Standard disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect, nor any other content that you recognise. Some characters and systems are original creations. I am receiving no money for my work.
London – Earth
2017.10.28
I made a tumblr for this story. The fourth council race dot tumblr dot com. On there you will find things that I am going to try and describe without taking up too many words in the story. It currently has two maps that I have made of the area of space surrounding Earth, along with a more detailed look at the shirt sleeve garden world colony/city design. I bastardised Atlantis from stargate atlantis for the ground footprint of the city. As more chapters get posted I will post other things as well.
I am going to resist posting my large number of spreadsheets that tell me everything from planet population through time to a specific ships length and firepower. That way you guys won't notice when I have to change something because it didn't make sense as the story progressed. Numbers are the key to realism, currently every chapter has needed a new spreadsheet so that I have realistic numbers. This one was figuring out the impact of a 4 kg kinetic rod from various launchers along with its death/crippling injury/destruction/severe damage blast radius from each impact strength to allow the turians the orbital strikes from cannon without also breaching the cannon Citadel ban on bombarding garden worlds -.-
Right on we go, I hope you guys like the next few chapters. Army scale ground battles are the things I find most difficult to write currently so I hope the way I have done it is ok.
Qinghai – Shanxi
The journal of Lt. General Jack Williams
2112.10.01
It is sunrise above ground and as much as I wish I could see it, instead I thank God that the defences are complete. The Alliance policy is that a city's maginot line must be completed before it is allowed to grow beyond 1 million people, I only wish I had the soldiers to man the defences. They were designed to be held by an army corps and I have only a single division under my command, dam the general staff for requiring 4 million inhabitants before increasing the garrison to a corps.
I am 332,000 men short of what I need to man the line properly, if it were not for my faith that God would not give me an unachievable task I would think our defeat was simply a matter of time. I have taken as many steps as I can to maximise my manpower, the catering, logistics, and non-weapon maintenance duties throughout Qinghai's maginot line are now being performed by civilian volunteers. Even if they are logistics officers that haven't held a weapon since basic training I still need all of my soldiers on the front line.
The police are guarding the shelter entrances, the armed response squad officers are giving the normal police officers a crash course in firearms while we wait for the enemy attack. I hate to press them into potential combat duty when the vast majority have no weapons training, but I have no choice. I have no men to spare for rear-guard duties, the thin line of Alliance blue is that is all that stands between these invaders and the 882,920 colonists who came to this city to make Shanxi their home. Trusting the Systems Alliance, trusting us, to protect them. The navy has failed, the army must not let them down.
My two infantry brigades are garrisoning the line, I have rearranged them into two shifts of twelve hours each. It will be tough on the soldiers, but I need to cover for the four missing infantry brigades. The lines fort and bunker guns thankfully have slave circuits for situations like these, one gun in a section can be ordered to simply copy the target selection of its manned neighbour. It is far from ideal but with the garrison at only 1/3rd strength it will most likely be the difference between victory and defeat in the fight ahead.
The 6,000 marines I have recalled from all the ships in this cluster will be integral to the defence plan, there are far fewer of them than the 55,000 soldier army infantry brigade I would prefer, but they have always boasted that their training made them worth 10 soldiers. We will see in the coming days if those boasts are empty rhetoric. They arrived just after the evacuation of the villages and towns were completed, there should be no one left outside the city limits now. Everyone should be safe in the shelter network as long as my forces can defend the city.
The aliens orbital fire has destroyed the entire centre of the colony and all of its traditional buildings and still it continues, were we and the civilians above ground it would be devastating to morale and combat readiness. As it is, safe below ground in the maginot line and the shelters, all of this destruction is simply fuelling the fire of defiance both in my soldiers and in the civilians.
Personally, as much as it pains me to see Qinghai's forbidden city and her pagoda's destroyed, the destruction of the cathedral, the mosque, the synagogue and the temples has been worse. Ancestral, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, Muslim, Christian and Jewish alike, their destruction has been much more devastating for a man of God like myself. It has been a constant battle the last two days to follow the Popes directive not to hate the alien, to remember that they are children of God as well. I hope that I will still be able to follow it at the end of this invasion.
They have not targeted the main spaceport, so I still have the faint hope that they will land there and the explosives my engineers have placed will be able to destroy their first wave along the with port. It is a very faint hope, their bombardment has been thorough and professional despite their view of civilians as legitimate targets. As much as I wish them to do so, I do not think that they will fall for that old trick.
I had hoped to write about the preparations of my own armoured brigade, we must somehow take the fight to the enemy without the two other armoured brigades that are supposed to be with us and I have had some ideas, but the sensors have just shown the first enemy troopships entering the atmosphere.
It seems the wolf is at the door.
Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo.
Amen.
Qinghai Outskirts – Shanxi
2112.10.04
General Vetra Sparatus was really beginning to hate this planet and its inhabitants. The memories of the last four days flooded back as she stared at the map in front of her, fighting off the feeling of apprehension as she reviewed her plan of attack.
Everything had been going so well at the start, Admiral Arterius had dispatched ships to the four station colonies to capture them. As expected, they had encountered resistance in their docking bays from the alien's garrison forces, so the navy had withdrawn and destroyed the life support systems of the space stations and technology dependant colonies. It seemed the prospect of suffocating and/or freezing to death focused the minds of this new species as well as it did the known ones and the four station colonies had soon surrendered. The civilian population had then been allowed to repair their life support systems once the garrison troops had laid down their weapons and marched into captivity.
Her good luck had seemed to be turning into a winning streak when the navy entered orbit of the class 1 and 2 colonies as neither world had any surface to space anti-orbital guns. Granted those sorts of guns were generally a waste of resources, they were almost always overwhelmed before they did significant damage to an attacking fleet, but several races used them to buy time.
The main thing they did was force the attacking ground forces to strike immediately and in predictable locations, not having her invasion strategy dictated by the need to capture or destroy the guns before a full landing could occur was a pleasant surprise. Enjoying the relative ease of the operation to that point she had approved Sub General Orinia's request to begin landing her troops in close proximity to the alien's dome colony. That was when things had started to go wrong.
Sub General Orinia had landed with her 100,000-strong sub legion on the moon of the gas giant close to the dome colony and had quickly punched through the defences around two of the entrances. Fighting through the docking and supply areas her forces had quickly broken through into the dome itself, but once inside they had found no resistance, just a city that appeared abandoned. Orinia's forces had advanced cautiously but they had only gone a dozen metres before the first snipers and artillery opened up, killing and wounding hundreds in the opening minutes as the inhabitants destroyed their own city to hit the invading forces.
It had been nothing but grinding urban warfare ever since, the nightmare of every turian general when on the attack. With the dome preventing accurate orbital strikes, even if General Orinia was prepared to endure the logistical nightmare that would be caused by her entire army fighting in sealed armour due to the unbreathable atmosphere flooding the dome through the punctures, her forces were forced to fight room by room.
The General's situation wasn't helped by enemy forces constantly using the sewer network and service tunnels to pop up in previously cleared areas and strike from the rear. Every heap of rubble, whether in front of their own lines or behind them, was a potential death trap for Orinia and her forces. As if that was not enough, the troops had encountered two hardpoint fortifications designed to look just like an ordinary building and the casualties inflicted by the defenders had been severe.
Spirits only knew how many more of them awaited Sub General Orinia's advancing forces, but they wouldn't find out any time soon. The advance had been painfully slow, in four days Orinia's forces had made it only a few hundred metres into the dome colony and the enemy resistance showed no signs of faltering.
General Sparatus's own battle on this class 1 garden world was not fairing any better.
In the beginning it had seemed to be a standard, even an easy attack. From orbit it was clear that only one area of the planet was currently inhabited, a city with small villages and what seemed to be a couple of partially built towns scattered around it in a circular area approximately 600 km in diameter with the city at its centre.
They were all abandoned, the population presumably having been evacuated to the city. The main space port, some 100 km away from the city, was abandoned as well but she wasn't falling for that old trick. She had bombarded the railway connection between the spaceport and the city and had left it for possible capture later.
The city itself was small, obviously just at the start of its life. There was a clear central area filled with open green space and what were probably historical building recreations based on their size and construction materials. Surrounding it, beginning to fill in the visible footprint of a six pointed star, were six 1 km tall archologies linked together with elevated walkways and plazas.
The plaza's and walkways were partially made of transparisteel and transparent crystal to allow light to filter through in rainbows to the ground below instead of blocking it out, showing this species valued art and appearance as much as functionality in its cities. Two parks and two lakes seemed to be under construction in four of the voids between the spokes of the star.
The remaining two voids seemed to be taken up by two small space ports, but the archologies had what appeared to be heavy anti-air emplacements on their roofs making a lightning assault on them impossible even if she was prepared to risk a similar booby trap as that which was no doubt awaiting her at the main spaceport. At the end of the footprint for each spoke was a 10 story high fort with a heavy artillery emplacement and four heavy anti-air emplacements each.
Adding these emplacements firepower to the ones on the top of the archologies, the city was a death trap for any form of aircraft that the defenders didn't like. Together they provided total anti-air coverage of the city and the surrounding area and several could be destroyed or disabled before gaps started to appear in that total coverage. Encircling the city was a line of small hills, approximately 1 km in width and 250 km long in total. Some were natural, and others were obviously artificial, but the most interesting thing was that the valleys and routes through the line all appeared to be guarded by forts. The analysts had only spotted them due to their gun emplacements and firing bells being above ground, the majority of each fort was buried deep in the hills.
General Sparatus remembered laughing at the realisation that the primitives thought that a set of small hills could stop an invader, even if they did encircle the entire city and had forts built into them. That laughter hadn't lasted past the first day. Following her targeting criteria, the navy had begun the orbital strikes as she brought her troopships down well outside the enemy's anti-air net.
Turian warships were equipped with multiple launching systems on their ventral surfaces that launched 4 kg kinetic rods, impacting with a force of 0.4 tons of TNT, 1.7 tons, and 3.9 tons from frigates, cruisers and dreadnoughts respectively. Admiral Arterius's cruisers had rained down their kinetic strikes all day and with a blast radius of 52m from their kinetic rods, suddenly 104 m diameter craters had begun appearing all over the primitive's colony.
The targeting criteria had prioritised the centre of the city and one of the archology's, a standard tactic to attempt to demoralise the civilian population and cause them to force their military to surrender without turian forces even having to commit to a ground attack. Just in case these civilians were more stubborn than the population of the station colonies, General Sparatus had also targeted all of the anti-air forts and the visible gun emplacements in the line of hills, to let the military know that they were beaten and she could just pound them into dust from orbit, encouraging them to listen to the civilian demands for surrender.
After a full day of bombardment to produce enough shock and disruption to the defenders, the centre of the city had been reduced to flames and rubble littered with craters, as expected. The high plazas and walkways linking the archologies together had disintegrated under the kinetic strikes as well, shattering and falling to the ground in a rain of metal shrapnel and crystal shards. But that was where it ended.
To the utter surprise of her, her officers, the navy officers, and the Admiral, the archology was untouched, defended with a kinetic barrier. This wasn't impossible, the archologies were only 1 km high, the length of a modern dreadnought, and the barriers were only frigate grade, but still. No one, not even the asari used kinetic barriers to defend entire skyscrapers from orbital kinetic strikes, those that had the defensive mindset either didn't use archologies, didn't have the eezo, or didn't have a strong enough economy to pay for it.
As the dust had continued to clear the General had felt her apprehension grow. The anti-air forts were protected by cruiser grade kinetic barriers and had suffered no damage at all while the visible gun emplacements in the fortified hill line had been constructed using what seemed to be frigate grade armour. The day of kinetic strikes had dented them, but that was about all that they had achieved. That armour was designed to take a glancing blow frigates main gun without failing, which meant that given that a turian frigates main gun hit with a firepower of 5.4 kilotons of TNT on a direct hit, no artillery she had, ground or orbital based, was going to do more than dent the alien's forts.
The warship grade kinetic barriers defending the anti-air forts and the civilian archologies prevented her ground or orbital forces from having even that limited effect on them which had narrowed her possible attack method options drastically. The only thing that would allow her to destroy the archologies and the military installations from outside return fire range would be firing the main guns of the navy's warships at them, but that was in direct violation of one of the strongest Citadel Conventions, ie: Do not bombard garden class worlds whatever the reason.
If she broke that law she would be vilified for all eternity by every inhabitant of citadel space, and so would everyone under her command.
General Sparatus had promptly banned anyone from referring to the aliens as primitives and had begun pouring over the scan and reconnaissance data with a great deal more caution while the forward operating base continued to be constructed around her, well outside the enemy's projected artillery range.
While this was ongoing she had dispatched a small force under Captain Desolas Arterius to capture the alien's main spaceport. As expected it had promptly exploded on his arrival, once he had proved that he was not going to obligingly walk into the middle of it, but Captain Arterius had conducted a thorough search of the surviving warehouses, the rail terminal and the surrounding area. He had come back two days later with some form of artefact that he had found in one of the less damaged warehouses, apparently it was completely different to the local alien's technology, it was ancient in fact.
The Captain had speculated that the locals had most likely found it here on this garden world at some point since their arrival or had found it elsewhere during their exploration of the surrounding systems in this cluster. Regardless as to how the aliens had found it, Captain Arterius was now on a frigate taking it back to the Hierarchy for study with strict orders to be very vague as to how it was found until this situation was dealt with and became public knowledge.
A team of local mercenaries had apparently been guarding it. An appalling dereliction of duty on their part, to be sticking to a contract rather than helping their army at a time like this. This was the main reason why she was willing to believe Desolas's assertion that they were mercenaries when no one could actually ask them because they still didn't speak the enemy's language.
Desolas had taken all three of the mercenaries to Palaven with the artificat, in case they had information that would be useful when they knew how to interrogate them. His father had extracted a very detailed and convincing promise for him to be careful with that artefact before giving him a frigate to take the ancient artefact and the prisoners back to the Hierarchy for study.
They had been dispatched last night, just after the last of the supply ships had finished ferrying the Legions supplies down from the orbiting supply ships. Now with the sunrise the turian base had turned into a hive of activity as armour, artillery, vehicles and troops martialled into their respective units.
General Sparatus took one last look at the map in her office before sealing her helmet and heading to her Command APC. The enemies defence line would be broken by sunset if they responded as every other race did to turian attacks. The doubt and apprehension continued to form a knot in her stomach, as it had done since the dust from her bombardment cleared at the end of the first day to reveal negligible damage to the alien city.
The turian in her had total confidence in victory, there was no other outcome for the Hierarchy army. The General in her was deeply concerned what the defenders had in store for her next, she had a feeling this was going to be one of the hardest fights of her career.
Codex Entry: Humans – Human Military Doctrine, Implementing the Endurance Strategy
(Citadel Codex, First Human SPECTRE Collector's Edition, 2183)
While keeping it as its offensive doctrine, the Alliance Army rejected the blitzkrieg doctrine for defensive warfare since it relied on air, and now orbital, superiority. (Indeed, obtaining orbital superiority is the first objective of turian military doctrine). This was believed to be a terminal flaw as the army would not see combat unless the navy had been defeated and had lost at least orbital superiority.
Even if they were able to keep fighting and deny the enemy orbital supremacy, they had still been beaten badly enough to let enemy troops on the planet's surface to engage the Alliance army in combat, which meant the army formations were exposed to orbital fire.
While the army's offensive tactics remained the standard blitzkrieg that had proven so effective, it was treated with contempt and derision by the nation states armies for choosing defensive tactics that were seen as nearly 200 years out of date, and that even then had been created by armies that were referred to as 'Lions lead by Donkeys.' The vindication of the endurance defensive strategy and the Alliance Army's method of implementing it in the first contact war catapulted the Alliance army to the most prestigious of the human armies.
The nation states armies entered a tailspin once it was proven that fighting defensively in the 'modern' way, the way that nation states had done since World War Two would have resulted in a turian victory in only four days. They would suffer recruitment problems for the remainder of their existences.
When creating the Endurance Strategy, the Alliance army concluded that any massing of mobile assets such as tanks and motorized infantry would be subjected to orbital kinetic strikes and destroyed before it could enter battle. This left them needing a strategy for defending their colonies that was designed to withstand orbital kinetic strikes.
Alliance planners decided to discount the idea of creating a defence for an enemy using nuclear warheads after the destruction of anti-air defences or bombarding the planet's surface with the main guns of their warships. These were deemed impossible to defend against, and if faced with such an opponent the colony would either be forced to surrender to prevent a wholescale massacre of its civilian population or hunker down in the civilian shelters and concentrate on surviving and awaiting rescue from off planet forces.
The planners based their designs on orbital kinetic strikes of 1-44 tons of TNT as the largest bomb in existence at that time, the USA's MOAB, produced a 44 t explosion. For comparison, the main gun of a modern Alliance frigate produces a 2.4 kt explosion (2,400 t). Alliance warships are equipped with kinetic rod launching systems that allow them to fire 6 kg rods creating explosions ranging from 0.3 t (frigate) to 14.2 t (dreadnought) in support of their invading ground troops blitzkrieg.
With their unique vulnerabilities and restrictions, it was decided to use the Stalingrad method of defensive warfare to defend dome colonies, it was seen as viable as, due to the surface being uninhabitable outside the domes, all of the fighting would be restricted to within the dome where armour and motorized infantry would be more of a hinderance to an attacking force than a help and the dome would prevent enemy orbital strikes from hitting with any accuracy even if they were willing to puncture it in the first place.
Shirt sleeve colonies were seen as much more difficult to defend due to the wide spread of the colonies and the unlimited room to manoeuvre. Deciding to look to the last time a war was conducted under the threat of heavy artillery bombardment, the planners studied the first world war and the years immediately after it. Finally, they came upon the linchpin of their colonial defence strategy. The Maginot Line.
Much derided due to its ineffectiveness in protecting France from German attack, this failure was in fact due to the strategic planning failures and tactical manoeuvring failures of the French Command rather than any deficiencies of the Maginot Line itself. Over 450 kilometres long, the Maginot Line was a line of major underground forts forming strong points, between which were smaller forts filling in the gaps between their fields of fire and multiple small one-man to five-man fortifications to engage any skirmishers who were too small in number to be targeted by the main guns of the forts.
Underground barracks and railways kept the troops safe and allowed them to man the forts without fear of artillery. There was no wall to stop an attacking force that fought its way passed the guns, that was not the intention of the line. Rather it was supposed to slow any attack to allow friendly forces time to rush to the area and counter attack. Immune to air and artillery attack it was the perfect ground-based defence against the blitzkrieg doctrine, nullifying the shock and speed that were two of the three requirements critical to a blitzkrieg attacks success.
This is why the German attacks of 1940 CE completely bypassed the Maginot Line rather than trying to punch through and why the Italians proved completely incapable of breaching the Alpine 'Little Maginot' Line on France's southern border where there was no possible way around.
Considering that the 188 km M25 orbital motorway encircles Greater London, an area that had a population of 9 million in 2016 CE and 14.8 million in 2112 CE it was decided that all shirt sleeve Alliance colonies would have their major cities encircled by a 1 km thick by 250 km long Maginot line, 200 km shorter than the original.
With adequate underground military facilities, major air defences put throughout the area to prevent the bypassing of the line by air, above ground green space for the cities inhabitants to enjoy and the population housed in space efficient arcologies approximately 1 km high, this would allow the city to grow to a size of approximately 80 million people before a new city would need to be constructed.
As the city of Beijing managed to house 20 million people in a similar space with no building over 200 m tall in 2016 CE, this was deemed to be an acceptable balance between the defensive fortifications required and the limitations that those fortifications placed on the city's ability to grow. It should be noted that on more developed garden worlds, an increasing percentage of the population chooses to live outside of the cities in small towns and villages.
These are bereft of military protection and the inhabitants must use the rail links to evacuate to the cities as quickly as possible in the event of an attack. In 2112, 90% of the non-sol Alliance population lived in cities. By 2183 and the attack on Eden Prime, the increasing security of the garden worlds in the Alliance's core systems had dropped that figure to 70%.
These defence systems were put to the test for the first time when an entire turian army legion invaded the human worlds of Shanxi and Zapala in the first contact war.
Codex Entry: Humans – Alliance Colonial Guard Garrisons
(Citadel Codex, First Human SPECTRE Collector's Edition, 2183)
The Alliance policy is that the defences of each dome must be completed before colonists are allowed to move in, similarly when colonising a garden world, a city will form the nexus for each region of the planet colonised. Its defences must be completed before it is allowed to exceed 1 million inhabitants. The Alliance assigns garrisons to a world based on its class and its population size.
After the First Contact War (Relay 314 Incident) These garrisons are made up of colonial guard soldiers rather than army soldiers.
Station Colony 20,000: The garrison force for these colonies are Platoons (256 soldiers). A Lieutenant is the CO
Station Colony 20,000-100,000: The garrison force for these colonies are Companies (1,024 soldiers). A Captain is the CO
Station Colony 100,000-200,000: The garrison force for these colonies are Cohorts (3,072 soldiers). A Major is the CO
Station Colony 200,000: The garrison force for these colonies are Battalions (6,144 soldiers). A Lieutenant Colonel is the CO
Arcturus Station: Arcturus is garrisoned by a Regiment (18,432 soldiers). A Colonel is the CO
Dome Colony 1 Million: The garrison force for these colonies are Brigades (55,296 soldiers). A Brigadier General is the CO
Dome Colony 1-4+ Million: The garrison force for these colonies are Divisions (165,888 soldiers). A Lieutenant General is the CO. Each additional domed city gets a brigade garrison until it passes the 1 million mark, where it's garrison is upgrade to a division.
Shirt Sleeve Colony 4 Million: The garrison force for these colonies are Divisions (165,888 soldiers). A Lieutenant General is the CO
Shirt Sleeve Colony 4 Million – 80 Million: The garrison force for these colonies are Corps (497,664 soldiers). A Captain General is the CO
Shirt Sleeve Colony 80 Million: The garrison force for these colonies are 1 Corps for each city of 40 million in habitants. An army consists of 3-5 corps, a General is the CO
For codex users concerned about the large size of these formations. A more detailed explanation can be found in the army order of battle and ranks entries in chapters 7-9 of this codex.
Seeing how the turians fight exactly the same as we do today in cannon (except with a more callous attitude to civilians) and how easily our current method of blitzkrieg ground warfare falls apart when you lose air superiority (the Alliance fights that way in canon and gets pounded into oblivion by turian orbital fire) I came up with my own mix based on history and the demonstrated deficiencies of our current method of warfare when your enemy has a vastly more powerful air force (see most battles fought against the US army and air force since 1945)
Last note, Ouvrage Hackenburg is the largest fort on the Maginot Line and is open to the public with tours in many different languages. If you find yourself near the French/German border you will not find a more fascinating place to visit! Very reasonably priced as well.
Timeline Changes So Far
First colony on mars: 27 years earlier than canon
Discovery of Prothean ruins: 64 years earlier than canon
Founding of the Systems Alliance (council of nations version): 63 years earlier than canon
The First Contact War: 45 years earlier than canon