The Siege of Shanxi

by Made Nightwing

2157: The Turian Hierarchy launches a secretive war against a new species known as 'humanity'. The first major battleground is the outlying colony world of Shanxi, defended by the 3rd Garrison Division of the Systems Alliance Marines. With overwhelming odds against them, the hopes of Shanxi rest with the fledgling Alliance fleet...and unlikely allies within the ranks of their foes.

21. Burning Skies

The Siege of Shanxi

Chapter Twenty One: Burning Skies

I don't own BioWare

"It is a difficult thing to objectively judge war crimes. To be clear, I do not believe in morally grey areas. Either an act is right, or it is wrong, and must be treated as such. But for it to be justice, all the facts must be presented. The actions that many on both sides are accused of did take place, of this there is no doubt. But how many of these acts were prompted by malice, I wonder, and how many by the terror, loss and psychological damage of the circumstances around them? Our investigations shall hopefully reveal these circumstances, and the punishment of the accused ones suitably tailored. But one thing is certain, justice must be served. Both as honour to the dead, and a suitable warning to the living. This will be an interesting few years." –Matriarch Benezia T'Soni. (On being named head of the Council War Crimes investigation following the incident at Relay 314)

KREEFT STREET

OUTREACH CITY, CBD

"Move it! Run! Run! Run!" Khafagey screamed as the whine of one of the hover tanks sounded almost right behind him. "Somebody shoot this fucker!"

His stumpy legs pumped underneath him, and he once more cursed and cursed the stupid genetics that meant he was about to get run over by an alien tank in the middle of a side street.

From up ahead, there was a dull thump and then the sound of igniting fuel. He could see a smoke trail climbing upwards, cutting across the morning the sky. Great, now they shot the fucking tank, and here he was still caught in the blast zone. "I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna..."

The Rommel IV anti-tank missile was overkill incarnate. Designed to strike an armoured target with enough kinetic energy and explosive force to turn it into scrap metal, they were proving to be very effective against the hover tanks, whose reactive armour and shielding were protecting them against the lighter rockets and grenade launchers the Marines were fielding. The 104 mm piece of ordnance and the launcher itself weighed almost thirty kilograms all up, and when the missile finally struck, it hit with enough force to slam the alien vehicle into the ground, bounce it back up into the air as a burning fireball, then fall back to the street in a smouldering heap.

Khafagey took a flying leap as he heard the explosion, opening his mouth wide and dropping his rifle to clamp his hands over his ears. He landed in a heap behind a destroyed taxi, just before the shock wave passed over him. He shuddered at the sensation and crouched lower as a wave of flames shot over the top of his position. The heat was unbearable, but his eardrums were still intact. That meant that physics had once again spared him, and he wasn't going to die horribly from internal bleeding after being too close to an explosion.

His men rallied, rifles blazing in sporadic bursts as they put down the infantry advancing behind the tank. Ambush, fire and manoeuvre were the tactics being used all along the retreating line. The mortars and snipers were having a field day, but casualties were almost catastrophic.

General Williams had been right. The massed charge of the enemy would have spelled death if they had chosen to slug it out from fixed positions. With armoured support landing, and air superiority now firmly in the hands of the alien invaders, the few Marine units that had disobeyed orders and held the line had run out of ammo and been overrun before they could even send for resupply.

Khafagey hated running from a fight. He'd never run, not during his first war, a bloody border skirmish with Iran. He had not fled when battling the juiced up bodyguards of the Three Kings of Fallujah. And he'd never shown the rebels on Mars his back.

But today, cut, slash and run was the order of battle. And Khafagey would not break from it. Despite his misgivings, it was working. He was losing men by the minute, but he was littering the streets with dead aliens.

The pressure was intense. Soon, they'd run out of ammo for the heavy weapons. Then the aliens would work through whatever clever little VI was jamming their active scanners. And then the human retreat would turn into a rout.

"Yeah, you like that?" Wyckoff was moving back toward the tank, shooting his rifle at something writhing on the ground. "Not so fun when it's a two way firing range, huh?"

Khafagey looked to see what he was shooting at. One of the aliens was trying to crawl out of the way, by the looks of it, it had broken its leg. Wyckoff hadn't killed it, just shot up the ground around it. "Private!"

"Sorry, sir, I'll just be a second." The rifleman lifted his weapon again. "Quick and clean, not like they did to the Major..."

Khafagey rested a hand on Wyckoff's barrel. "Private. He's wounded. Out of combat. ROE says cease fire."

The younger man halted, his expression tense. Barely a month out of Reconnaissance School , the kid was as competent a soldier as any Khafagey had ever seen. But if the stocky officer knew anything, it was that nothing strained a man like watching his friends died. He understood, he really did. But if you picked and chose which rules of war to follow, pretty soon you wouldn't choose any of them.

Wyckoff's head dropped slightly as his rifle lowered. "Sir..."

"Forget about it." Khafagey shook his head. "Private, I need your headspace in this game, understood?"

"Yes, sir." Wyckoff nodded a little more enthusiastically. "Sir, I'm sorry...it's just..."

"You're tired, you're hungry and these things have been shooting at you for two days?" The officer sighed. "Welcome to the..."

A series of sharp reports came from the direction of the ruined tank. A few seconds later, a small squad appeared, a few of their member stopping to check the wounded alien, now lying dead with his head blown open.

The captain wanted to scream, shout, curse, anything, but he didn't have the energy. The uniforms of the newcomers were different to his black and grey digital camouflage. They wore green and brown woodland colours, out of place in the city, but all they really had.

A militia Staff Sergeant walked up to Khafagey, his expression grim. "Thanks for taking that tank out, sir. Bastard killed our CO this morning when we a recce on the enemy LZ. Been tracking it since. Good to send those bastards to hell."

The officer nodded blankly, then turned to Wyckoff. "Private, with me."

The trooper looked as numb as Khafagey felt. The rules of war...such a strange expression. Could war ever really have rules? He'd been taught that it could...that it did...but whose rules was he following? Hague and Geneva were very far away from a side street on Shanxi.

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EMERGENCY BUNKER BRAVO FIVE

BENEATH FINANCIAL DISTRICT

"Governor Worthing?" Williams looked at the figure approaching him in a torn suit. The small, greying man smiled tiredly at him.

"General Williams. How goes the war?" The governor dropped into the chair on the other side of Williams' improvised desk.

"Sir, I ordered you evacuated on the first available transport." Williams stood up. "You were supposed to be under the mountains by now."

"There was...a woman...she had a kid..." Worthing waved a hand dismissively. "I gave up my slot. And after the first wave hit...there were more important things to do"

"Sir. You are top political echelon. You are needed else..."

"General." Worthing's hands were shaking and bloody, but his voice was deadly calm. "I know that no good soldier cares much for politicians. But I did not come to Shanxi as a politician, I came as a doctor. I was a trauma surgeon in London for twenty years. Here, my medical skills are valuable than my political ones. First the civilians needed their basic needs met, now your soldiers are getting torn apart. Your own surgeons are getting overwhelmed. I'm not leaving."

"I cannot guarantee your safety." Williams informed him bluntly. "This bunker is good for maybe another twelve hours before they either find and kill us, or we have to evacuate."

"Joe." Worthing's eyes didn't look angry, or nervous, or determined. He simply looked...accepting. "You need to hold out until reinforcements arrive. For that, you need men on the line with guns, and people keeping them battle worthy."

Williams was not one to reject help when it was offered. It was either waste time and men escorting a meaningless VIP to safety, or retain a useful asset to his war effort. There was no real choice.

"Doctor Worthing." He extended a hand over the desk. "Good to have you on board."

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"This is Lieutenant Colonel Rico to anyone near the entertainment district. Can you read me?" The militia officer shouted into his microphone as another enemy artillery shell slammed into the side of the building he had taken refuge in. "I say again, this is Lieutenant..."

A voice answered back. =Greyhound One, this is Warhawk. You will use proper Ra-Tel procedure if you want a pickup, over.=

The man blinked slightly at the abruptness of the message. "Just who the hell do you think you are?"

=I'm the one keeping my ID off the net so that the damn birds don't listen in.= The man on the other end snapped back. =Been a long day, Greyhound. Shame to make it longer by making yourself a high priority target.=

Rico slumped back down against the counter of what had once been a four star restaurant. "I'm...sorry. My...my unit, all of Greyhound...we're currently pinned down in the Maravel Building. We've been falling back since morning...birds are kicking our asses. We need ammo and reinforcements if we're going to hold."

=Can't give you that, Greyhound.= The voice was tense. =I'll bring my team in, we'll blast a hole in enemy lines for you to get out.=

"Out?" Rico was almost hysterical. "How the hell are we supposed to get out? We're pinned down and under heavy enemy fire!"

=Greyhound, calm down!= The man's voice was becoming increasingly urgent. =Just hang on, we're coming to...oh no...Lord have mercy...=

Rico felt a shadow cover him and looked upwards. Through the shattered windows, he could make out a grey shape hanging over the city. He blinked, trying to make sense of the image. Then the front end of the mass erupted, and everything turned to dust.

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From where he was standing, Shepard ducked down as the shockwave from the toppling building rolled over him. The air in his lungs compressed and expelled from his open mouth. An easy tactic to avoid injury from a concussion wave, but it still shook him to his very bones.

Beside him, Harper continued to gaze at toppling building, listening to the screams of the militia as chunks of metal continued to fall on them. "Orbital bombardment...right on top of a signal hub. So they are listening into our transmissions."

"We've got to get word back to the General." Shepard flinched again as the grey shape in the sky cut loose with another shell, this one landing less than four blocks away. "Get the word out to cut all radio transmissions."

"You know something?" Harper observed drily. "I think he's probably guessed by now."

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Williams slammed his hand down on the console. "Those bastards. Those motherless sons of bitches! Fuck!"

"Quite." Gurung's brow furrowed as he scanned the status reports incoming on the tac map. "Sir, receiving reports from Pressly, Shepard and damn near every other commander left up there. They're hammering all of our strongpoints, assembly areas and supply depots. Casualties are in the hundreds."

"And if we lose our supply caches we lose this city." Williams had feared this moment ever since the blips appeared on his LADAR screen. Orbital bombardment. A force bringing to bear all the awesome power of their mass accelerator weapons. He'd seen the simulations himself. A standard slug could level a whole city, but even a reduced mass shell could bring down a block with ease. "Order immediate dispersal of supplies and troops. Evacuate every exposed bunker and joint command area."

"Sir?" Gurung's voice interrupted his order stream. "Without command groups, we're not going to be able to organise effective counter-attacks."

"We don't have a choice, dammit." Williams turned to his adjutant. "They're wiping out everyone who's squawking up there! Splitting up into fireteams and sections is our only option to keep up the fight without getting wiped out by those damn cruisers."

"Sir, aside from the Fourteenth, our men just aren't trained to fight that kind of war." Gurung indicated the screen. "You're depriving them of the chain of command. We can't win this battle without having effective formations working in synch to mount a defence."

"You don't get it, Colonel." Williams looked away. "The Battle for Outreach is over. They have suppressed and overrun our positions. They have the CBD, the spaceport, and soon they'll have the entertainment district. Our last avenue of escape is the underground tunnels leading to the mountains. We must hold and harass them in the entertainment district long enough to evacuate what we can."

"You're abandoning the city?" Gurung blinked in surprise. "Sir..."

"Colonel." General Williams rested his hand on the man's shoulder. "Our only hope is still reinforcement from Arcturus. But that hope no longer lies in Outreach. We've held them as long as we can here. But we're far too exposed. They now have orbital firepower coming into play. We can hang onto Outreach, and lose everything we have left, or we can fall back to the mountains and hold on for just a little bit longer."

"Sir...yes sir." Gurung looked away reluctantly. "I'll...make it happen."

Ceris observed the man's feet as he walked away from the tac map. They dragged noticeably. "He is a born soldier. He does not wish to flee the fight."

"Hmm?" Williams glanced at her. "Oh...yes. Yes...he is a Gurkha."

"A what?"

"A Gurkha." Williams smiled faintly. "Amongst his people, it is a lifelong goal to serve as a soldier. They train from their youngest years to be selected, and only those with exceptional strength, stamina and fighting spirit will ever be chosen. And he is one of the best."

"Ah...they are like the soldiers of my people." Ceris nodded. "It is a long path to become a huntress."

"Is that what you are?" Williams asked, surprised to find himself genuinely curious. "A 'huntress'?"

"I was one." Ceris nodded. "But now I am a reporter."

...oops.

Williams blinked. "Did that translate right? Did you say you were a...reporter?"

For a second, Ceris was proud of the fact that she had just succeeded in utterly amazing the stoic officer. But only for a second. The next second was spent squirming uncomfortably as she tried to come up with something that didn't sound so...self-serving. "Well...yes. I came out here because I thought I was chasing a story about the turians fighting a threat to Citadel space. Instead...I found you."

Williams blinked again. "I see. I thought you were military intelligence. A spy of some kind. It's why I haven't asked you too many questions. I thought at some point...you'd probably pull some kind of gambit for your freedom."

"Oh."

"Indeed."

"So what now?"

"Now?" Williams shook his head. "Now I need every last scrap of data you can think of about these 'turians'. Or none of us is going to live till nightfall."

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Desolas prided himself on his composure. In a world where his clan was considered an untrustworthy group of schemers, and his family looked down on as borderline traitors, it took thick plates to endure and to get by.

But the fact was, he had had enough.

Striding over the threshold into Jhirx's ready room, he asked her a simple question. "Are you out of your twice damned mind?"

The admiral cocked her head to look at him. "Not your customary greeting, Desolas? Strange, I thought your usual grovelling was far too strong a habit to..."

He struck her, his talons creasing her faceplate with his full strength as he bowled her over. "My men were in close contact to the enemy. You've killed dozens of my best soldiers..."

"And killed hundreds of theirs." Jhirx spat from where she had fallen, seemingly unfazed despite her fall. "Shattered their defensive lines in a few minutes. Something you could not do in days!"

"The Council has prohibited bombardment of garden worlds since the Krogan Rebellions!" Desolas hissed. "A single shot could cost the Hierarchy millions of credits in fines, and you have just released a dozen salvos!"

"And I would do it again in a second, if it meant getting this damn war over with!" Jhirx climbed to her feet. "I received communiqués from the Staff of Generals and the War Council this morning. All of them wanting to know where the hell I am."

"But they know..."

"Not officially, damn you." Jhirx paced towards him. "This war should have been over with by now. These 'humans' should be trotting along beside the volus. Instead, they've destroyed a cruiser, a dozen frigates and almost six thousand of our men. These casualties, Desolas, are unacceptable!"

"And so you'll rain down fire from the heavens as an alternative?" Desolas flared his plates. "Jhirx, this species is a tiny one. There cannot be more than five million of them on that planet altogether."

"And from what we've seen so far, most of them are soldiers." Jhirx shook her head. "The Army had its chance to sort this out, Desolas. From now on, the Navy will be handling this. Orbital bombardment is now to be our primary tactic. Your soldiers will mop up when my men are finished with their work."

"I see." Desolas nodded coolly. "Well then...as the Admiral commands. If you will excuse me..."

"Where are you going?"

"To join my men in their 'mop up.'" Desolas nodded, as politely as he could stomach. "Leaving the Admiral to her tactics."

"Very well." Jhirx turned away. "But Desolas?"

"Yes?"

"You would do well to cover yourself in glory. Else I might find an unused rope to repay your blow."

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A/N: Sorry about the long delay, folks. Army Reserve's been taking up a lot of my time. Never fear, this story is still going strong. In fact, I've finally got a solid handle on where the story is going to finish. The next chapter will see us entering the final stretch, beginning a string of chapters covering the bombardment of Shanxi, Desolas's discovery of the obelisk, and the beginning of the Alliance's relief effort back at Arcturus.