime.

I was fantasizing over the chance to fly a Block 50 when Marie poked me with her spoon. "Relay control to Chris, come in Chris."

Oh yeah. Sometime between Tiptree, Marie had switched from Valentine to Chris. Looking back, I can't tell you when that happened. "Sorry. What was the question?" I looked over to a bemused looking Kaidan as Marie gestured with her spoon.

"I was wondering if you've ever been through Arcturus before."

I shook my head. By that point, the majority of my false background had come together in my head, double-checked against the extranet's more reputable sources. "Can't say that I have. Not much point in it for an Illium flagged independent trader crewed by humans." For those uninformed, Illium's reputation of being a good place to get a 'no question asked'…well anything really, were fully deserved, and that included ship registrations. Practically all the independent traders that worked the Traverse had at least one set of papers from Illium.

Marie's eyes widened. "Really?"

"Not much in the way of work there without an Alliance flag for humans." I shrugged. "Just another hub system, right? Lots of ships, lots of activity."

Marie and Kaidan stared at me for a good five seconds. I know this because I had shifted my attention to my food, and they had very distinct pollaxed looks on their faces when I looked back up from my generous helping of quasi-beef stew. The kind of look that sticks on your face after a bout with cognitive dissonance until something snaps you out of it.

"What?" I asked. "Okay, so it's unique as a Population II relay hub star, and it's interesting how it's probably a halo object…"

Marie shook off the look on her face and grabbed my wrist. "You're not going to want to miss this."

My response was classic as I tried to remain sitting. "But my stew!"

I still remember Marie's laugh at that. It was clear and full of mirth. It fit her alto much better than her earlier giggles. "Trust me, will you, Chris? This is much better that vat-meat stew, even if you're on the regenviruses."

I relented, dropping the spoon and allowing myself to be pulled to my feet. "Alenko, I'm counting on you, man. Put that poor stew out of its misery."

"Extra calories." Kaidan dragged the stew over to his side of the table. "Don't worry, Valentine, you can count on me." He was already tucking in by the point that the hatch cut off my still-half-forlorn gaze. Regenviruses suck.

Less than the alternative, true.

"So where are we going?" I asked as Marie hurried us down the corridors fast enough that I had trouble keeping up. Naval crewmembers bustled through them, finishing up last-minute jobs.

"Observation deck." Marie caught me as I stumbled. "You'll kick yourself if you miss the approach to Arcturus Station." She shouldered past a naval rating and palmed the open plate on the hatch to the observation deck. The blue light of the FTL field washed over her as she ducked in.

Muttering an apology to the navy man, I slipped in. The closing hatch cut off the Still the same view of stars distorted by the mass effect field. "Gotta say, I'm still missing the stew…"

That was when the Mog came out of FTL.

"Wow." Before me was the heart of the Alliance, Arcturus Station. Ships of all classes and all description swarmed about it. It was some of the busiest space I could imagine, as ships from at least eight species went about their business. I do not exaggerate when I say there were thousands of ships flying about.

It made about as much impression on me as the stew. My attention was consumed by Arcturus Station herself.

I'm sure that some of you are asking yourself why Arcturus would make such an impression on me. What about the Citadel? It dwarfed Arcturus in every respect.

Well, one, I'm not from this universe. I hadn't seen the Citadel in person yet. Second, I knew that the Citadel was made by the Reapers. Its builders had an incredible level of technology, millions, if not billions of years advanced from us. Arcturus was a human construction.

The fictional Arcturus I had been lead to expect was a flattened blue and gray disk with a pair of kilometers-long structures that reminded me of nothing so much as a Trident's drives and cannons. It was like the titanic lovechild of an F-61 and a 1960's era flying saucer.

Arcturus was actually a gigantic white wheel, five kilometers in diameter, with a stationary disc for its hub. 'Above' it glittered a titanic mirror, three kilometers in diameter itself, reflecting the light of the star down into a secondary array of mirrors around the hub. These, in turn, brought light to the city, for it could be called nothing else, that filled the inside of the wheel.

In 1975, Stanford College had drawn up plans for one, giving rise to the popular name of the Stanford Torus. Their proposal had a diameter of 1.79 kilometers, and would have spun at one revolution per minute, providing .67G.

Arcturus provided a full G at three-fifths the spin rate. It was an incredible piece of engineering, doubly so when you considered that it needed not the slightest bit of eezo to function perfectly well. It was kind of a shame that Alliance High Command decided that they were going to base themselves in the hub and flatly refused to do without gravity.

It's hard to communicate just how massive Arcturus was with raw numbers. So, I'm going to make a comparison which never ceases to get a stunned look on peoples' faces. Arcturus's diameter was just under twice as large of the Presidium ring's. Yes, that's right. With equivalent width, Arcturus would have had double the interior space of the Presidium. Of course, Arcturus was nearly three times as wide as the Presidium ring. It had gravity five times as strong as the pitiful .2G in the Presidum. You could fit two of any class of dreadnought you care to name in between the rim and the hub the long way with room to spare. And then you could fit another two on the other side of the hub. Roughly 45,000 people made Arcturus their permanent home. The transient population brought the count closer to 150,000 at any one time.

And humans had built it.

It was beautiful. It was humbling. It was inspiring.

Tears welled up in my eyes. I felt a hand squeeze mine, my flesh-and-blood hand, and tore my gaze away from the sight before me to meet Marie's eyes. A soft smile lit up her face. "Welcome to the Alliance, Chris."

I couldn't have stopped the tears if I tried.

A/N: Well that took a while, didn't it? Sorry folks, I got bushwacked by writer's block again. Only recently was I able to break it's hold. Another unrelated piece I wrote to break free might just be making it's way onto the site soon as well. This chapter marks the end of Valentine's time on the Mogadishu. For those of you who enjoyed the characters, don't worry. They will be returning. But we're looking forward to new, exciting things. Valentine's adventure is barely started, and plenty more faces, some familiar, and some brand new will be showing up soon. But enough shilling for chapters yet to be written. Onto some comments about this chapter.

I was really quite surprised at some of the numbers I generated when writing this chapter. Arcturus station (at least the one described in the Codex) is huge. It also has little to nothing to do with the design they gave it in the comics. Don't get me wrong, I like the design. But for a dreadnought, perhaps a salarian one. That is not a Stanford-torus style design. Maybe the comic-style Arcturus will return as a ship design later. Arcturus itself, though, will remain a proper toroid space habitat. The numbers I quote, while rough, were actually calculated, using information found in the Codex and Theodore W. Hall's SpinCalc, a delightfully easy to use Java app. I did make the assumption that Arcturus was spun for 1G, but the required RPM would be quite comfortable, and it made all the sense in the world to do so for human habitation. Docking at the rim would be a challenge, but that's par for the course with spinning designs, and the reason for the stationary hub.

Arcturus's size in relation to the Presidium. Yeah, that was a shock. But we do know that the Citadel generates it's gravity by spin. Wards gravity is quoted at 1.02G, with a diameter of 12.8 km. Plugging those numbers into SpinCalc gave me the required RPM. Bringing the gravity down to the Presidium's quoted 0.2G and maintaining the RPM gave me a diameter of just over 2.5km, half the size of Arcturus. Wow. It makes me wish even more that we could have seen Arcturus Station before the Reapers got to it.

As for the expansion of the Mantis...well, this is the memoir of a pilot, and the aerospace side of Mass Effect is criminally underdeveloped. So, some liberties will be taken in the interest of a good story and a fleshed-out universe. For those of you who were confused at Valentine's explanations, it is technical language that describes the 'winged' Mantises. As for the 'wingless' Mantises, they look like the ones in game, though with a heavier belly. How are those things supposed to drop troops like they do in game? Do they make them out of omni-gel or something? Mechs are one thing, but live troops?

On a side note: Bioware, why the hell haven't you given us a space combat or flight-combat game in the Mass Effect universe? Wing Commander gave us stories with branching paths, diverse squadmates, and RPG style dialogue trees back in the 90s. Heart of the Tiger and Price of Freedom featured Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm McDowell, for God's sake. I would love to play out the story of a fighter squadron in the Reaper War. Perhaps a multi-species command flying off a flotilla of converted cruisers in the style of the multiplayer "N7" squads. It'd certainly be something fresh that doesn't run into the 'Shepard' problem.

But enough ranting. I'd like to thank all my readers. As much as I write this for myself (I never write anything of my own volition that I wouldn't want to read), it's the feedback and knowledge that there are people out there who enjoy reading this as much as I like writing it that in large part keep me going. So, thank you to everyone who has reviewed, favorited, or followed. Thank you to you new readers, here for the first time. I hope you continue to enjoy the story. Please do leave a review if you've got something to say. I promise I'm interested.

So until next time, thanks once again.

Another fine product from Valentine Diverse Optics