Avengers of Mass Effect

Shanxi arc chapter 4

Disclaimer: I do not own either mass effect or the marvel cinematic universe, if I did I would not be writing this story, but making changes to the games or sitting besides Stan Lee during his moments in the movies.

'' Talk'' is regular oral communication/talking out loud

'TALK' Is mental communication such as telepathy or communication with things that are controlled through brain waves. Might also be used in situations dealing with possession by some kind of being/force.

Authors note: As a side note that was probably already somewhat visible in the last chapter, instead of the European union discovering the prothean ruins on mars, in this story a combined American-Chinese expedition discovered it in 2135. This because I find that without this amount of time between the discovery and the first contact war the weapons created with it wouldn't be cost effective enough yet to be given to militia instead of giving them much older non-mass effect gear.

And Shanxi is a Chinese colony with systems alliance forces both as part of its defence force and retired systems alliance officers training and leading its militia, while the remainder of the militia is made up out of people that moved to it from China or other colonies as colonists. The reservists and Chinese regulars are logically under direct control of the Chinese government however. And with that out of the way, let's begin.

.

Planet: none, Location: Bridge of a dreadnought in the Turian fleet near Relay 314. Year : 2157, Date: ?, POV: Desolas Arterius

.

Even a complete outsider that didn't know the first thing about me could have seen that I, Turian General Desolas Arterius was angry, very angry. The reason for this was the fact that I had not heard back from the Salarian STG infiltration team that had been sent to the planet and as such I had already concluded that they had already failed somehow due to their own incompetence.

''Those incompetent amphibians, they cannot be trusted to do their own jobs correctly, once again it falls to Turians to do all the hard work. How long until our last transport freighters will join us here? Also any news from the allies we contacted to assist us in this matter?''

A communication officer replied ''It will be four hours until the transport freighters arrive sir, while they were able to load and start the journey much earlier and faster than expected, they saved 8 hours on that actually, the consequence is that they have run into some problems with too hurriedly repaired engines on a freighter that is transporting most of the rations for the Batarian mercenary company you had them bring along.

As such they have been slowed down by slightly more than two and a half standard hours. Meanwhile the Eclipse mercenaries have reacted positively to your message and are sending over all of their naval forces that can get here within a reasonable amount of time, in total they have coming in on two cruisers, ten frigates and a dozen freighters plus twenty something smaller troop transports, with as their ground forces some eight thousand infantry with mech support in near equal numbers.''

That is comforting to know and also very advantageous for us. As I give him a nod in silent confirmation, he continues. ''We have also managed to contact the nearby Asari Republic you mentioned, Minbara? They have agreed on sending a portion of their forces to support us, though it will mainly be logistical support in space in the form of another eight freighters, however their ground troops will consist of four thousand infantry, no mech support with them though.''

All this positive news is doing wonders for my temper, good. ''Does every member of the fleet already on location know what we are heading towards and what we are going to do?'' The communications officer replied ''As far as we know all naval personnel and army officers do know our reasons for heading towards that planet and what we are going to do there, though we do not know how well the word has been spread out among the non-officer members of the land forces.''

I nod at the answer, it is decent enough. ''That is good enough for me. Have the officers give their troops a bit more rations and let them rest for now, we might not have too much of it in the coming weeks or even months while putting order to these primitives.'' The officer saluted ''Yes general!''.

At this I nodded once more, then left the bridge to return to my quarters. Some of the lower ranked personnel could be heard sighing in relief all over at my seemingly infamous temper not having gotten the best of him while they were near. Those were quickly stifled though as if to try to not be noticed by their officers. Usually I would go back and lash out to ensure discipline and order were kept, but today I'm in too good of a mood to bother. It also has admittedly been a stressful day for them and myself both.

Hmm, this is such a nice opportunity though, I get to bring a new still somewhat primitive race that is however more than advanced enough to be a genuine threat and with certain technologies we can profit from under the heel of the council, which will cause the Primarch to respect me more and at worst have him make me the military governor of a decently developed planet, at best promote me and give me permanent command of a fleet the size of the one I'm currently commanding.

My brother will also profit from this, after all a spectre in training can never have enough experienced military and political connections that have served their race and the citadel faithfully. Considering the looks of this race I can probably even get some more support for this from a number of individual Asari Republics since I will have given them access to a race that looks like a bi-gendered mix between them and the suit rats.

Thinking about this just brings a smile to my face, there is one problem though, that hypocritical little bitch that sits on the council in name of the Asari might try to get me in trouble for this. How do I manage to either make her see that this is a good idea, or otherwise convince Sparatus and the Salarian councillor to overrule any attempt from her side to punish me for this through somewhat legal means.

I mean Sparatus was a front-line combat officer during his term in the military and one of the few survivors of the battle between the Citadel diplomatic team and those beasts that call themselves Yagh, he will almost certainly understand just why we should show any new race just who is in charge otherwise they'll just kill whatever diplomats we send to them.

Meanwhile the entire Salarian culture is somehow still shell-shocked by the Krogan Rebellions even though it was tens of generations ago for them, and blame some 75% of all their problems on both the Krogan and the conflict itself. With the primitives actually having attacked a patrol group first, how they slap so much armour on their ships and the seemingly shared mindset 'We shall never surrender!' that is for the most part absent in every race in the Galaxy except Turians and Krogan so far I can easily enough spin them to be little more than more intelligent, more advanced and thus far more dangerous versions of Krogan.

And considering that Tevos was actually alive for both of those events once they bring their arguments about this to her chances are pretty high that she will actually follow along with it just not wanting to take the chance of either of them being right about how bad it can go if we do something, while uncaring enough about anyone other then her own people that she won't make too much fuss about the fact that I actually did something about it besides maybe a public reprisal about how I could have done it less violently.

.

Planet: Shanxi, Location: Farmstead roughly 20 kilometres North of the capital city. Time: a few minutes after the battle of the shield generator is over.

.

Steve POV

.

This, it is like waking up from being an ice block for years all over again. Though this time, the only people from my time that could even potentially be found are these three that came with me due to the dimensional barrier. Wait, what was just said of me having a fireball in my hand? I looked down and it was true, in my right hand a ball of fire seemed to be slowly growing.

Ok, that thing needs to go away if this conversation is going to be peaceful in any way shape or form, so well let's see how did Wanda gather/let go of a gathered amount of power. 'Image slowly stopping a flow of power going to your hand and then picturing the creation slowly going out of existence' I think she said.

And the fireball is already gone, does that mean it works the same way as Wanda's powers did, or is it more likely that the power needs some kind of emotion behind it to actually work. Will have to work on controlling it though, don't want to accidentally set something on fire.

''Ok, so now that we've found out the old man is a pyrotechnic somehow, can we focus more on the fact that we're now in a dimension that is in the mid 22nd century and none of you seem to have gear that people should have by now? I mean, my suit is great and all for its time, but I made the first version of it with a week of work in a cave with a workshop that had more in common with a medieval blacksmith shop then with a modern workplace in 2008.

Surely somebody should have by now created at least something similar to it and made a higher quality version with better, more modern technology in it a form of standard gear for the military of an organisation like the Systems Alliance seems to be?''

Actually, now that he mentions it, Tony is right, there is very little in the way of high-tech gear visible. It might be a lot smaller so we're overlooking it or not deployed yet. However after seeing a few super-humans running through a forest at what was close to the maximum speed of cars in cities around the globe in our time, they would probably have deployed them already if they had anything of the likes with them.

.

Lieutenant Armstrong POV

Wait a second, did he just say that he built a version of that power armour in a cave with very limited supplies? With only a week time to create it no less? Ok, those guys over in Europe were probably right with their whole thing about Terran designed energy gear being the way to go, if this is the kind of results it could have given that early on if more of our focus was on it.

Suddenly the private charged with communications comes running up to me ''Sir, sir, there has been an attack on the base, specifically the shield generator! Command wants us to return as fast as possible.'' Wait what?

''Since when can people get into that general area at all without being noticed, especially since the base has been on high alert the entire time?'' The soldier seems to shiver a bit and starts looking into the forest around us afraid of as if something is going to jump out of nowhere and grab him.

''Apparently they used some kind of cloaking devices, the damage is currently being assessed. The only reason our troops could even fucking see the bastards at all was that the A.I. assigned to the base somehow managed to turn its sensors into detectors for emissions made by the IFF system they used. Their cyber security apparently sucks.''

After a moment of thought I turn towards the 4 beings we were sent to negotiate with ''If you want to negotiate further, either join us or run along with our vehicles, we will need to head back to the planets capital right now to get the civilians we have with us to safety and to prepare ourselves for a defence against an at least partially unknown enemy.''

They all seemed to look at each-other for a few seconds then the former captain seemed to nod, after which he turned towards me ''We will join you, though only Stark and Loki will ride with you on the vehicles, both Sgt. Barnes and I could use the exercise of running a distance.'' I raised an eyebrow ''Are you sure you can keep up? I mean we're going to be going near 100 km per hour for roughly 20 kilometres.'' Both men that were supposed to go running seemed to smile slightly.

''I am capable of overtaking vehicles going at that speed without too many problems currently, and Bucky here has a much more speed and agility centred version of my serum, where as I have a much more strength and endurance centred version of it. The only reason why we even have to put in effort at all currently is that we've been fighting a near constant battle for the past few days.''

.

Planet: Shanxi, Location: Planetary SA military headquarters, Time: Moments after the battle for the shield generator has been won by the Terran soldiers, POV: General Williams.

.

After talking about potential scenarios in case we are attacked by either the group that landed planet side from the portal or dealing with a potential invasion from space, I stopped the call to the Captain since I needed to think for a moment. After sitting there for a while waiting on news from either the diplomatic group or the militia sent to the shield generator, not knowing exactly how much time had passed, Sergei appeared in front of me, seemingly somber. ''Sir, we have an incoming call from the shield generator facility, the caller pages it as extremely urgent.''

Ok, that is unusual, the only thing that should have happened there is my brother being removed from his position as commanding officer of the facility and a militia officer replacing him. It also should not have taken anywhere near this long. ''Patch the call through.'' When the A.I. did so, an older, slightly accented voice came through the speakers.

''General, this is Major Xing, I have finally been able to establish contact with you, we found the reason why your brother wasn't reporting and have dealt with it. The facility was under attack by enemy infiltrators with cloaking devices, these same infiltrators also somehow managed to set-up a device that disabled any communications going in or out from the facility even though their cyber security should have been a piece of cake for our A.I. to defeat, it only stopped once we actually destroyed the physical device. Somehow any communication once inside their range did work, but that is not the problem currently.''

This... I had expected a lot to potentially be going on, but not this. However the fact that it was only the Major on the call and not both the Major and my brother caused a cold feeling to grip me ''How many casualties and wounded did we suffer from this assault Major?'' She spoke up, a slight sadness creeping into her voice.

''Luckily enough only four of our troops died sir, six of the remaining 16 have been wounded, none of them life threatening luckily enough due to your brother's heroic actions during the fight. Sadly enough sir, I do not know how to tell this, but those actions cost him his life.'' No, no I might have complained about him, but I loved him, please let this be some kind of cruel joke, let him be alive.

''He died taking down the infiltrator that was busy with the generator itself, without those actions the shield would be completely un-repairable right now and the civilians would be little more than target practice for whatever enemies come to us.''

My brother, dead. The last words he has heard from his own family were insults. The bastards that have done this are going to pay for both his death. And I will personally put a bullet through the head of whatever piece of shit is behind it all! My voice was ice cold when I spoke up next. ''Tell me everything. That is an order.''

.

Planet: Shanxi, Location: A convoy 20 kilometres North of the planetary capital, Time: Moments after the Avengers agreed to join the Alliance convoy, POV: Tony Stark.

.

Ok, now that the talks are mostly over, I should ask Steve. Hmm still strange to say that name as an ally, even after the week. Let's see if that mental link still works 'Loki does the link still work between all of us?' I got my answer, but not from Loki 'Yes Stark, we can still hear voices inside our minds. What seems to be the problem outside of being classified as insane if anybody finds out?' Barnes, hmm there was actually a bit of cheer in there.

'Well I did some scans and these people either A: stagnated badly after the 2000's, or B: This dimension didn't have most of the people that accelerated advancements like in ours. With this I mean like, in our world the Nazi's had energy weapons derived from an overpowered cube, and as such the allies gained the need to find a way to respond to that and it also caused us to realize such things were truly possible in the first place. This then caused supersoldier serums, the creation of arc technology and so forth.

In this dimension, there was no Asgard, no cosmic cubes, and as far as we currently know no or nowhere near as many alien invasions. This might have taken away the impulse to actually improve to the level we were already at in our time. While saying as easy as breathing for me to actually hack the onboard computers of their armour and communication devices without being noticed would be a complete and utter lie, it was somewhat easier than the Cyber security sparring matches me and Vision used to have.

One of the main things were a large number of their advancements are apparently based on is something called Element Zero. However, this element is horrible at using things like energy weapons, faster than light sensors, creating actually intelligent A.I's or V.I's as they call those things and a load of other things but I couldn't get those quickly from their devices without alerting them that somebody was hacking them in the first place.

Meaning that older not yet upgraded technologies and already somewhat weak A.I's had to support and lead their much more numerous and inferior V.I brethren in their Cyber defence against anything trying to invade like me and as could be expected of a man good enough with this that I would actually be able to defeat their A.I in direct cyber sparring matches without too many problems, I managed to succeed.

If any of my children were here they would have been able to just steamroll everything these guys had without them even noticing, hell they could have taken over all of the space ships around the planet and set them on a crash course into each-other and they wouldn't have noticed until they were already on their way, their cyber-security is that bad. What is even more surprising, apparently their enemy somehow had even WORSE cybersecurity.

As in seemingly only V.I., no A.I. and then those V.I. are weaker than the Systems Alliance versions. Wouldn't surprise me if the moment they get ships of any kind into the Solar System I'll be able to just hack into them and learn all their militaries darkest secrets within minutes even though I wouldn't be able to understand the language they are using.

If this turns into an actual full swing war the Systems Alliance will probably be able to just de-activate the life-support on their enemies ships once they actually understand the language before more than a single volley of shots can be fired by either side. Of course the enemy will learn from this later on but the Systems Alliance will have the advantage long enough early on to win a war as long as they manage to defeat them before the opponents probably superior industry or manpower can be properly mobilized.'

My children, I might never be able to hold them again, never knowing what happens to any of them. NO, now is not the time to get lost in sadness. If I do I might not be able to provide intelligence for the others if this so called Systems Alliance decides to turn on us. 'Are you alright Stark? Never mind, I apologize for that slip-up, none of us are truly alright at the moment.'

I hear Steve's voice in my mind, and though it is a bit awkward, his attempt at comforting me does calm me down a bit. I have friends and allies here that can and will take on world devouring Titans, hell two of them are Gods, and they want to get back to their loved ones just as much as I do. There is nearly nothing that will truly be able to stop us if we work as a team.

'No Rogers it isn't a problem, I'm relatively fine now. Ok, can the two of you keep up with these guys while running? Also, I just checked, apparently they were really attacked, by some kind of unknown race, I cannot pull up the physical resemblances yet. Loki, is there a way to adjust your spell to scan this planet to specifically look at non-human sentient beings and their locations, in case there are still some left behind?'.

'Keeping up with them shouldn't be too much of a problem, from their info we'll be going less than 100 km per hour, my max speed is 120 but I can keep that up for only about ten minutes, a speed of 100km though I can usually keep up for closer to an hour. Though right now I'd only be able to last for some thirty minutes at it. Before anyone asks I also don't know how that shit works. With Steve now being a God in addition to his slightly better version of the Serum he should be able to keep up with that with ease for roughly twelve hours with barely any or no rest.' Barnes replied.

'And sadly enough Stark, while I would be able to detect if there were still non-humans on an area as large as the entire planet, unless I got the right feel of this specific species it would also detect beings like the sergeant and the captain, so I could just as well be detecting the enhanced of this version of humanity while thinking I was detecting invading aliens.'

Damn, that would have been nice to know. Wait he said he can sense enhanced, though he would see them as non-human? 'Can you still try to do it? If you only detect say three or four of them, it will show us that neither are there any aliens, nor does this system Alliance have many enhanced or in other words super-humans.' If it did come up nearly empty, well all the more positive for us for now. Though if these guys are really protectors and the invaders are agents of this Dimensions version of Thanos we're fucked.

.

End

Ok I have to stop the chapter here, otherwise the story wouldn't have any updates in a while. After this I'm going to reread all previous chapters and try to edit them enough to take out some of the more glaring mistakes in them. Thank you everyone for following/liking this story, and I hope this chapter was enjoyable to read. As always, please do review and tell me what I did right and what I did wrong, and have a nice day.

Edit 8-5-2019: I am done rewriting this chapter, was a pain to do so but it is finally done. The main changes in this chapter are rewriting it so that I could use less different POV's, expanding upon the parts of both the Citadel Council and Desolas and lastly well… making Desolas less of a Caricature and more of an actual if elitist and hypocritical person.

Once I m done rewriting the events described in the chapters posted up untill I brought out the time-line chapter I'll look into making chapter 1 more pleasant to read before continuing to work on chapter two of the time-line while also doing work on the updates for my other stories.