Author's Note: I'm back! Thank you, thank you, I survived my trip. And, it turns out if you deny me access to most of my usual distractions, but let me keep a word processor, then I can write thirty thousand words in two weeks. Productivity! Woohoo!
And now, responses to reviews:
1) Why not just use shuttles with nukes on board to destroy Ethereal ships? I'm not sure which engagement is being referred to here, but there's a couple of reasons. Before the arrival of the Fleet, it was because they didn't have the shuttles to spare and most engagements are taking place in atmosphere (and the scout flotilla doesn't actually carry any nukes and asking Humanity for them seemed…unpolitic). For the engagements in chapter 5, the scout frigate didn't have any shuttles and was ambushed; the Heavy Fleet needs to find the enemy and the Temple Ship absolutely surprised the Civilian Fleet. More generally, they don't do this because it doesn't have any real advantage over a fighter or missile attack which won't get through the enemy's point defense (probably, or so the Quarians believe. You may have noticed they're having some trouble adapting to the new circumstances and technology (an unfortunate side effect of the generally pretty stable technology of the Mass Effect 'verse)).
Without FTL communications, there's no easy way to coordinate a shuttle attack from outside the line-of-sight of the party being attacked and the shuttle needs to build up speed before it can jump to FTL, giving the target plenty of time to see it coming and move. I may not be doing a great job of describing it, but that's part of what makes space battles so very hard, everyone is moving unpredictably and the distances are, usually, vast, though the Ethereals have get in pretty close in order to target their enemy. It's a clash of technologies which tends to mean that whichever of them can force the other into their preferred mode of engagement will win.
Well, unless there's some sort of…game changer out there. Like some sort of massive alien ship, armed to the gills and stuffed with Ethereals and their soldier-slaves…
Or something.
2) Various anticipatory comments: Thanks! Reviews are wonderful things.
And now, your regularly scheduled chapter:
"You heard the man. Fire," Admiral Vega commanded. The converted transports sent up a hail of tiny shots from their turrets, frigates fired their main guns, sending up a cloud of shot, while frigates and cruisers fired larger rounds and each of the Liveships sent a single round towards the stationary target.
Fire burst from the fusion weapons which filled the ship's lower decks while the mass effect rounds were still approaching.
London vanished.
The ship vanished.
Thousands of rounds passed through newly empty space.
"How'd they do that? They can only jump once per period. It was only a few min—" one of the officers began to ask.
"Where the hell is it?" Admiral Vega snapped, overriding him.
"Other side of the planet ma'am, above a city called," the scanner tech's voice shifted somewhat as she tried to mimic the Human pronunciation, "Tokyo?"
"We're switching to wide coverage dispersal. No one fires without my order," she didn't know if failing to attack would prevent the enemy from destroying a second Human city, but she wasn't going to trigger another massacre until and unless she absolutely had to.
"Aye, aye, ma'am," the comms tech said, transmitting the order.
"And figure out why that ship isn't playing by the same rules as the rest of the enemy fleet!" she added to one of her senior staff techs.
"Aye, aye, ma'am."
The Civilian Fleet scattered, moving to cover the full scope of the atmosphere with the Liveships. That required pulling the giant vessels back, to each cover a third of the planet. Fortunately the enemy stayed in a high enough orbit that the curve of the planet didn't make this impossible.
"Ma'am," the staff tech said, drawing the Admiral's attention.
"Yes?"
A voice came from the tech's omni-tool, "Admiral, it's brilliant! There was no way we could have figured it out from the readings we had, but—"
"Tech," the admiral interrupted the blithering genius her tech had consulted with.
"Ma'am, they've got backup engines capable of small jumps. We estimate they can jump like that five more times."
"Five more times. That's all?"
"That's not all! See, their FTL generates a field which folds space and brings them to their destination. That field contaminates other engines within the field, until the contamination dissipates, they can't be used. Which is why they can't just have multiple engines. The field should scale with the ship and the distance and it does, but not entirely perfectly. At the size of that ship, there's places where, if the generator was placed on the prow of the ship, then certain of those metal projections would be far enough away not to be contaminated. Those smaller drives can only move the ship a tiny relative distance, but it's more than enough for maneuvers like that," the scientist explained, not aware that the tech had muted her transition.
"Based on the power spike and radiation surge we saw when they jumped, yes, we believe so, ma'am."
"The locations of these engines are identified?"
"We believe so. We've calculated optimum position which would let them fit in six backup engines. Any other position and they can only fit a maximum of five. It fits with the one jump we've recorded."
"Any way to stop them from jumping besides blowing up their individual drives?"
"Well…let me talk to some people."
"You've got thirty minutes until we're in position and have to decide whether we're firing again. I'd like another option."
"Yes, ma'am," the tech said to Admiral Vega's back as the admiral was already demanding a channel to the Commander from the comms tech.
XXXXX
"Six more cities? Casualty estimates are barely beginning to come in from London, but we're looking at millions dead," Central Officer Bradford snapped.
"Six more cities will not destroy Humanity. If that's the only option, then we will deal with it. I would prefer another option however, if you have one," the Commander said, voice level.
"Then you wish to continue?" Admiral Vega asked, through Semmi's omni-tool.
"Yes."
"Understood. I assume your own forces are mobilizing?"
"Of course," the Commander responded.
"For what good it will do," Bradford muttered. "They're down here, we can't get them up to that monstrosity. But we'll have troops ready to go wherever it crashes."
Dr. Shen stared at him. "If it crashes, there won't be anything but a crater for a hundred kilometers, at least if it doesn't land in the ocean, which is actually the worse scenario as it involves massive tsunamis all along every shoreline."
"Continue the mobilization," the Commander ordered into the silence that followed the doctor's announcement.
XXXXX
"Five more jumps is more than enough to destroy every Liveship in the Fleet and as many Human cities. I need a way to pin that bosh'tet down," the tech demanded of his omni-tool.
"We're scientists, not miracle workers," one voice argued.
Another was suggesting some sort of particle emission that would contaminate the other drives, but since that suggestion started with 'assuming we had a particle generator capable of creating and aiming such particles' he ignored that.
"Well, gravity distorts space. The larger the ship, the further out from a gravity well it has to come out to make its jump. Knock it into the atmosphere and it won't be able to jump around," one voice pointed out.
The others immediately jumped in to point out the damage to the planet in that case, as well as the fact that if they could hit it to knock it into the atmosphere, then they wouldn't have to knock it into the atmosphere, because they'd be able to hit it.
"How large a gravity well?" Admiral Vega asked from her command chair, still examining her slowly redeploying fleet.
"Depends how close it is."
"A gravity well the size of a cruiser?" the Admiral asked.
There was a pause while the scientist plugged that into his model. "Doesn't have the mass, even if its hull-to-hull with that ship."
"Even if it uses its core to increase its mass as much as possible?"
There was a longer pause. "A cruiser could hold it, under those circumstances, but only if it runs so hot that its power system would burn out in less than a minute."
"And the Levsheppa?" Admiral Vega asked.
There was a moment of absolute silence, not merely on the other end of the communication line, but in the bridge as well as crew froze at the suggestion she was making. Protecting the Liveships was core doctrine. Endangering them was unthinkable.
"At a power level which could be maintained for a reasonable period of time, the Levsheppa would need to be within a kilometer of the enemy ship," the scientist said after more time than it should have taken to run the numbers. "Which is well within the range of the enemy weapons."
"Thank you."
"Deploying multiple cruisers could have the same effect in a more reasonable fashion, I'll forward plans to your omni-tool, Admiral?"
"Thank you," the admiral repeated, but her eyes were not on the information the scientist streamed to her.
The captain of the Levsheppa approached her as she manipulated potential fleet maneuvers on her omni-tool, exploring various possibilities. He stood before her for a moment, then, when she didn't look up, came sharply at attention before her, boot coming down loud on the deck. "Yes, Captain?" she asked, without looking up.
"Ma'am, I can't help but notice that you appear to be looking into using my ship as some sort of primitive battering ram."
"I wouldn't put it that way. More like a primitive boarding pod," she corrected him.
"Ma'am, putting aside everything else which is wrong with that, this ship is full of civilians unloaded from the Heavy Fleet. Remember? Oh, and that ship outmasses us many times over. Who knows how many soldiers are onboard it? Surely more than the thousand marines on the Levsheppa. There was something else, what was it?" The admiral opened her mouth, but the captain spoke right over her. "Oh, right, and this is a Liveship of the Fleet, one of the last three reserves of life from Rannoch. It contains irreplaceable animal, insect and plant life. If we lose this ship, our chances of ever repairing Rannoch drop to almost none, oh and we'll have real trouble feeding the Fleet. This action risks the entirety of the Fleet. You cannot—"
"I can, Captain. And I will, unless you and the rest of the staff can give me an alternate solution to this problem. You have until we're in position, Captain."
"The Conclave will not permit—"
"The Conclave voted. We are allies with the Humans. We do not abandon our allies, unlike the Council."
Codex: The Betrayal, Unlocked.
"Failing to commit suicide is not abandoning our allies."
Admiral Vega examined the massive ship which awaited the next response of the Humans, then flicked a hand and the projection shifted to where London had once stood. Stone and metal buildings had melted to form lumps on the exposed bedrock, but the fusion and plasma weaponry had left almost nothing behind. "Shall we leave them to die alone?"
"Is it better that two species die than one?"
"Your defeatism betrays you, Captain. It is better that five species die here than two. And that is what will happen. If there are more of these monstrous ships wherever they come from, then capturing this one can only be good. If not, then we will use their own ship to burn their worlds to ash. We are the Migrant Fleet and we will never run again."
XXXXX
"Do we have a plan?" the Spokesman asked.
"We wait," the Commander answered.
"There's nothing else we can do?" the Spokesman's voice was incredulous.
"There's nothing else to be done at this time. That ship dodged the Quarian shots which are a lot faster than any of our missiles. Assuming some nuclear missiles could take it out, we couldn't hit the target. And that assumes they dodge, instead of blowing them out of the sky and spreading radioactive material over the planet. If that thing lands we'll take it out, but so long as it stays in orbit, we'll have to leave it to the Quarians."
"And what are they doing?"
"I have no idea. What little our remaining satellites can pick up indicate that thousands of ships are moving around in all different directions." The enemy ship was picking off every satellite that came within fifty kilometers of it, doing massive damage to telecommunications and observation capacity.
"Are the Quarians withdrawing?"
"They will do what they will do. And they aren't talking much at the moment."
"Do we know why not?"
"They may be concerned about communication interception, or they may be ashamed that they're going to run. I don't know."
"And if they're running?"
"Then it depends on what the enemy does. There are things we can try, but if they're able to continue to dodge and their point defense is as good as appears likely, then we will probably be forced to surrender."
"That is unacceptable."
"I did not say we would mean it when we surrender."
"And how is a fake surrender different from a real one?"
"If we can bait them into landing? Then it's very different. If not, then it's not different at all."
"Unacceptable," the Spokesman repeated, as if that changed anything.
"But it may be necessary. We will try many things beforehand, but I doubt their success. I do not say that we're doomed, yet, but if they're truly willing to exterminate us from orbit and we can't touch that ship, then, unacceptable or not, we'll surrender. The real question is how far are we willing to go to make them prove that they are truly willing to exterminate us?"
XXXXX
"This plan will work. They can't detect our shots, once they're fired. They'll see the spike, but won't know where they're aimed. There's only so many big cities on the planet and that ship's a damn big target. We can put cruiser weight shots through the space over all of them, make a grid. We'll get a piece of them! Odds are better than ninety percent," the captain of the Levsheppa argued.
"That you'll get a piece of them, sure. That a single shot from a cruiser's main gun will take out a ship that big?" countered one of the admiral's staffers. "I don't think so. You saw what happened when it took a hit from a frigate."
"We need to pin it down and pound on it. We can't do that if it's jumping around like magic and we can't do that with a bunch of cruisers which'll get cut to bits before they can even get close," another staffer agreed, arguing more with himself than anyone at the table.
"But to endanger a Liveship…" a third muttered. "It goes against policy, doctrine and common sense."
"And standing orders!" the captain put in sharply.
"The admiral's standing orders. She can overrule them if she wishes."
"Besides, with that ship able to jump anywhere it wants within, what, some unknown distance? The Liveships are in danger so long as they remain in this system."
"The Heavy Fleet will be back—"
"Not that soon. And it doesn't contain any dreadnoughts anyway. What matters here is size. Armor and shielding won't stop those weapons. We need a ship that can take a hit and still anchor itself in place."
"Which is why a swarm of cruisers and cargo transports are the right way to go!"
"Except those ships will get in each others way and be destroyed or defeated individually. The Liveship gives us a single battlefield, where we're on the defensive."
The staff meeting devolved into bickering for a long minute until Pol's chief of staff slammed an armored fist down on the table. "I'll present all options to the Admiral, but only if they're presented to me, clearly. I want proposals on my omni-tool within fifteen minutes. Enough discussion. It's time to decide."
"Whether we're all going to commit suicide for a bunch of aliens," one of the staffers muttered under her breath, but audibly.
"Whether we're going to betray our allies, as the Council betrayed us," another muttered in response.
"ENOUGH!" the chief of staff shouted, waving them out of the briefing room with a furious gesture.
XXXXX
"Engage."
Ships moved. By the thousands they moved, engines burning as they began to build up speed towards the jump that could take them to FTL and out of the system. And in the center of it all, sat Admiral Pol'Vega Vas'Levsheppa and the Migrant Fleet danced at her command.
XXXXX
"The aliens are attacking!" Bradford yelled, staring at the massive display.
Semmi glared at him. "The Fleet is moving," he corrected the younger man.
"Directly towards the enemy!" Bradford snapped.
"They have to build up speed before they jump to FTL and they're hardly likely to turn their back on this enemy. Which is why the enemy hasn't moved yet," Semmi said and the others almost missed his sotto voce concluding comment, 'I hope…'
"Continue mobilization," the Commander ordered, as if nothing was happening, because he recognized there was nothing he could do about anything going on outside the atmosphere.
XXXXX
The Levsheppa leapt to FTL, firing her top thrusters at the last possible moment before making the jump. Those thrusters flipped the ship over while invisibly in FTL, putting the Levsheppa in position to instantly began to decelerate and increase its mass, when it dropped out of FTL almost atop, in both senses of the word, the massive enemy ship, engines burning hard to slow her before she plowed into the top of it (originally the Levsheppa would have flown over the enemy ship, but the same thruster movements which had flipped the Levsheppa over to let her slow herself with her main engines had aimed the Liveship down into the enemy ship).
In the moment before the ships collided, the Levsheppa's mass rose exponentially and the enemy ship managed to land a single shot from one of the fusion weapons that dotted its hull on the charging Quarian ship. The remaining half-dozen fusion weapons which could bear on the Levsheppa missed due to its sudden arrival and squirming, shifting trajectory and mass.
Fortunately, the blast came in at an angle and impacted the exhaust from the massive engines before hitting the rear of the craft. The exhaust absorbed some of the energy of the weapon and the increased mass helped protect the ship, but the fusion weapon still slagged one of the engines, causing the Levsheppa's arrival to be somewhat more…energetic than anticipated.
The increased mass of the Levsheppa and the shielding which they had pulled back to reinforce the hull against the impact (as it was thoroughly useless against the fusion weaponry of the enemy ship) was sufficient that the Levsheppa survived the maneuver intact (except for the destroyed engine) and the enemy ship's mass and massive armor let it survive as well, though the exhaust of the remaining engines did burn deep gouges in the hull before the ceased firing. The Levsheppa settled atop the ship, pressed hull to hull, too close for any of the recessed, non-Levsheppa-covered, weapons to bear upon it.
One of the covered weapons tried to fire, but with the Levsheppa's hull pressed against the opening, the weapon didn't have the necessary room to build up a charge and discharge, instead exploding messily, taking a divot out of the hulls of both ships and depressurizing large sections of them. Escape pods burst from the top of the Levsheppa as children and civilians made the escape which the Ethereal's observation and the Admiral's paranoia had denied them earlier.
At the same moment, half a dozen armed shuttles and fighters burst from the one still functional shuttle bay on the Levsheppa's starboard side (the port side one having been converted to living quarters thirty years ago) and began to fire on the enemy ship's weapon emplacements from inside its own defensive perimeter. As many more small ships detached from the airlocks they'd been clamped to and joined the fray. The ships hugged the hull as they killed ship-killing weapons with pinpoint, short-range fire. Despite their accuracy and the range, it took sustained barrages of fire from the smaller ships to disable those weapons.
Point-defense turrets rose belatedly from hidden locations and began to fire on the craft as the Levsheppa's shields expanded in response. The shields of the smaller craft were much weaker, but they could dodge back inside the Levsheppa's shields whenever their own shields needed to recharge and the craft were far more nimble than any of the Ethereal's craft. The giant ship's defenses weren't designed to handle such maneuverable manned craft inside the main defensive perimeter. Picking off unshielded missiles was one thing, fighters skimming their own ship's hull were quite another.
Marines and engineers dropped onto the hull at the same moment as shuttles were launching from the crashed Liveship. They were carrying long cables and tethers, binding the two ships together, long before the Ethereals could move any forces into the area, especially with so many of those forces dying in the decompression caused by their own futile attempts to kill the Levsheppa.
Hidden bays swung open all over the massive enemy vessel and scout craft poured out. Those which had been within the range of the jump-engine-contaminating original jump began to dogfight with the attacking fighters and shuttle craft, using the point-defense turrets the same way the Quarian ships used the Levsheppa's shields and GARDIAN systems.
The few shuttles launching from the rear of the craft, where they'd been outside the range of the contamination, jumped to nearby cities and began trying to spread panic and draw attention away from their mothership. With every major power around the globe basing Firestorms out of their airfields, that was a short-lived and relatively futile attack. However, it did succeed at spreading panic and delaying the Firestorms from joining the attack on the main ship.
More Quarian vessels dropped out around the restrained enemy ship, carefully dropping out of FTL far outside the range of its weaponry and launched shuttles full of marines. The assault craft swung around so they were approaching from where the bulk of the Levsheppa shielded them from the enemy's weapons and they began to board the Levsheppa from the same areas where the civilians had fled the crippled Liveship as well as from where the, now-dueling, strike craft had launched from.
It could not be, would not be, and was not long before the Ethereals began to respond more effectively. Floaters and suited Muton warriors began to pour into the area and onto the hull where marines instantly switched from attempting to secure airlocks and mine any remaining weapon emplacements to defending the tethers which bound the two ships together. The increase in mass, careful firing of the Levsheppa's thrusters and the enemy ship's own forward orbital momentum had held the ships together for the critical instant to permit them to be tethered together, but if the tethers were cut and the enemy sublight engines fired, then it might still get away (though that would mean exposing itself to the full fire of the Fleet until it reached a safe distance to jump, unshielded by the Liveship's presence).
Thanks to the artificial gravity, none of the Ethereals noticed that the Levsheppa's thrusters were rolling them until one of them sadly (and belatedly) ordered the destruction of Tokyo as punishment for this gambit. The discovery that they were upside down and therefore the vast majority of the weaponry not blocked by the Levsheppa was pointed at empty space was somewhat disconcerting to people for whom spacecraft were merely a means to reach new planets and new subjects. It was likewise disconcerting to the marines and engineers on the hull of the ships, but they shrugged and got back to work, trusting in their mag boots to keep them from falling. A trust which was mostly rewarded, though several discovered that a planetary gravity well was far less forgiving of mag boot faults than a vacuum, where someone else could just come get you if there were problems.
A few shots from the weaponry which wasn't covered by the bulk of the Levsheppa or disabled either by the marines or the, still-raiding, shuttlecraft and fighters did some damage, but the ships had mostly drifted (not at all accidentally, and at a very high rate of speed) away from Tokyo, out towards the ocean and were still doing so, carrying them away from anything obvious that might be damaged by their fire (the consequences of vaporizing a large amount of the ocean might have been bad, but did not occur to the Ethereals).
Though the mile long Liveship couldn't cover the entirety of the three mile long Ethereal vessel, it covered most of what had been the top, fore section and was now the bottom fore section, leaving the (now) bottom aft weapons free (which could aim only at water) and the top (formerly bottom) weapons free, which were mostly intended for planetary bombardment and now could aim only up. Though the ship's weapons were mostly useless, the same could not be said for the rest of its systems, as the Ethereals eventually realized.
The enemy ship's engines leapt to life as the two vessels began to struggle for control. The Levsheppa was a Liveship, almost a kilometer long, with engines built to let her outrun raiders and Geth alike, but the enemy ship was three times the length and many more times the mass, even if it was mostly intended to use its jump drive, its sublight drive was still more than a match for the Levsheppa's (and would have been even if one of the Levsheppa's main drives wasn't melted scrap metal). Once it overcame the momentum the Levsheppa and gravity were imbuing, it would be able to push the smaller craft around, indeed, it was already angling things to attempt to burn the smaller ship off as they approached the atmosphere.
It was, therefore, something of a surprise to them when Admiral Vega's handpicked team of infiltrators and engineers finally reached the main engines after a long run across the outside of the enemy vessel's hull and began blowing the crap out of them. They didn't have time for finesse, so they just packed everything within reach with explosives and detonated them. Unfortunately, the four main engines were each…large and separated by several hundred meters of open hull. Even more unfortunately, they were being maintained by a cluster of Drones and Cyberdiscs, which called for aid the moment they were attacked.
None of the 139 marines, or 84 non-marine engineers the Admiral had dispatched would return, but they accomplished their mission and the engines were destroyed.
With the enemy ship helpless and over the ocean, the Levsheppa rolled again and called for aid herself, to keep from plunging to a fiery death as she descended into the atmosphere. Dozens of Quarian vessels answered the call, tethering themselves to the back of the Levsheppa and keeping her aloft, but there wasn't room for enough craft to lift them out of the atmosphere, not with the enemy ship merrily destroying any craft which slipped into its line of fire.
Not that they would have lifted it out of the atmosphere even if they could.
XXXXX
"I don't fucking care. Get every goddamn Skyranger loaded up and up there. We aren't leaving this fight up to the fucking aliens. We will decide our own fate if I have to fire your ass up there out of a fucking artillery piece!" Bradford's bellow was emphatic to the point of being almost unbearably loud.
"Contact the Fleet and get flight paths which keep our craft clear of enemy fire," the Commander added calmly.
"Shuttles are inbound from the Levsheppa, Commander, they're requesting additional troops to ferry up there," Semmi said.
"Cleared. Empty the barracks. Once all our people are topside, we'll have them ferry troops from the nearest military bases. I assume the Americans, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, Canadians, Mexicans and Australians are all cooperating?" the Commander asked a nearby tech.
"Yes, sir, everyone's seen the pictures of London, they don't want that ship loose any more than we do," the tech responded.
"Get those goddamn Firestorms moving as well. Coordinate with the Quarians, I want those fucking city-killers melted off that damn ship!" Bradford yelled at another tech, abandoning the, insufficiently furious, Commander and Semmi to their nonsense.
"Agreed," the Commander said the Bradford, then turned back to Semmi, "I understand why the Admiral did not communicate with me beforehand, but we need to coordinate now, or we risk tripping over each other."
Semmi looked up from his omni-tool, now streaming in updates. "Admiral Pol'Vega is dead. She died in the initial crash. Everyone's following her last orders with some direction from Captain Tion'Elor vas'Levsheppa, but it's going to be chaos up there. The Admirals of the Heavy and Patrol Fleets are still out there hunting the rest of the enemy and the Admiral of Special Projects is still studying the one Quarian who has shown psionic powers and hasn't bothered to answer any messages in four days, let alone leave his lab. There's no clear chain of command at the moment."
"Can you take charge?" the Commander asked Semmi. The Quarian looked like someone had gutted him. He wanted it, more than he'd ever suspected, he wanted to be an admiral, to save and serve his people. A heavy sigh escaped grey lips.
"No. My skills aren't those which are needed. Even Pol's skills aren't what's needed now. Tion can handle the limited remaining naval side of this engagements. It's not hard, it's just going to take a while to clear out the enemy point-defense and heavy weapons one by one. The hard part is the boarding action. There's probably millions of X-Rays on that ship, and a Liveship has a garrison of a thousand. Thousands more were dropped off by those shuttles and more are inbound. However…we haven't fought a large scale ground engagement since the end of the Geth Wars. This needs a different," Semmi winced, "commander."
He stepped forward and activated his omni-tool and took over the central screen in Mission Control. Usually it displayed the planet, except when satellite imagery was letting the Commander aid and guide a team in the field. At Semmi's command, that was replaced with an outline of the enemy ship and the corridors the Quarians had mapped, dotted with markers indicating Quarian troop strength and where they'd located the enemy. He stripped off the omni-tool from his wrist for the first time in almost three decades and passed it to the Commander. "The teams are labelled, just speak their name and they'll hear you, broadcasting with my authority as representative of the Conclave. I hope the enemy can't tap that communication, but I can't promise it."
"And the Human soldiers?" Bradford asked like a good XO, while the Commander was busy absorbing the tactical situation.
"If they're within sight of Quarians the VI should ID them, but if they're on their own, you'll need another way of tracking them."
"Merging all those command-and-control systems won't be easy," Bradford muttered.
"We won't bother. We'll use Quarians as messengers and CNC. Make sure we get copies of all the relevant radio frequencies as they go up, so we can still communicate if the Quarians go down," the Commander said, then spoke a series of seventeen orders without pause which brought the Quarian forces into a ragged line just inside the decompression zone and sent a group of civilian engineers to work on patching the atmosphere.
"I've sent updated translation packages to the marines' omni-tools, but we still haven't finished programs for all Human languages, remember," Semmi added.
"I do, I do. Now then," the Commander rubbed his hands together, "let's get to work."
XXXXX
The battle became one of attrition, ugly and grinding with massive casualties on both sides, but the balance was tilted in the favor of the attackers as more and more soldiers shuttled up from the planet, or over from the Migrant Fleet, but the X-Rays received no reinforcements. Though the massive assault ship did manage to destroy a number of Migrant Fleet vessels, there was always a replacement. The same could not be said for each weapon emplacement which was destroyed by fighter fire, or infiltrators. The few fighters and armed shuttlecraft which were destroyed were replaced with Firestorms.
Though the Human fighter craft was extremely effective in atmosphere, the Quarians couldn't rearm, reequip, or refuel them and both ships remained tethered together over the ocean, leaving many Firestorms with time for only a single brief attack run before they had to continue on to the nearest airfield. This problem gradually resolved itself as X-Com claimed Henderson Field (formerly the Naval Air Facility on Midway Island) and brought fuel, weapons, batteries and everything else needed to do maintenance and repair on Firestorms to the, mostly decommissioned, air station. Along with Japan, Hawaii and Alaska, Midway and a dozen other World War II era decommissioned bases were used as staging points for the largest air assault ever launched by Humanity.
Faced with such a determined (and massive) assault, the Ethereals had to resort to venting parts of their own ship to defend themselves. Most of the Human soldiers had been given masks and oxygen supplies sufficient to let them get to the next section, and the Ethereals lack of locks crippled their ability to defend themselves properly, but many still died, or suffered horrible decompression injuries.
Obedient to the Commander's orders, the soldiers spread like coral throughout the ship, seizing key corridors and sabotaging systems. As they cleared out anti-ship weapons, more shuttles were able to dock with Ethereal airlocks and bring troops in right near the front lines, each shuttle bringing a squad or two of soldiers, which wasn't much individually, but as an endless stream, they acted as a moat, holding against the enemy, even if they spent lives like water to do it.
And then there was X-Com and a few elite units of Quarian marines, kept together as assault groups. They smashed enemy resistance and advanced so quickly that a few had to be recalled to keep them from getting cut off and floating through the rest of the ship like an embolism floating in a Human body.
There were hundreds of thousands of soldiers engaged and millions more ready to take ship when the Commander spotted something that he thought might give them a chance at ending the battle without finishing the ugly slugging match. He selected his troops with care from those who were in, or near, the right position and gave the order. To lots of them. He wasn't rolling the dice on one long shot, not with entire armies at his command.
XXXXX
Codex: The Betrayal:
When the Geth Wars began, the Quarians initially demanded that all other powers stay out of their internal strife. Their concern at the time was making sure none of the other powers took advantage of their instability and that none of the border colonies either made a break for independence, or sought to join another power.
As the wars dragged on, this changed to politely, then desperately requesting aid from outside powers. These requests were denied. As the wars slowly ended with the collapse of Quarian populations due to starvation and the brutally efficient strategies of the Geth, the remaining Quarian government begged for aid. And were denied. The final call came as the Migrant Fleet was launching, begging for Council protection as they fled. The Council did not respond.
The reasons for the Council's noninvolvement and the failure of any the member nations to intervene are not entirely clear, though presumably they were convincing, as both the Quarian casualties and the economic damage were horrific and all of Quarian space, the population and resources therein, was lost to the Council. The economic damage is believed to have caused what is widely known as the Quarian recession, damaging the galactic economy for almost a decade thereafter.
There are many theories for why no assistance was forthcoming, from jealousy over Quarian success in the field of AI, to Geth blackmail of the Council and leadership of every individual nation. But to the Quarians, the reasons, actual or conspiratorial, hardly matter. They lost their worlds, their ancestors, almost everything and everyone, while those they considered allies did not help. The failure to do so is known as the Betrayal.
Author's Note: This and the next chapter should really be one chapter, but that proved to be way too large.
Also, though there's five admirals on the admiralty board, I'm not sure what the fifth admiral is in charge of and therefore left them out of my count. The other four are in charge of the Civilian, Heavy, Patrol Fleets and Special Projects, respectively. In my head, I'm handling this by calling it an innovation of the intervening almost two centuries between the two time periods.
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