Grave to cradle, Arc 3 of "Gone with the Sun"
Chapter 30 Revolver
Six pack
Vakarian watched three familiar figures enter Overlord with a pang of nostalgia. He liked Sanders, respected Miranda Lawson's achievements with her co-opted mercenaries, and was a little in awe of Jack, or at least her ability to pick interesting fights.
He considered paying a visit. But they looked a bit preoccupied, and he had his own… calibrations to do, of crew as well as guns. Speaking of which, the loading trolley had just left the front loading hatch. Time to head for the elevator.
"Nyrek. With me. Where's Riley?"
"She's already down in the loading bay, General, fitting up the revolving blitz pod."
Briskly moving aft, Garrus happily considered the state of the ship. The human/turian design had undergone a few changes, but the CIC map location still followed turian standards. In most other respects the machinery was likewise the same as the original design, excepting Tali's improvements to the original Normandy…
"I'd try the stairs, General. It only takes eight seconds to go down a level."
… and there you had another exception. The humans had insisted on an alternative to the elevator – primitive and unsafe access stairs following the wall curvature. After the débâcle when the soliton grid disabled Normandy's elevator controls, he'd agreed. Turian engineers had (with bad grace) accepted this, as emergency access was suddenly an issue.
"True, Nyrek, but the steps do clatter so. I notice that the ones in Overlord have rubberized cleats and step clips."
They and the humans were learning such fascinating details from each other. Wars before the Shanxi conflict had been so one-sided in favour of the turian empire that such… accommodations hadn't been necessary.
"I'll speak to the engineers about it, sir."
Turian ingenuity had wrought the Thanix cannon, wonderful instruments of destruction, of proven value even against a Reaper destroyer, particularly if a hit were scored on the open priming chamber.
"They're a bit busy with the blitz pod at present, Nyrek, leave it for slack time."
Against a Reaper capital ship, even Thanix streamguns hadn't a prayer. Absent something better, a frigate's only defences would be stealth and speed.
"Come on now, sir, you're just itching to play with the new toys."
"Not at fifty thousand credits a torpedo I'm not, Corporal."
This was somewhat hypocritical, thought Nyrek. The captains of Overlord and Peacemaker were not by temperament suited to the role of small mammals hiding from dinosaurs.
Vakarian's idea of a dinosaur hunt involved artillery.
Lawson's involved a cliff. Or a staked snakepit.
That quasi-human female could be… disturbing, at times. However, she had been instrumental in getting the turian and human staff colleges to put their heads together. The teams they formed, including the Normandy engineers, had productively compared notes – after cautious negotiations.
Nyrek had been deep in thought as they entered crew deck by the med bay and crossed to the stairs down to engineering.
"We're fifteen minutes from lift-off, General. What have the mercenaries been hiding in their loading bay, Sir? Can you tell us now?"
Worries about the task force weaponeers weren't just casual. Some of the blistering comments by that damned difficult human Admiral Mikhailovich, which had just enough validity to sting, had helped generate new ideas. His objections weren't xenophobic or technical; Mikhailovich had appreciated the turian Thanix streamgun design, for example, very much. They had to do with military doctrine.
"All I could see was two bloody great gun shapes covered with canvas and foil, Nyrek, and Alliance military guards. Not mercs. Shepard might have told me what's going on, but he's not around any more."
The Turian hierarchy felt it would have been a lot easier to argue with Mikhailovich had Lawson spoken in support, but she was close-mouthed.
Primarch Victus and Garrus had their own ideas about doctrine, notably the use of flexible but overwhelming force at a schwerpunkt. That traditional turian doctrine had been somewhat discredited by Reaper force being even greater and more flexible than their own, but Victus' revised version incorporated some innovations that, it was hoped, Reapers would not anticipate.
From Engineering the hull-following stairs stopped, to get the cargo bay you either took the elevator or access shafts in the subwell.
Nyrek wasn't letting this go. "So it's a special gun sir? A super Cain maybe?" Garrus headed for the elevator and tried to think.
What was really odd and unsettling about Mikhailovich's doctrine, was nothing to do with guns or weapons. Simply put, he did not agree with either turian or familiar human military doctrine. Certainly not the technical and soldierly virtuosity of normal Alliance doctrine as they understood it, relying on layered defence and a fleet in being.
"I didn't even ask Williams, she'd laugh and tell me to ask again after five shots of whisky, I'm not going down that road again, and Lawson would just give me a beady eye. But I'd assume it's not just guns. There's something else going on, something about the way they'll be used."
Hackett had fought what amounted to a guerrilla action where it was assumed the enemy's strong concentrations could not be broken head-on, purely to gain time for deployment of a superweapon. But Earth had drafted three percent of its population, and one percent had made it to fleet troop carriers by the time the Reapers hit. Over a hundred million men.
Mikhailovich, therefore, constantly harped and hammered on unremitting harassment, committing vast numbers of cheaply trained soldiers. With warning provided by the Collector ship, he and his allies had prompted the Alliance and Turian navies to construct a great many standard 250,000 tonne freighters equipped for cold sleep, and later there were huge, barely maneuverable cylindrical shells – "barracks-ships," so-called.
Between the freighters and the barracks-ships, the Alliance alone was "housing" those troops in cold sleep, in dark space. That was not counting the empty shells set aside for Krogan troops. These were supposed to be supported by cheaply built 'fleet destroyers'. But Mikhailovich did not have them, because Hackett had diverted so much Alliance engineering to the Crucible project.
He might have them soon, though. If rumours were true, the Crucible project had been ordered by QEC to start building more conduit relays and fleet units to carry them. Still, like other NAS-based Alliance strategists, Hackett would not commit troops to a sausage grinder – but Coats and especially Mikhailovich would, so long as victory was thereby assured.
"Are they sending a ground-based army, sir?"
That sounded like a recipe for disaster; one problem with Mikhailovich's approach was the lengthy co-ordination time required. On the other hand it had sometimes worked very well on occupied colonies; when major Reaper units left to address a threat by Hackett's main fleets, the 63rd Scout flotilla would descend to places like Terra Nova and simply massacre as much as ninety-eight percent of enemy effectives in hours; even Reaper destroyers turned out vulnerable to a nuke's precursor wave. Reapers had found, as with many empires before, that their combat-effective capital units could not be everywhere at once.
"Not likely, Nyrek. For this expedition Hackett has selected Mikhailovich, of all people, to attack what might well be a reservoir of Reaper capital ships."
"What had he been smoking, sir?"
"He would not discuss his choice further."
There had been speculation that Hackett wanted to discredit a political rival; Mikhailovich came from a prickly and difficult nation-state not completely happy with its influence in what passed for Earth government these days.
This had been somewhat dispelled by the appointment of Dominic Osoba as councilor, who did not seem at all under anyone's thumb, and certainly not Hackett's.
"It's got to be something to do with the elder Shepard, sir. Must be."
Garrus thought the corporal was wrong. The conspiracy theories lately focused on a supposed relationship between Hackett and Admiral Shepard. Surely not.
"I couldn't possibly comment, Corporal."
First, Hackett's disappearance to Arcturus while Hannah Shepard circulated among Council diplomats, usually on Earth's surface where she had dramatically improved reconstruction efforts, had killed such speculation.
Second, and Garrus couldn't let this slip out, their separation probably had something to do with Shepard's dying body. Only four turians existed who knew it had been recovered: Tactus, Vakarian, then the Primarch – who had told Sparatus.
"And I don't want to hear you speculating with crew. Clear, Corporal?"
Tactus was of the opinion John Shepard's body had stayed with the mother. That was a 'born secret', never to be even remotely hinted at outside a secure bubble.
"Whatever's going on between the human top brass, it can't have anything to do with our mission. They're not here, they won't be the field commanders."
This was reinforced by extraordinary scenes Tactus had witnessed between Lawson and Chambers, hinting at deep emotional links non-humans could barely guess at, except for Liara, who clearly intuited something but wouldn't be drawn on the subject.
Too bad. Garrus was conflicted about Chambers/Hannigan.
"It'll just cause strife with the Overlord crew. We can't have that."
Misericord
He refused to think of Shepard's old yeoman as Kelly, now. He'd got into the habit of calling her that when she'd just been a sweet and harmless human female, hah, riiight, who had inexplicably managed to coax from him his worries about his family.
He hadn't even been drunk. Human secretaries! Samantha Traynor was worse. Suddenly Shepard had been in the doorway when he got a message from his dad and sister. That message had to have been routed through Traynor's comm board. But Chambers was unique. There were entirely too many coincidental connections between her and the human hierarchy. Garrus didn't believe in coincidences.
Then again… she'd been a spy for the Man. Garrus had been cold and distant to her, even rude. That had been a mistake. Liara had given him a look. Michel had seemed hurt. Compounding that, she'd been useful, with the refugees, so he'd felt guilty.
"We don't understand humans that well, they don't understand us, and we've no asari on board yet to help."
What was a self-respecting turian soldier to do? Some mysterious sisterhood thing in play there. He put up with Chambers, and she got the subliminal message.
Tactus and Massani took her part, but Garrus remained deeply suspicious of some ulterior motive. Mind you, she dropped out of sight when adoring refugees wanted to give her money, post-reapers. Some of them, like Ashland and Elkoss, were seriously rich. What had been the point of that? More damn mysteries.
"Also, it would disrespect the dead."
Turians had a thing about military dead. They found places like the Yasukuni shrine quite comprehensible, which asari did not. It even resembled the Guardian Rest.
Garrus honored the memory of Shepard as much as the next sentient, but his memory was assuming the ghastly outline of religious devotion. Shepard would not have approved. Especially not if he was still alive, which Tactus could not rule out, but Chloe Michel said he was not long for this world, before she clammed up completely.
More likely his mom had buried him at a South Pacific hidey-hole until the hysteria was over. Post exhumation he could quietly be slipped into the ground at Arlington.
The elevator stopped; they exited among racks of FTL fire-and-forget rounds for the revolver pod.
"Look at that, Nyrek. Riley, Kozlo, you've made a thing of beauty."
The joint team had two ideas which might ensure continued survival. Both involved weapons really too big for a frigate, but after the scene with Mikhailovich there was motivation to try something wild.
"Thank you, Sir. Nyrek, are we with your troop?…"
The humans on Overlord had been quite open about intending to use nuclear weapons. Initially, this was laughable. Even boosted fission devices hadn't the energy of a single Reaper main shot, about 250 kilotons TNT-equivalent tops, maybe twelve times the size of the nominal nuke that had been dropped on Hiroshima. Pointless. A Reaper's point-defence systems would kill turian nukes five kilometres away.
Turians had never been so silly. You don't foul your own nest with radiation in a ground war. Even thermonuclear warheads, with sufficient layers of fusible material wrapping a fission bomb, maybe an order of magnitude more powerful, weren't likely to hurt a Reaper unless it went off inside (as on Palaven) or really close to the hard exoskeleton, which would allow X- and gamma-radiation to strike deep.
That wouldn't happen in a realistic space rumble. What were they missing? The humans were altogether too sanguine about the idea. The problem was that Mikhailovich had agreed with their analysis. But he'd smirked… which, Liara, said, meant trouble.
So she had done a bit of research.
Sucker bet
It turned out that humans had discovered a method of gaining much greater efficiency from thermonuclear warheads and had managed to make 'hydrogen bombs' several orders of magnitude more potent than the fission warheads typically used in old Turian times. Also, they had miniaturized them to an astonishing degree. Some rocket-borne payloads had a dozen independently targetable warheads.
Even so, in deep space a nuclear warhead couldn't transmit the deadly blast effects which made them so dangerous in-atmosphere. The harm would come from 'prompt radiation' crossing the vacuum, and Reaper shielding could take four dreadnought 38 kiloton hits before degrading. Turians, like other races, had never taken nuclear designs beyond simple layered-fissile methods. For space battles, they were pointless. For ground bombardment, kinetic strikes were cheaper and much, much more destructive.
Victus had dismissed the whole nuke notion as another unproductive Mikhailovich brainstorm. Garrus wasn't so sure. Hackett and Coats had not reined him in. It smelled of an I-know-something-you-don't situation of the kind Salarians were so good at.
All the same, Garrus preferred a different human idea; the blitz pack, the revolver FTL pod which reminded his liaison officer, Riley, of an old human chemical-propellant pistol.
Riley had been the team leader of the Cyone fuel base. As N7, she'd been ordered into Hammer and Nyrek had suggested her as liaison. Riley had shown them her personal "revolver", in a wooden display box, an intricately engraved bit of primitive technology of the kind the turian empire had abandoned four thousand years previously. The antique sidearm was only three centuries old.
It was a shocking reminder of the stagnation of the old council civilizations, but what had struck Victus most was the name given this particular model. There had been many 'revolver' manufacturers. Riley spoke knowledgeably about Webley .455 calibre for example, but her own one did not have an unsubtle macho nickname like 'manstopper'. Instead, it was known as a 'Peacemaker'.
An odd name for such a weapon, observed the Primarch. It was issued to peace officers – police – said Riley, in matter-of-fact tones. But she also quoted an ancient Roman proverb, ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant. "Where they make a lonely desert waste, calling it peace".
Early Roman culture closely resembled turian society, right down to scorched-earth responses to rebellion. Victus had liked the phrase, and christened Garrus' new vessel Peacemaker. It would not have been Garrus' first choice, yet he perversely felt an obscure pride. Tacitus would have been rotating in his grave so fast you could fit up a dynamo and generate power.
The six 'bullets' Peacemaker could fire in rapid succession were twelve metres long, with a shuttle-grade FTL drive core and a new FTL controller VI which did NOT halt for obstacles.
They had just enough Helium-3 to cross a stellar system. The energy did not come from the ³He itself, which merely powered the Casimir generators and capacitors, drawing from the vacuum energy of the universe to warp four-space.
Tali's absconded God had not so far expressed a disapproving response to the bug report.
This sword has two edges
The humans had done something else of interest. Original Reaper-pattern FTL designs had embedded safeties deep in their workings to prevent:
(a) accidental collisions, and
(b) the use of FTL kamikaze ships.
Rather than remove the FTL safeties – still an ongoing research project at the Crucible – the humans had subverted them. Instead of refusing to fire if it would result in a collision, the safety would only fire if it would result in a collision. Suicide-ships were still a waste, but FTL torpedos were suddenly practicable. The logic inversion was a bit precarious, and the VIs had to be perilously close to AIs, to choose a Reaper from the available collisions. But they did consistently work, now.
Only Riley of those on board had ever fired one of these things in anger, though. Too secret for target practice till on the way. Garrus shivered in happiness thinking about what his new, big, six-shooter might do to some target of opportunity, but Riley was concerned about the longer-term implications:
"Sir. What exactly is there to stop someone firing these things at a settled planet?"
Ah. At one level this was one reason for the Council ban on fiddling with the supposedly Prothean-derived safeties on FTL guidance tech, but:
"For developed planets, Riley, it's pointless…" Humans of course hadn't had centuries to think about this.
Peacemaker would be engaging the enemy typically at a hundred and fifty million kilometres. Trajectory time would be about thirty seconds. Garrus didn't know what would happen when a Reaper collided with a shuttle-sized mass dewarping at fifteen light years per day before the Alcubierre energy could be reverse-Casimir dumped into the vacuum energy field. But that first Reaper target could not know either, and never would. There could be no light-speed limited sensor warning. Planets? A different story.
"Consider, we will be firing at mobile targets whose position is not known in advance. But remember, installations like the Citadel have thrusters. If its defensive perimeter detects a warp channel precursor in time, it can dodge…"
FTL impact energy tended to be dissipated under planetary crust. Cities were still vulnerable, as the recent suicide collision by Taetrus rebels had shown. But:
"Defences exist for such massive or nearly static installations like planets."
In essence, one could put debris in the path of the missile:
"A planet's position is known – but that also means defences can be localized. Big installations and home systems have a defensive spherical perimeter which detects warp channel signatures several minutes and in some cases, hours out, then relays info by QEC. If a warp trace intersects, defensive missiles are launched to inject blocking debris along the track. Incoming projectiles deviate or self-destruct. A big bubble of dust and gas is enough."
She wasn't too happy. Riley didn't think Earth had such installations any more.
"Even the Citadel has a traffic control nexus whose business is to detect incoming warp traffic. You want to know about Earth's defensive stations? Do you need to know? Ask Hackett. But those things are black and stealthed for a reason."
Riley got the message. Some questions are better not asked, let alone answered.
– Next chapter will be #31, "Tales of the South Pacific…" –
Tuesday, July 21, 2015 -8/8-
