A/N: Yes, Grunt being number 117 is a Master Chief reference. To those who caught it, good call. Additionally, to those who will undoubtedly call Mary Sue, the following curb-stompage is heavily reliant on the Batarians not having sufficient anti AI cyberdefences and would never work against a Council member.
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The Batarian colony of Erszbat was one of their newer worlds, the population living almost entirely in a single city. For every free caste Batarian living on the world there were three slaves, mostly Batarian but with a handful of other species as well.
The Emaris Adjudicator-class light cruiser Maeoloa slipped into orbit above the colony, unleashing a barrage of Cauteriser thermal missiles that struck the Hensa class cruiser above the colony before it could even react. The colony's lone defender breaking apart and burning up in the atmosphere, the Maeoloa turned her turreted mass drivers on the colony.
Firing short bursts, the mass drivers spat golden ingots down at the colony in precise bombardment patterns. The military base was the first to go, eradicating the surface to orbit missile silo before the colony even realised it was under attack. The governmental headquarters was next, reinforced bunker no obstacle to relativistic impactors. The Hegemony's policy to make all their transport hubs military installations made the space port and central train station legitimate targets. Two more bursts took them out.
The only civilian targets hit were the power station and the slave exchange. The low square building of the slave exchange was hit with twice as many rounds as the other targets, killing eighty per cent of the slavers on the planet in a single blow. In the belching smoke and hellish fires left by the bombardment three things swiftly became apparent.
The soldiers were dead.
The governer was dead.
The slavers were dead.
As the Maeoloa set course for her anchorage at the Atavira colony of Meciu, Erszbat was consumed by the bloodiest slave uprising in Batarian history.
###
Khar'Shan had the most advanced defence grid available to the Batarians. A network of weapon satellites, sensors and ground based missile silos girdled the entire planet, making a fleet based attack supremely foolish. But not even the most advanced defence grid was impenetrable. An attacker just had to know how.
The sensor grid detected the meteors when they were five hours out, extrapolated their tracks, moved a single communication satellite out of the way and then disregarded them as a threat. The largest was barely sixty metres across. The sensor tech who monitored the alert checked their projected atmospheric transit path and called his wife and daughter, telling them to watch the sky for a light show in a few hours.
When they were forty four minutes out from the planet's atmosphere tiny thrusters fired up, slowly angling them towards their intended target. At seventeen minutes out the power systems inside the 'meteors' started powering up. At eight minutes out the 680 MJ/sec proton beams concealed in the meteors fired.
Eighteen proton beams lanced out, converging on the Hegemony Navy's orbital dockyard. The structure didn't have kinetic barriers, allowing the proton beams to wildly slash through dry docked ships and military headquarters complexes. The kilometres long structure was torn apart by the beams, the tumbling weapon tracks concealing the precision with which they intersected key structural points and allowed centripetal force to finish what the meteor weapons started.
At seven minutes out the defence grid tagged the meteors as a threat and turned six missile satellites towards them. The missiles easily locked onto the incoming rocks and fired, punching out from their satellites.
At six minutes out, with the missiles still twenty seconds away, the explosive charges in the meteors exploded, shattering the weapons into hundreds of fragments of rock and metal.
At one minute away from the atmospheric limit the clouds of shrapnel intersected the 35,000 km mark, the height at which the majority of the Khar'Shan defence grid satellites orbited. At that point the shrapnel clouds had a radius of almost one hundred kilometres, gouging a hole through the defence grid that took out four weapons and two communication satellites.
A Batarian woman balanced her little girl on her knee, the two of them oohing and aahing as the shrapnel painted trails of fire through the atmosphere.
###
The vast majority of the Batarian fleet was currently gathered above Camala, awaiting the US raiding fleet. Their weapons were loaded, their kinetic barriers were up and they were in full combat formation.
The Earth races had AIs specifically created to prevent other AIs from infiltrating their networks. The Seu'Seun used organic computers incompatible with electronically coded AIs. The Council had their recently designed SAPIENS anti-AI firewalls. The Hegemony did not have any of these. Which meant that a single AI attack crippled their entire fleet.
Weapons and barriers powered down, engines dead in the water, life support, lights and heating all off, the Batarian Navy was paralysed within seconds. After that, a single Roosevelt-class assault carrier was able to destroy the entire fleet with its complement of Pyro and Vortex strike craft, tearing them apart with the nuclear fire of Avalanche missiles. It took around thirty minutes for the pilots to ensure every single ship in the Batarian main fleet was unsalvageable.
###
Zaeed Massani loved his guns. The General of the Blue Suns had an entire wall in his stateroom on the Blue Suns HQ ship dedicated to them. He owned hundreds of guns, some of them the latest in Earth tech lethality, others taken as trophies from the dead hands of their owners. But for Zaeed, pride of place would always go to Jessie.
Jessie was a beauty of a gun. At her basic level she was a M96H SAW "Blitz", one of the many variants of the Mattock assault rifle used by almost every Earth power, but she had been modded almost beyond recognition. She fired high explosive rounds, a massively extended frame accommodating
155 millimetre heat sinks and allowing for forty rounds fired fully automatically before the heat sink needed changing but resulting in the rifle being half again as large as a standard Mattock. She had a set of custom holographic sights and a laser targeter salvaged from an SN7 heavy pistol, allowing for almost pinpoint accuracy at long range, and her secondary barrel was a surprisingly powerful light shotgun that could fire quickly, dealing heavy damage at close range with sledgehammer rounds. She had an Omniblade bayonet he could deploy with a touch of a button and a custom tooled Salarian made eezo shock absorber in the stock that allowed him to fire fully automatic with semi automatic accuracy, although that one component had cost almost as much as the rest of Jessie combined. Unlike the usual white coloration of Suns weapons she was pale grey, originally designed for urban warfare. He had first got hold of her back when he was a green private stuffed in a lander and sent into the meat grinder of mass attritional warfare on the barren industrial dust bowl of Seu'Tseuma, invaded during the latter part of the Seu'Seun war. Zaeed had gone into that battle straight out of the training camps, a fresh faced seventeen year old private with zero experience, a false Hollywood glamorisation of war and a crush on his sergeant, Jessie Westman. He had left the battle three years later as a scarred veteran captain, borne up through the ranks by countless field promotions, one of only thirty six Americans landed during the initial assault left alive on the planet and promoted constantly for two reasons: being the best at killing Seu'Seun on the planet and officers being shot, blown up or eaten faster than they could be replaced. And all that remained of his crush, and later lover, was a single rifle taken from her cold dead hands. His Jessie.
He had other guns as well. An enormous Jackal automatic shotgun, an anti-material rifle almost as long as him, even a flamethrower pried from the grasp of a Blood Pack Krogan with Zaeed's knife through his brain. None he lavished as much care and attention on as Jessie.
"General Massani? Your squad is ready."
He grunted in acknowledgement and gently lifted Jessie off the rack on the wall, stroking a hand along her barrel before collapsing her and slinging her on the back of his armour. He may be a self styled general now but Zaeed was in his heart a soldier. Every once in a while he would lead an operation just to keep his skills sharp. No point getting sloppy after all, and Jessie needed the exercise.
"Come on girl. Time to have a workout."
###
Councillor Murtok looked at the data presented by the STG units charged with monitoring the Hegemony and let out an impressed whistle.
"An impressive display. Hegemony military capability reduced by destruction of main fleet, remainder tied up dealing with slave rebellions throughout territory. Hegemony effectively destabilised, turning own culture against them - ingenious. Wonder if demands will be met now. Logical step, but Batarian arrogance and stubbornness notorious."
###
The Extranet was a wonderful thing, Liara mused as she watched Grunt. The wealth of information combined with the engineered superkrogan's supremely malleable brain allowed him to absorb information at a staggering rate, and the nascent neural links were like a drug to him. He had already memorised technical specs and user's manuals for every firearm in existence, entire treatises on tactics from every race in the galaxy and four martial arts, which he combined into his own unique style of fighting she had seen him practicing on a couple of unfortunate would be muggers. With the protection of her enormous silver guardian Liara had been able to focus less on surviving and more on taming her eyesight. She had more or less figured out how her eyes were working, developing her ability to the point where she was able to focus on up to four objects at once, and had figured out that the green and purple overlays were visual aids for using her new biotic powers. She had also managed to tame her unstable biotics somewhat - although she was yet to replicate her feat of dehydrating those Batarian slavers she had managed to execute a basic biotic pull that seemed to have a minor warping effect associated to it, something she was distinctly proud of, and Grunt had acquired an Omnitool for her with a couple of basic programs, namely a hacking and lock bypass program, a factory standard Overload and one definitely uncommon one, a Neural Shock program. Grunt had been particularly pleased with that one. "I'd like to see someone shoot us when their nerves are on fire", he had said.
Grunt paused from his extranet mining session and looked up, sniffing the air.
"Someone's coming."
Biting back a curse, Liara pulled her hood over her head and ducked behind a support column as Grunt's voice growled in her ear over their Omnitool comm link.
"Eclipse. Two Engineers, two Vanguards, four troopers, two heavies and a heavy mech. Wait for them to pass."
The thin, reedy voice of a Salarian giving orders sends that plan to hell.
"That Asari bitch the Suns are after is around here somewhere. Spread out and search the warehouse."
She froze in place, nearing panic as the Eclipse mercs started sweeping through the warehouse using a military search pattern. They were going to discover her, and she didn't like her chances against that many opponents.
"Liara. When I give the word, pull the two heavies and use your neural shock on the nearest Vanguard."
Reassured by the rumbling voice she replied with her assent and primed her Omnitool, feeling the tingle of biotics in her other hand.
The first clue Eclipse had that something was wrong was when Grunt dropped from the ceiling, swinging a biotically charged hammer at the YMIR mech's head. The blow crushed the YMIR's optics and powered downwards into the CPU concealed in the mech's chest.
"Now!"
Assuming that was the signal, Liara popped up and waved her hands, the snap-hiss of Prothean biotics yanking the two rocket launcher toting Eclipse mercs off the ground and slowly cracking their armour as the warping effect stripped away their defences. Before the Eclipse could even react to the second assailant she had fired off her Neural Shock at the nearest Vanguard. The Asari fell to the ground, howling in agony as the focused electrochemical impulse bypassed her biotic barrier and set her nerves into overdrive, conflicting pain signals coursing through her body and obliterating all rational thought. As the mercs finally reacted to Liara's presence Grunt opened up with his heavy machine gun, ripping apart the two weakened, levitating heavies before turning it on the Engineers who returned fire with pistols and Incinerate tech that splashed harmlessly off his kinetic barriers. The sub-standard shields of the Eclipse engineers didn't last long against the withering firepower brought to bear by Grunt, who chuckled as the bullets shredded their tiny Salarian bodies. Liara felt another surge of biotic power and pounced on it, shaping it into a pull/warp and throwing it at the other Vanguard, warping her barrier and picking her up into the air in one move as her Omnitool came up, neural shocking another one of the foot soldiers as Grunt smashed the other three aside with a single sweep of his hammer.
Liara gestured to the two twitching Eclipse mercs on the floor, an Asari and a Batarian male.
"What should we do with these?"
Grunt grabbed the Batarian by the ankles and smashed him against the wall a couple of times.
"Strip the Asari's armour and put it on. You'll attract less attention in Eclipse armour. Then we find out what she knows."
Grunt retrieved a long, serrated knife from one of the dead bodies as it floated serenely past his head and handed it to her.
"You up for a little torture?"
"Sure."
Omega really changed people.
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A/N: I am currently planning a couple of spin off stories for after this fic is finished (don't worry, we're not even close to the end). At the moment I have two ideas: Zaeed during the Seu'Tseuma campaign and Rael during his time with the Privateers. If anyone else has any other ideas please let me know in a review.