Chapter 13: A Noble Chance
The Frantic jumped into a warzone. Well, more a nuclear haze. Alarms started blaring the second they returned to normal space, radiation markers, the battle computer, and Sarria's poor helmsman began screaming in various states of horror. A sensor tech fainted in her seat. The bridge may as well have exploded. Or something equally catastrophic. "Everyone! Shut the fuck up! Give me a status report now! Comms, go ahead!" T'Josa shouted.
"I'm getting hails from every bastard in system! We've got someone claiming to be Sub-Admiral Desolas Artreius in charge of a siege position over a garden world, he's line 2! Should I deal with the Relay picket?"
"Yes yes fine! Put him on hold in C2, Sensors what's with all these alarms!"
Sensors had broken into a sweat. "I have no fucking clue! I have gravimetric, radiological, and battle computers saying different things about literally everything, but it looks like we have radiation markers coming from Class 4 Nuclear Weapons across the system! By the goddess… we also have evidence of an impact on the surface of the planet, seems mass driver related but I'll need to check with Sciences."
"What have they done now-"
Her combat tech raced up, "Ambassador! CIC is telling me we have evidence of battle in various areas cross system, and groups of unidentified vessels are all over the damn place. Gravimetrics are off the charts, our VI can't make heads or tails of them!"
"Then get a liason from one of the Turian vessels now! They probably have their stuff figured out if they've been blowing 'em up for weeks! Anyone else!"
She took the brief silence as a blessing, and ran for C2. Once the door was closed, she could barely hear the chaos ensuing outside. She sighed. She didn't take this job because it was easy. She pressed a button, and the infamous Turian was on the screen. Desolas was a promising man, with a spotless service record and a couple of medals on his belt from various Batarian pirate raids. He was shuffled up the ranks after he led the heroic defense of Oberpal from Eluam Ran'Perah's pirate fleet. Handsome, in a rugged sort of way. Ruffed up, by the looks of it. The Sub-Admiral was bleeding from the side of his face. Looked like a gunshot that grazed him, how the hell do you get shot by a gun in a Turian flagship?
"Ambassador T'Josa, I'd have liked to have met under better-"
"Cut the crap Sub-Admiral. What in Atheme's name is this? Attacking primitives, nuclear weapons, the fucking shelling of a Garden World! I want to speak to your Admiral, not his lackey. If we're going to fix this I want to be talking to the man in charge…"
"Ambassador, I am the man in charge. Litrinox… Admiral Litrinox was no longer fit for command. We had to remove him from his post. I'm commander in charge."
To call the ambassador shocked would be the understatement of her life. The last time a Turian Admiral had been relieved of service… she couldn't remember! She was a Matriarch for Tevura's sake! She clamped her mouth shut, and took a deep breath. "How the hell am I going to fix this…" she muttered.
"Ambassador?"
"What!? I... Okay Desolas, please tell me you've subdued enemy forces, at the very least, we need to have firm ground before we can begin negotiations-"
"Ambassador, we… we're currently in full retreat."
Sarria laughed. "Please, tell me you're joking Sub-Admiral…"
Desolas was not. Sarria couldn't hide her shock this time. "What? You're telling me a war fleet couldn't beat a bunch of primmies?"
"Ambassador these aren't primitives shooting rockets at us-"
"I've heard enough out of you Desloas, your Admiral's incompetence has already ruined my weekend plans, and dealing with this headache of a crisis has not improved that. We need to talk to representatives of the planetary government, if they have one, and let them know we're ceasing hostilities-"
"Ambassador please! You aren't listening to me. Tactical estimates that this species is an advanced race, they've already decimated our forces, and they possess technology that we don't yet understand! We can't walk in there like we own the place, because we don't!"
"Sub-Admiral please-"
"Don't give me that shit Ambassador! I am the Admiral -I think that should be clear by now- and I have seen what these people can do! My flagship is the only dreadnought left in the system, and if negotiations go sour I don't think we can protect your ship while covering our withdrawal from the system. I'm sending you all we know about them, translation codex, biology, social systems, military tech. Don't underestimate them Asari, we've already done that…"
A door opened on the far side of the screen, and a voice pushed its way between the two. "Admiral, we have enemy forces on a light burn towards the Shanxi picket, we're waiting on you to advise them."
Desolas chuckled, "Fortunately, I have business to attend to Ambassador. I hope you can find us a way out of this, for all our sakes. Keep in contact, and listen to my advice." The screen went black. Sarria tried to take in all that information. All her life she had known Turians to be the best of the best. The best fleet, the best soldiers, the best military the Council knew, defeated by primitives? It was devastating to even consider the idea, and as Turian data began to flow into her omnitool, she realized it was all too true.
Sarria had been in sticky situations many times in her life. When she was a maiden she'd gotten caught in the Omega riots of the 2330s, in her matron years she'd negotiated with feral Krogan warlords, Batarian kidnappers, and played a major role in the pacification of the Batarian Hegemony during the Police Actions. And yet this… this sent a real shiver down her spine. If she failed here, it wouldn't be her life on the line, or the Citadel's relations with backwater stations or rogue states. It would be war, one that she wasn't so sure could be easily won. Thousands of lives, millions perhaps, were on her back.
Goddess, time to talk down a raging fire.
There is this feeling after a battle that has permeated the officer corps of every human military to ever exist. Drescher liked to describe it as a series of waves. For her, as the alien ships limped away and adrenaline dripped to nothing, she was buffeted by a wave of relief, by knee numbing and leg jellying relief that almost made her nauseous in a way. She took a seat in her chair, and let all the stress that had been eating away at her blow out with an exhale. If somebody had told her that she'd been holding her breath for the past few hours, she would have believed them.
"Alright Central Command! Return to readiness Level Two, and start compiling After Action Reports! I want a general meeting of Flag Officers in one hour, and I want that AAR in 30!"
A chorus of affirmations followed Drescher out the door, as she wobbled on feet that were finally starting to feel again. Three hours of stalking, yelling, and commanding had taken its toll, and she needed to rest. Her bridge would do nicely for that. She leaned against the walls of the turbolift as she punched in her destination, and sighed. It would be a 3 minute trip, and she was going to make it a mini debrief for herself. Ah, the next wave: giddy excitement.
Alone for the first time in hours, she managed to laugh. Hard. It was the kind of thing that left her out of breath, coughing and cackling. She honestly couldn't believe they'd managed to survive. Her heart still hurt for the people she lost, but she could at least rejoice in the fact that their sacrifice was not in vain, far from it in fact. She took a look at the rapidly updating slate in her hands, and kept reviewing the figures, part in awe, part in disbelief. Tonnages for vessels under corvette-grade suffered only 6% casualties, under cruiser-grade lost just barely over 3%, and not a single ship bigger than a dreadnought had anything more than paint scratches. The only things that really got hurt were the strike craft, but 15% casualties was still a full 40% lower than what she'd normally lose in wargames. It was patently absurd. The lift beeped, and her ride was over.
"Admiral on Deck!" A marine cried, followed quickly by cheers from her bridge crew. She could get used to being the conquering hero. She stepped a few feet into the bridge, to let the mobbing crew get their jabs in. The sound was intense, cheers and hollers and telling where those Raptor bastards could shove it. It was fun. But it had to end. They still had a planet to liberate.
"Alright alright! Relax assholes, I know, I know! I've won the battle for you and you all want to go home!" The crew cheered at that. "But we still have work to do! Save the champagne for the off hours, got it?!" There were some protests to that, some of them more jovial than others. But the order stuck, and the crowd began to break up. Drescher began to wade her way through the dispersing party, and found her XO, Commodore Zinash, waiting by the Captain's Deck.
"I see you've survived negotiations?" The XO thrummed, twirling a finger around a lock of curly hair. "I'm impressed ya know, few can defuse rioting mobs quite like you."
"Why thank you Zinash, just the complement I was looking for after defeating an alien armada." Dresher fell into her seat, and enjoyed the padded chair's soft, cool embrace. Her eyes closed of their own accord, and she sighed heavily. She stretched in her seat, and exhaled as the tension of the battle ebbed away. "...Sorry, Hara. It's been… hectic…"
"I can imagine, Kastanie. You'll be happy to know that flying the Indomitable was a breeze?"
There was only a groan in response to that.
"It's true! We didn't even lose a fighter in the engagement! It was quite fun being able to just point and click ships to death, honestly I can't imagine why you'd want to get promoted to something so dreadfully boring as Admira-"
"Okay! Okay, I get it, Hara. Being a Commodore is sick, never should have gotten promoted, blah blah blah… I just want to rest my eyes for a few minutes, is that too much to ask for?"
"If you insist, Ma'am." Hara wore a smirk, and sauntered down to operations, just below the captain's chair. "I'll be organizing our fighters, call if you need me." The Admiral waved her hand, and slunk into her chair. There was a marked difference between the floor of an elevator and the Chair. For one, the elevator didn't have automated cooling features that made her sweaty body feel like a butterfly on a cool breeze. She could have stayed like this forever. She gave herself two minutes. It was divine.
Her neural lace woke her from the half slumber she'd fallen into at two minutes exactly. Neural alarms were always a kick in the pants; the alarm system wasn't a loud noise in her ear, but a strange pressure on her temples that was intolerable yet entirely painless. Like a tickling at the back of her throat that never failed to make her jump out of sleep, and into action. The room was as she'd left it, frenetic in the minutes after battle, each flag officer working their stations raw. Hara knows how to choose 'em alright.
Ah, right. Her job. "Commodore! Status report!"
Hara was busy with what looked like an Air Chief, but she paused her discussion to relay, "I see you're recharged! CC wants you back Admiral! Apparently they can't wipe their asses without your help!" She dreaded returning to the hellish chaos of Central Command, but she was the Admiral, and even if the battle was over, the system was still in enemy hands. She waved a short goodbye to her friend, and made her way back to the turbolift. The trip back was short and mostly filled with answering messages marked IMPORTANT and URGENT. Of course, most of them were supply reqs and the like that would have been better answered by an Ordinance Officer or anyone but the admiral of a fleet, but things got done faster with the admiral stamp on them, so that was how it worked. She went over her plan of attack. Make her way to the Order of Battle Station, and make herself busy there so people wouldn't bother her unless it was important. That was probably a bit too optimistic.
The lift dinged and she was back in the fire. It was more simmer than inferno, but that didn't mean the voices didn't press their way into her skull. "Admiral on deck!" A guard shouted, allowing for a brief pause to envelope the room, the bare minimum of respect allotted in a warzone. The Admiral would have preferred no stop at all, but tradition dies hard in the navy.
"Admiral!" Ah, her first assailant. A quick glance at the officer's breast told Drescher she was ground command, the pair of bars on her lapel mixed with the burning skull confirmed her as ODST Attache. Ugh, I've told those bastards that we need to clear orbit before we start throwing Helljumpers like darts. She reminded the officer, who stormed off in a tizzy. She made a mental note to make sure those maniacs didn't try to launch themselves at the planet. An Ordinance Officer held out a datapad and she signed without reading. Ordinance was always on top of their game, no need to babysit. A medical officer -wearing his caduceus bar no less- wanted to begin setting up casualty management centers on some carriers, she drafted an email on her lace while officially asking her Marine detachments to prepare for deployment on surface. Oh Christ, they'll likely want me to consult on strategy! Can one of the Vice Admirals- shit most of the forces are on the flagship. No pawning that one off… Oh someones trying to get her attention, a 2nd Lieutenant with an Air Wing pin. The poor bastard must have been ordered to drag an Air Chief back to a hangar. She directed him to the miniature tornado that was the Air Command corner of the room and wished him luck. Someone tapped her on the shoulder, an intelligence officer -Lt. Mosely- asking her if she wanted the AA for the capture of the Alien flagship. She almost dismissed the man with a 'leave it on my desk' before she was pulled from administrative stupor.
"Oh Christ I forgot about that…" She took the pad from his hands and transferred it to her lace, promising to read it soon. In the meantime, she authorized a tow for the vessel into a central position among the fleet. After that… wait what? There was nobody to talk to. The waves of information stopped smashing through her for a brief moment, and she gathered her breath. She took in where she was, direct center of the room, and realized she'd managed to do what she needed to do. Order Of Battle was only a few feet from her, she'd made it! She couldn't help but smile as she embedded herself in the consoles and protective cluster of officers. Finally, she could get some real Admiral work done.
She tapped the shoulder of a red haired man she knew as Commander Horne, her Fleet Controller. That jolted him out of his headphones, which he quickly pulled off, before snapping a quick salute. "At ease Greg, give me a sitrep would you?"
He smiled a little at that, "Were it so easy Admiral, our lines of communication are shot to all hell. Probably should have spent some time fixing the org chart, but what can ya do now eh? So far as I'm aware we still have CAVALRY groups mopping up some straggler Raptor forces around galactic north, Air Traffic is telling me that 90% of our fighter-bombers are home and awaiting rearmament, should be back to full combat effective in a few hours. I've selected some carriers who are already finished should you need any strike forces, sending them to your lace now."
"Good job Horne, if you don't mind we need FLEETCOM to start liasoning with the IOP and General Giorni for retaking the planet and providing aid. Can you set up a meeting some time shortly?"
"One step ahead of ya Admiral, I've got something for you in about an hour with Giorni, in the meantime I should be?" He motioned to her with an open hand.
"Start pushing some of our vanguard toward Shanxi, only vessels that took Cosmetic Damage or less are on the hook for that right now. Send something to my lace when you're done- Oh! And Horne, do you remember that xenoarchaeologist that we termed a VIP?" He nodded. "Do we have a location on them yet?"
A short little prick stuck in her chest. But it grew and grew, until Peters couldn't help but hack as that sharp and fibrous thing caught in her lungs. That little exercise turned into a fit, which turned into something that caught Doctor Kingston's worry. He looked up from his microscope, as did the two other workers in the lab. "Doctor Peters? Are you alright?" He walked over to her, placing a hand on her shoulder.
She waved him off. "I'm fine I'm fin-" another phlegmy sound emerged from her throat, causing another fit of coughing.
"In my medical opinion you are not doing fine Ava, take a seat. I'll get you some water." He guided the woman to a stool, and left just as quickly. Her breath rattled as she sighed. We don't have enough water to give it out for random coughing fits, and with the water he was using just to sustain the prisoners? It wasn't doing him any favors with the civilians.
Kingston was back only a few moments later. "Here, drink this for me would you? I can't have my top researchers coughing their lungs out every day." He set the drink down, and went back to his station. "You know, I put the work order to have them fix ventilation in this room days ago, at best. Those bastards still haven't gotten to it! I mean honestly, the work we're doing here is going to be a vital part of the war effort! So what if we're using a bit more water than the other stations?"
"To be fair Doctor, we do use 400% more water than all other research stations." Yu-Wen, a grad student a month ago, had a tendency to say what she felt no matter the situation.
"What Ms. Hsu is trying to say is that you're being somewhat of a prick about that, so it makes you hard to work with on occasion." A man shifted from a microscope, before crossing his arms and giving a trademark frump of his lip. Doctor Annan was a xenobiologist at Vang University. He was like Yu-Wen, but worse.
"While I thank Kofi for sharing his opinion, I would like to remind you all that the Provisional Government allocates our labs the most resources for a reason, and I happen to believe that that reason is us. Our research is not about weapons or armor or ration packs, it is about the enemy itself. That is the thing that will win us any war, friends. I'm sure Sun Tzu said something like that, and I imagine the Provisionals agree. Now, speaking of the enemy, Doctor Annan, have you managed to make any progress with genetic sequencing?"
Annan shrugged, and moved back to his desk in the far corner. "Nothing all that incredible so far as I can tell. Six standard base pairs, double helix formation, cells possess standard carbon-oxygen based cycle, though it appears their system for energy production centers around ADP rather than ATP. There are obviously a bunch more things that are different, for example it seems your hunch about their being a dexto-based species was correct."
Yu-Wen had gone back to work the centrifuge, and didn't bother to look up while delivering her report. "Unfortunately these aliens continue to surprise me. Their carapace is rather impressively designed, does an impressive job of blocking the radiation of anything below microwave light, I imagine these bastards have an asshole of a sun. Or a lackluster ozone layer. I'm currently running some tests to see if they have matching oncogenes for such an environment, these poor fucks would be getting cancers every few minutes, even with this much protectection. They must have some insane genetic repair mechanisms. Could be quite useful?" She shrugged, before turning on her centrifuge.
That left it to Peters, who herself stood. "My own work is going rather well. From what I've seen so far, Turian forces are impressively self-disciplined, at least from what I've seen with interviews. There are tell-tale cultural artifacts of religious expression, but no obvious idolatry has been discovered, our captives don't seem to pray, at least with elaborate rituals. Their armor and weaponry almost never show personalization, even their face tattooing seems relatively hierarchical in nature, perhaps based on clan or nationality? We're looking at a highly organized, highly stratified society, at least that's what the captives suggest. Who knows if there are other nation-states with different cultures?" She sighed, feeling the sharpness in her chest recede. "That's the best I can offer just from individual cultural insight. If we were able to group them up, however-"
"The General would have us all killed for insubordination." Annan finished. "I happen to agree with General Jourdan's idea that we shouldn't group up the deadly alien magic users if we can help it. Save the dangerous research for when we're not trapped a mile underground, sorry."
Peters looked to Kingston, who only shrugged with an expression saying she'd already lost. Again. "Well, any news from our favorite Raptor captives?" she asked, hoping to change the subject.
"If only, it seems we've found ourselves talking in circles. Our translation program is still too primitive to ask in-depth questions about culture and society, or biology for that matter. And even then, it can still refuse to tell us anyway."
"So we're reaching a bottleneck?" Yu-Wen asked. She'd finally rejoined the group, reading something over with her tablet. "Your prisoners don't seem to be holding much purpose right now is all I'm saying."
Kingston looked offended. "Fresh samples of tissue are always better than those resected from corpses Ms. Hsu, I'm sure you can understand that, and besides, we still have not unlocked the secrets of their powers."
"Their powers, Doctor?" Annan butted. "You mean the hearsay evidence we got from soldiers on the field-"
"A decorated Spartan War Hero!" Retorted Kingston.
"Who may have simply been misinterpreting what was actually going on? What they saw could very easily have been advanced technology that they didn't understand, and thus termed magic! A sort of hardlight projector that uses their strange Mass Particle as a weapon? It's certainly more reasonable than fucking magic is it not? I mean Christ, Peters saw the Fork with her own eyes, and she could have logically leaped to magic by your own admission?"
Peters was shocked out of listening. "I mean, with alien biology anything is possible, right? We have discovered high concentrations of something matching the Gravitational disturbances from the Fork, their guns, their FTL engines... those particles may give them some sort of biological adaptation?"
"Or it could be simple contamination from using their technology! Look, my recommendation is we should find a way to get rid of those fucking Raptors, they're a security risk to everyone in here, plain and simple."
That put a spell over the battlefield. Annan returned to his station in a huff. "Look, Kofi…" Peters started.
Annan stood, and stared daggers at her. "Just… just stop. I'm taking my break, okay?" The doctor directed that at nobody in particular as he pushed the door open, and left.
There was a pregnant silence for a few moments, before Kingston pulled himself to his feet, "I need to go talk to him-"
"You really don't." Yu-Wen intercepted him. "You're only going to make him more pissed-off." She patted him on the shoulder, "I'll talk to him, okay? He knew me before all this, I can calm him down." She smiled, and jogged out of the room herself.
Kingston watched her leave, then sat back with a sigh. "Christ, what did I do?"
Jourdai was starting to see why prison sucked. He hadn't seen a Turian in at least four weeks, and if the color of his scales were anything to go by, it had also been four weeks since he'd eaten anything but the liquidy broth the humans had offered as food. The comforting rock of the battle above had quieted to nothing, and the Turian feared Command would never find him and his men. In the quiet of the cell, he offered a prayer to the Spirits. He thought of his Unit, of the 101st Atticans, of his home on Firibusta, of so many things he couldn't recall them all if you'd asked.
He'd tried singing to keep himself occupied, but he found that whatever that Green Monster had done to him had stunted his voice. Another thing he'd lost. First a mandible, now his voice? What would Pinala even like about him when he got home?
He chuckled bitterly to himself. He shouldn't beat himself up too much. One of the boys told him that Anti-Socials love a good facial scar. How that Bala Thief had any idea of that was dubious, but he trusted him. He hoped he was alive, more than anything. He mustered up another prayer for his team, and tried to will it into reality. He was about halfway through that when his prison door slammed open.
"Reposition up!" Shouted a dark-skinned human with a gun in its hands. Ah, no time for tardiness today. The translation matrix around its neck jangled as it pulled a chair from the side, and practically threw the thing towards him. "Seated." His captor's translator garbled. This wasn't his normal interrogator, the alabaster skinned man that called himself Kinton (Or however you were supposed to say it). This was the one with the needle, the one who took the blood samples and held a look of contempt that transcended language, species, and culture. That one was the one with the gun, and bulky grey looking thing that looked about as mean as it shot, if he remembered the battlefield correctly.
"Tell me for the species things." It said, as it loomed over him.
"I… I can't understand? Tell you about my species?" The Turian tried to reply, before he was slammed with the butt of the gun. He'd forgotten how strong those little flesh bags could be.
"Don't idiot prehistoric alien lizard, give me need so I can done with!" It shouted again. That human fuck would've broken a mandible, had his right one still been there. The human had left him untied, and was beating him. If he had been alone…
The door slammed open again. Oh, the female variant, the one that fed him on occasion. That was why he didn't strike. There were always at least two watching. Evidently the second human was unhappy with the first. It yelled at the dark one, before pointing at him. Aw, did they really care about my well being?
"Oh not-part-of-modern-group, huh? Go sex! I'm tired of these aliens here, Yu-Wen (ugh, humans), let me get what we need so we can be gone them!" That won a little retort from the female, before she pushed the male. It was light, but the point was made. She motioned towards the weapon, but the interrogator shook his head. "Is for talking-help." he explained. A scoff, a human expression he'd learned readily. But then he saw it. The door was open. The female left it cracked, not shut and automatically locked like it usually was. Jourdai's eyes narrowed. If he could get out and find other captives? It was a moot point, there was still a gun in this room, and Jourdai was too weak to wrestle it away from two humans, much less use his biotics to defeat them. That's when the female slapped the male across the face. A juicy bit of drama in normal times. Something altogether different because the male dropped his gun. Right at the Turian's feet.
There was a pause, a moment the width of a talon, before the Turian leapt for the pistol. The humans weren't as fast.
"And you're certain that these ones aren't some sort of lost Asari Colony?" T'Josa said. "The resemblance is uncanny, aside from the dimorphism." The Ambassador was on a holo call with her 'friend' Admiral Desolas. Currently, he was the only ranked man who'd had any experience with the humans, and that meant she couldn't be rid of him just yet. He'd have to liaison with her, and hopefully his assistance would allow for a ceasefire, opening relations, and enough stalling for a real Council fleet to show up and scare them into becoming a useful client state. That is, unless the Turians' war crimes have enraged them into eradicating us. According to Desolas they could do that quite easily now. Goddess.
"As I've already said Ambassador, language and technology recovered are in no way related to anything Asari, not to mention the fact that they have two sexually dimorphic genders." Desolas was obviously not fond of her presence either. But they needed each other, evidently. "And given the fact that they had no knowledge of Citadel Law, I imagine they wouldn't care all that much anyway. Look, this is a First Contact, T'Josa, a royally botched one. Worse than that mess on Parnack, worse than the Vorcha, worse than the Geth… We need to smooth things over. Somehow, someway. So, are you ready?"
She sighed. "Yes, I am."
"Then start your broadcast, hopefully they have tightbeam comms, and we can have a real conversation."
The Ambassador tapped something into her omnitool, and the diplomatic mission began with a generic radio signal being broadcast into the system. It carried a general greeting and a set of coordinates/equations for Tightbeam communications. The Ambassador's ship was deep in interplanetary space, far enough from the Turian force that comms wouldn't give away Turian positions, and close enough to the enemy that the Eezo-Bathed Neutrinos could work as intended, working doubly as a neutral ground for communication. After that, it was a waiting game.
She went over her little speech, introducing herself and her counterpart. The Turian was doing something else on his screen, small orders and maintenance tasks that helped Turians calm their nerves. Sarria was not a fidgeter herself, centuries of experience helped with any outward signs of anxiety, and the glass of wine she'd had half an hour previous dulled what remained.
"Admiral, we're picking up alien Portal signatures, they might be on the move." A turian officer called.
"If you can find its location, do so. I don't want any surprises right now, okay?" Desolas replied. The sounds of busywork on a bridge.
"Ambassador? We're receiving a radio signal from enemy space." One of her own officers said. "I'm running it through translation… it says, 'Arriving Shortly?'"
"Excellent, Comms I want you to prepare the contact package for Tightbeam Translation-"
"Ambassador?" Another officer, from Sensors this time. "I'm picking up some intense high energy particle readings right now-"
A Turian cut off her Sensors tech "Admiral! We have FTL readings right on top of the Frantic!" That caused a large amount of shouting. The Ambassador said something about evasive maneuvers, but she wasn't sure. She definitely heard the Admiral screaming evasive at her too. In any case, Frantic's engines started right as a blue portal opened just off the ship's starboard side. Only kilometers away. A human ship followed, though it would be better described as a behemoth. The vessel was monstrous, a solid metal cigar in gunmetal gray. What surprised her, more than the fact that it towered over her own vessel, or that it was bustling with activity even as it was exiting its wormhole, was that the ship wasn't stopping. The crew of the Frantic could only watch as the ship kept pushing itself from that hole in the universe. The vortex of blue and white.
When it had finally arrived, the Ambassador's mouth was open. "I… hail the vessel comms." The tech only nodded. How much smaller was the Destiny Ascension...
"Ambassador, pull yourself together." Came a whisper from Desolas. Like that, her mouth was closed and her fists were relaxed. There could be no panic. There was too much riding on this. Far too much.
"First Contact Package Sent, Ambassador." Came another tech.
"Good. I… take us to a 50 kilometer distance Helm." Another silent affirmation. There they waited for 10 minutes, while the aliens parced the series of images and languages of the Council Races. T'Josa had the contents memorised. The video only takes a few minutes at most. The smiling faces of the Asari, Turians, and Salarians, their cities and ships and cultures were condensed into a video 3 minutes long. It was a story, join us and reap our future, or face our gleaming arms of war. She had the translation read the words on Human's hull, words bigger than her own ship. Some were just strings of numbers and letters, but one word stood out. The translator couldn't find a direct translation in its early state, but it could get across the meaning. 'Unable-to-be-tamed.' She didn't doubt it.
"We're being hailed Ambassador." Somebody said. She couldn't tell who it was, she wasn't paying attention.
"Go ahead." She did.
It took a second for the human to show up on screen. She'd seen humans before, while she was studying what she could of them, but it was different now for some reason. The human wore her uniform crisply, a sharp white contrasting the tan skin. She wore a strange hat, a sharp white top with a decorated band around the base, the brim folded up at the sides and sticking out at the front. Gold crenulations decorated the cap and her shoulders in silver stars and golden bars, while medals hung from her chest, along with a multicolored plaque just above it. The crew around her were dressed similarly in sharp white, though none in as much splendor. The final detail she caught was the patch, an Avian perched upon a planet, wings spread wide. The almost imperceptible filter of the translator came up, and the human interrupted Sarria's study. She watched the eyes flutter as her counterpart spoke.
"My name is Kastanie Drescher, Admiral of the United Nations Space Command Navy, commissioned by the United Human Government." She spoke like iron ringing in your ears.
"Admiral Drescher, my name is Ambassador Sarria T'Joni, representing the Citadel Council. I am here with Admiral Desolas Atreius, a soldier of the Turian Hierarchy. First we would like to formally apologize for-"
"Spare it, Ambassador." The human spat out that word, like it was acid. "I am not here as a delegate for my people. I am here as a soldier, and as an officer, and as a citizen of my Nation. Your armies have ravaged our colony: have devastated our planet, have smashed our cities, have killed our people, for no other reason than pure greed and avarice. Your Turians speak of honor, yet they have slaughtered our civilians, and disgraced the idea of diplomacy with 'lesser' powers. They killed when they needed not, and then they tried to quicken the pace when they realized when they'd been caught." Desolas was rigid as a stone, but something imperceptible hovered around his eyes. Grief? Or shame? "Don't bother to deny it. Our AI have already secured this information from your very vessels, Turian." Sarria's eyes widened. Perhaps it was a translator error? "So, before the business of peace and reparations, we ask for the unconditional surrender of your fleet, Turian. If you do not communicate this surrender within 30 minutes, our fleet will wipe yours from this plane of existence. If any of your ships attempt to escape, there will be no surrender. If there is any resistance from any of your forces, there will be no quarter for any of your soldiers. I hope I have made myself clear. This will only be said once."
"Admiral Drescher, wait just a moment!" But she was already gone.
A/N: How Feeble the Plans of Mortal Men. Ideally, this would have been out about four weeks ago. As you may recall, something else happened four weeks ago, and my family was not lucky enough to escape it unscathed. There is no need to worry, everything is fine now, but that is the source of the delays. I hope this chapter brings some excitement to you all in this time of great and terrible boredom. Be Safe! Be Productive! Also, let me know how you liked this chapter! Reviews keep the Pencil sharp!
-Turtle