Chapter 50
200 years ago, we didn't have railroads. 100 years ago, we didn't have airplanes. 50 years ago, we didn't have spaceflight. 25 years ago we didn't have the Internet. We've already inherited the Earth and soon we WILL inherit the stars and anyone or anything that stands in our way will be eliminated one way or another.
—reasonably_plausible on Reddit
August 2220
Day Seven
Chest raw and throbbing, a large, round scar signifying where the cloned, augmented tissue had been sewn in place, its cellular division accelerated enough such that, added onto this nanites, it looked like a faded surgical scar, as opposed to the grievous wound it had been merely forty eight hours earlier. But John S2-15's mind wasn't on his chest, it wasn't in the gun he was cleaning, it wasn't in the knives he had secured to the small of his back, his tactical vest, and the metallic harness on his chest. His thoughts weren't on the battles ahead or on the war afterwards, but on history of times long past, once forgotten to circumstance.
Cassidy knew on some level what she had knocked loose in her host's mind, but given these last days, she also knew that she had to let John learn on his own, so she did what she was supposed to: Followed his orders. Seven hours after he had gone under the knife for the third time in his life, he awoke again, his skin sealed up and his wounds as healed as they could be, with the sheer amount of surgery needed to put him back together.
"Captain Hannah Shepard, forty eight years of age." Her words flashed through John's mind as he put his rifle back together in the bowels of the supercarrier. "Captain of the Logan at the time you reported to have been imprisoned by the Spartecs. She was promoted to the Einst-"
"Her face. Show it to me." His vision had been bad from repeated head trauma during that mission, but it hadn't been nearly as bad during those memories Cassidy had knocked loose.
Cassidy had paused a moment, before Shepard's face appeared on the II's HUD.
It was the same face he'd seen in those memories.
"Put me on the Einstein. Put all of the II's on the Einstein." He had ordered the AI, in his neutral, rumbly tone.
Two days later, Director Trent had given his speech just as the Navy's Fifth Fleet entered Warp. Cassidy had had to fight every step of the way to get John and the II's in the Einstein, while John told them his story. Learning that the men who had essentially raised them for their entire lives had lied to them, for essentially no reason at all, that they had had the chance to say no, and that they hadn't even any true connection to the Alliance period beyond a piece of paper, it hadn't gone well. Of course, where one would have expected all out chaos, with the II's, it had been stone cold silence. They took in the information and, in short order, followed John's lead: Wait, fight, train, prepare. If they wanted to leave the program, if they wanted to get, for the first time in their lives, the ability to choose their fates, they would have to kill each and every single I on Sparta. If they wanted to do that, they needed to be able to fight them.
John knew all of this, however. What he needed wasn't the training - the only possible benefit was from the intense gravity - no, what he needed was three minutes with Hannah Shepard. Seeing her file, experiencing the struggle of just trying to get onto her ship for transport, it made pieces of this puzzle fall together. While his and Shepard's interactions had been few and far between - less even than three encounters - every one was fraught with quick, almost desperate actions from the SIGMAs, and efforts to keep them from seeing eachother. Compounded with his memories being jarred loose by Cassidy, his and hers timeframes when compared to eachother, and the details in her personnel file, he made one, angry, jarring conclusion.
This woman, Hannah Shepard, was his mother.
The mother he had been told - assured - was deceased.
The death that had brought him to join the program in the first place.
The death that hadn't even been brought up when John had given Ducard his one and only amnesty call.
"She hasn't come down from her cabin, John. We're ten minutes from exiting Warp." Cassidy said softly, her voice echoing around John's angular gas masked-helmet.
It was the only excuse he needed.
He slammed a magazine into his rifle, and cradled it to his chest. He gave Craig and George a brief nod, which they reciprocated. They took up positions flanking the elevator, and green check flags came in from every SIGMA squad on every other level of the ship, all indicating that they were blockading the elevator as well. If John's theory proved true, everyone wanted to know, and as such, no one alive would interrupt him until they knew. War was inevitable, everybody already knew this; but if the mother of 2-15 was still alive, it made things, perhaps for the first time in their lives, personal.
Up through the elevator, his face set in a neutral scowl, his rifle cradled in his arms, his fists clenched tightly against its grip. It only took forty five seconds to travel to the top of the ship, relative to the current gravitic setting. It took another ten to swing up his rifle and enter the Captain's Cabin, unannounced. It was dark, most of the lights dimmed to give it deep gray hue, but even before John's HUD laid a gridline across the whole room, his vision adapted. One sweep of the spartanly decorated room, and John saw his target: A lone woman, kneeling in front of her desk in the corner of her room. Upon the desk was two bottles of alcohol, a holographic candle, and a picture of a very young child.
"Captain." His voice shattered the silence like a gunshot.
Surprisingly, Shepard didn't even start. Time slowed down as she turned to face the SIGMA, and got to her feet as John lowered the rifle. Her startlingly familiar, deep green eyes lowered to John's special forces rifle, before they snapped back up to the angular, angry red glass plates that shielded his eyes from view. She turned to face him fully, the woman was a full two feet shorter than him, hardly even reaching six feet tall. She was thin, but lean, her muscles packed dense from a life spent in the military. Her chest was tight, hardly even distending her uniform; her skin was pale from the time she spent in her ship, she had tear troughs framing her nose and wrinkling her otherwise smooth skin. John noticed faint scarring around her neck, a twitch in her wrists, and a wetness around her eyes, smeared across the left side of her face. He saw the slightest rosy tint to her cheeks and a dilation to her pupils.
He even smelled the hot, metallic smell of space. The smell made his chest briefly feel tight. Equipment returning from EVA excursions had always had been described as having the unique smell of hot, burning metal, seared steak, or even welding fumes. Inside the ship it was much more subtle, and naval men grew used to it quickly, but it was most powerful in the shuttle-bays and on vessels returning from planetside, or EVA flights. Even when the memory of this woman's face had drifted from memory, the smell never had. Whenever he had thought of her, he always remembered warmth, and the smell of space.
Barely a centisecond had passed in silence, far too little for the Captain to make anything of it.
"Are you injured?" Asked the son.
The mother blinked, and furrowed her brow. "No." She cleared her throat, "are we under attack?" She spoke with an authoritative tone, but John noticed a catch to her voice, the brief pause to clear her throat after that first syllable. Above all, however, he remembered that voice. A lesser man would have reeled from it, but he remained firm. It was the same warm voice he had heard more than a decade ago, if possessing a cold, militaristic edge to it, not at all dissimilar to his own.
It was her.
Unblinkingly, still as a statue, 2-15 found himself strangely unable to break eye contact with the shorter woman, and maintained eye contact with Shepard. "No. My AI has been trying to contact you. You did not respond."
Shepard cleared her throat again, nodded. "I apologize." She waved her hand at the entrance to her room, beckoning 2-15 to follow her. "I was mourning."
The SIGMA's brow twitched, as he followed the Captain. "Who died?"
"No one." She paused, "well, no one recently. My son died eleven years ago." She said, "I was offering him a prayer." She cleared her throat again, as the two entered the elevator.
He had been recruited eleven years ago.
"How did he die?" 2-15 asked, numbly.
Shepard blinked, "cancer. He was a latent biotic." Her wrists twitched again, and to mask it, she swiped her thumb under her nose. "I was on deployment at the time."
"Did they keep the body?"
"He was a biotic. They had to." Shepard said, darkly, before turning to look up to John. "I'm sorry, Sergeant Major, what is this to you?" She added, as the elevator began descending.
"I don't have a family." He only had brothers, all of whom would be tearing apart their foster-parents in weeks. Days, if he had anything to say about it. "Like that." He corrected.
Shepard blinked, and recoiled. "None at all?"
"No." A beat, "yes." Another beat, "no."
"No… Husbands? Wives? Children?" Shepard shook her head with each word, as if trying to drag the answers out of the supersoldier's war-oriented mind.
"Only SIGMAs." Only II's.
Only II's.
"What about your parents?"
John blinked, and his chest felt oddly cold.
What should he say?
"I lost my father in second contact." He remembered that much. "I…" Am your son. "Have…" A choice he wanted to make. "Not…" A single idea how to put his thoughts to words, the cold feeling in his chest to concrete thoughts. "Spoken... To my mother…" He drawled, "in a very… Very long time." This was the most he had spoken period in years.
Shepard shook her head, "she's worried, then." She said, in a warmer tone than earlier. "I assume she knows what you do?"
"Yes."
"Then call her, once you get done down there." She nodded in some vague direction behind her, causing John to briefly look over her shoulder, trying to identify what she was talking about. "She's worried about you." She repeated, with a brief smile, before she touched the child soldier's arm.
The SIGMA recoiled, as if he'd been electrocuted.
The Captain blinked, before she nodded and rested her hand behind her back again. "I apologize." John could see the muscles in her face tense, she was resisting a smile. "No matter how long it's been, you don't really stop trying to be a mom." She said, with an apologetic, sideward nod.
John slowly straightened out again, thinking a moment. "I do not think she knows I am alive." She didn't think like him, didn't pick up on the details he had laid, but so too did he not think like her: Completely incapable of putting to words what it was he wanted to say, what he had to say. Or even of understanding whether or not he should say it in the first place. He didn't understand anything happening, as the elevator slowly crawled downwards.
Shepard shook her head, "a mother knows, Two-Fifteen." She said with a brief chuckle.
"Did you?" He said, before he even really knew he was going to speak.
Shepard sighed, "walked right into that one -" She raised her voice, "Glenn, what's taking the elevator so long?"
"Apologies, Captain." Came Cassidy's voice, altered to sound like the ship's. "Bad hydraulics. We'll have to dry-dock when we get back to Arcturus. Just another minute."
Shepard shook her head, "billions of dollars, can't get a damn thing to work." She turned back to John, "not until I got the email." She said.
John's shoulders felt like they had just been given several thousand pounds, but oddly, his suit was still functioning perfectly, eliminating the feeling of its one-ton weight.
"Oh." Was all he could articulate.
All of the feelings in his chest, the cold, the warmth, the burning in his arm, the inability to understand any of them, they all made him want to kill something. She thought he was dead, if he told her, she wouldn't believe him - ignoring that he wasn't even able to articulate it in the first place, the words always stopping just short of his throat.
"I am sure he was made useful." Said John.
Shepard blinked, "excuse me?"
"Biotics research have come a long way, since first contact." He paused, "I am one." What else? "My augments also include biotics. Make them stronger."
She pursed her lips, "hm." She nodded, "Sergeant Major?"
"Ma'am?"
"Stop talking."
He stayed in the elevator after she got out, not exiting until he made it back to the shuttle bay, where his Alpha Squad awaited him.
George was the first to speak, turning his massive frame towards John as he stepped out. "Well?" He asked, his deep, accented voice echoing around John's helmet.
"Yes."
One lie, too many.
There was no more confusion, only anger.
There was no more desire for answers, only rage.
There was no more heat, only an empty, cold fury.
There would be no more training, only execution.
There would be no more peace, only war.
There would be no more life, only its end.
There would be no more stolen choices, only made ones.
Woe be they who denied John S2-15, or any other of the six hundred SIGMA II's their right to choose.
People would die.
Starting with the batarians attempting to do to the saltorians, what had been done to him and six hundred twelve others.
"What do we do?" Quietly asked Craig through their radios, as the feeling of acceleration left their guts, and they all stepped towards the drop pods. Marines and OD3's all scrambled for their shuttles and OIV's, to be launched towards the moons and lighter-gravity environments.
John heavily stepped into his drop pod, and after he ensured everything was secure and where it was supposed to be, he turned around and sat against its seat, his suit locking up the moment it felt contact and sensed his posture. Were someone to look, they wouldn't have seen his neutral, blank expression. They would only have seen the armored gas mask, and the angular, soulless red plates that shielded his eyes.
"Kill." He said, hitting the button that would close his drop pod. As the door lowered, so too did he unclench his fist, revealing the button destroyed, and an imprint of his knuckles in the hull of his pod.
A deep breath of the chilly to clear some of the fog out of her head, and an equally deep exhale to calm her nerves, and the Einstein's Captain stepped out of the elevator, just a moment after it shuddered to a halt. She entered the living-room sized CIC; unlike in any other ship, given the sheer size of Alliance Air and Spacecraft Carriers, the CIC was much smaller than, for instance, the bridge, and it was situated dead-center in the ship. In the center of the CIC was a dais, upon which was her chair, a computer, an AI projector, and - perhaps most importantly - a galaxy map. Ringing the CIC were several pairs of chairs and terminals, and seated at each one was the respective head of whatever portion of the ship to which the terminal was connected. Communications, Weapons, Crew, Fighters, every terminal connected its operator to a specific section in the massive vessel, and they all were within ear-shot of the Captain. It was like this to ensure a neat and easy flow of information, both to and from the ship's Captain - Shepard would always be appraised of what was going on and where, but wouldn't have to deal with anything not critical to her mission. She could give orders, the Shift Heads could send those orders down to their officers, who would spread them along the ship.
Standing next to her chair was her executive officer, Gale. He snapped to a salute, "Captain on the bridge!" He called out, prompting everyone to get to their feet and salute the red-head.
Shepard nodded once, "at ease. I have the con."
"I stand relieved." Gale dropped to parade rest, before digging into the breast pocket of his jacket, Shepard already knew what he was fishing out. As she made it to her chair, he slipped her the two pills, "cheeks a little rosy, ma'am?" He whispered, with just enough power in his voice to be heard, though only by her.
Shepard chose to ignore that comment, and downed the pills dry. "Dropping warp?"
Gale nodded, "aye. Any second now." He said, as the Captain sat down in her chair, and leaned over the galaxy map. "Marines are a little spooked, those SIGMAs were acting a little weird. Blocking elevator access."
Shepard shook her head, "one of their AI forgot that we're in warp and comms don't work. Sent a SIGMA up to check on me."
"How sweet." Blandly commented Gale, "they want to pilot the ship, next?"
"No. They talk a lot, though." Shepard felt the feeling of acceleration drop from the pit of her stomach, as if she were at the trough of a roller coaster and was just recovering. Immediately, her galaxy map lit up, showing her the entirety of the Fifth Fleet - some three thousand ships - as they all did the same, dropping from warp half of a light year from the Alnitek system.
With a twang of mirth, Shepard realized that the last time she had been here, her son had been alive. Of course, fate being the cruel mistress, the pills decided now was the best time to kick in and remove any alcohol from her system, leaving her alert and sharp-minded.
"Talking SIGMAs?" Asked the wrinkled XO, "I never thought I'd see the day." He too turned to the galaxy map, as the Einstein's AI popped up on the screen.
"Admiral Hackett is initiating Fleet-Comm, Captain."
"Let's hear it." Shepard nodded.
"Alright, Fifth Fleet." Came the grizzled voice of the well-decorated Admiral. "We all know what's going on, so I'll skip the pleasantries. Our orders aren't to take prisoners and they aren't to let any Batarian naval assets escape from this system. When we're done here we'll be picking up any saltorian that wants to fight and we're bulldozing our way to Khar'Shan. Our Marines, Soldiers, OD3's and N7 can't expect any SIGMA assistance in this fight - they're all the only soldiers we've got that can stand up on Saltor, so that's where we're dropping them. Everyone else, once we're done destroying the Hegemony fleet, spread around the planets and moons. Charon squadron, there's a Mass Relay the next system over, and if the Batarians warp out that's their fasted method of putting as much distance between us and them, so make sure that doesn't happen.
"Everyone else, I don't want a single Batarians ship in my sky in the next hour. With luck we'll be done here in a week, and parking in Khar'Shan's orbit in a month. Stay strong, Hackett out."
As Hackett spoke, Shepard stared long and hard at the map in front of her. Two planets and a handful of moons were the only bastions of life for the saltorians, but the majority of the batarians forces were centered around their homeworld and its moons, everywhere else got a pittance of hostilities at best. She knew her ship had the engine power and the tonnage to stay aloft for an hour under Saltor's conditions, perhaps longer if it had a Mass Effect core, but it would have taken a core the size of a dump truck to be able to make any significant difference in the relative mass of a ship the Einstein's size. Not an option, given its limited quantities in Alliance territory, not when cores the size of dimes could be installed on shuttles and Air and Space fighter jets, for the same effect at a significant fraction of the cost.
I can only stay long enough to help get our SIGMAs air dominance. Thought Shepard, as she pulled up Saltor on the map and zoomed in on a city near its geographic north pole. Their intelligence gathering and observation efforts these past two decades pegged this city as their New York-class capitol, but it was on a much larger scale, spanning half of a continent, and likely tens of billions of dollars a year in upkeep. The best Shepard could do would be to destroy any batarians ships that had parked themselves above the city, and then take up their position and assist her fliers in crippling their aerial dominance. Once they had a handle on things, then she'd have to book it back to orbit before the ship cracked in half, or melted, trying to stay afloat in that gravity.
"Gale." Shepard said, firmly, barely a minute after Hackett finished his address.
"Ma'am." The XO snapped to attention.
"Hit the Warp, aim for Saltor's capitol city, Innsua. Charge up the deck guns and make sure the SIGMAs are ready to deploy. Once we're stable, get our Marines and OD3's in the shuttles and burning towards the moons." She zoomed out and indicated one of Saltor's natural satellites, itself so large and so massive that, according to the scans, it had its own satellite orbiting it - a moon with its own moon. "We've got a lot of fighting centered around this one." Glenn helpfully highlighted its name on the holographic display, "Mun." She indicated the several ships in its orbit, "so we'll want to drop a lot of manpower there."
Gale nodded, "yes ma'am."
"Glenn, make sure you and Engineering are ready for any EMP's. The saltorians are supposed to be pretty trigger-happy with their nukes."
"Yes ma'am." Said the AI, as Shepard briefly felt the feeling of acceleration well up and then vanish from her gut.
Once was said that, at upwards of twenty three thousand warships, the pre-Alliance Turian Navy had been the single most powerful naval force in the history of the Milky Way. Even the Quarian Migrant fleet, with its sheer numbers and two-to-one advantage, wouldn't have been able to go up against the Hierachy's navy, not if they expected to have a viable, sustainable population afterwards. Merely the threat of a Turian flotilla showing up in a star system was enough to keep many a roving pirate gangs in the Attican Traverse quiet. The only ships in the universe that could have stood up to the Hierarchy's had, at the time, been considered to be the Asari's. Their much more advanced technology, ablative armor, and their powerful shields, to say nothing of their higher capacity heat-sinks, had made many an academic discussion on potential civil wars pit the Asari as the deadliest threat to any Turian victory. Then, however, came the Human-Turian War.
At the time of First (or Second, depending on what species was asked) Contact, the Alliance only had two planets under its flag, and thus was able to field a proportionately massive navy, numbering in at seventeen thousand ships. While numerically this put them barely even with the Hegemony's forces at the time, their strength came not from numbers, but their weaponry and tactics, as the Turians would soon have learned. In the Human-Turian war, the Turians lost nearly half of their combined naval forces - and, perhaps worse, three quarters of their Dreadnoughts - whereas the Alliance hardly even lost a quarter of their ships, cementing their 'quality over quantity' methodology. The result here was an instantaneous shift in the balance of power in the naval game - any ship out there that didn't have human magnetic weapons, or wasn't outfitted with human energy shields or armor, just couldn't be expected to match up unless it had a fleet to back it up. Suddenly, the most feared vessel in the universe wasn't that which flew Hierarchy green, but Alliance blue and gray. This was a fear the Batarian Hegemony's navy would feel all too well, as their scanners lit up like a bonfire, with the arrival of the Fifth Fleet's three thousand ships.
What remained of the Hegemony's navy, following their first open war with the Alliance, could have fit in a cosmic teacup. Less than ten thousand ships total, with four dreadnoughts, with three quarters of those ships - and all but one of those dreadnoughts - having been dedicated to the saltorian campaign. In any other situation, seventy five hundred ships against three thousand would have seemed a textbook example of a suicidally stupid battle, and in a way, it was, but not for the three thousand attackers. True, the batarians had something of an advantage in their fused human/citadel technology, but those vessels numbered in less than sixty, and even if they hadn't, they still had one major, damning weakness when compared to an Alliance ship: Size, and weapons capacity.
The only Alliance ships that came in at under one kilometer in length were their frigates, all others started at one kilometer and went up, until they reached a Flagship's five kilometer length. If need be, an Alliance ship with enough speed and armor integrity could crash through a Citadel vessel and still be able to put up a fight. Then, of course, were their weapons - since they didn't rely on the mass effect to achieve their killing power, suddenly mass and magnetic acceleration weren't as much of a problem. In the end, every ship had the same type of ammunition - a tungsten slug weighing in at more than six hundred tons. The difference was in their guns - more specifically, the energy their railguns had to work with. A frigate's guns could only thirty eight thousand meters per second, which created an impact force equivalent to ninety five kilotons of TNT. Then went up to a Destroyer's weapons, which generated a charge high enough to blast their projectiles forty one thousand meters per second, and on and on it went until their dreadnoughts got to firing their projectiles at five percent the speed of light - fifteen million meters per second, and at a force equivalent to just under fifteen thousand megatons of TNT.
Compared to the Alliance's, the Hegemony's weaponry was a firecracker, to say nothing of the disparity between human and Citadel armor. Compared to the Alliance's, the Hegemony's ships were hardly out of the age of wood and sail. Compared to humanity and the quarians, their ferocity and anger was but a dying ember, and compared to their determination, the Hegemony was a child willing to quit at the first sign of pain. One could rightfully say that an analogy with children, especially when applied to war, would be an inappropriate one, but it was, in reality, the exact opposite, because the Alliance had a history with children and war.
Seated deep in the belly of the Fifth Fleet's flagship, the SSV Scant Might, the fleet's grizzled Admiral stared firmly at the table-sized galaxy map ahead of him. From its dusty holographic projections, he saw the entire Alnitek system, with its two primary life-supporting planets and the known colonized moons all glowing a bright, vibrant green, all of the arriving Alliance naval vessels glowing a pale, friendly blue, and all of the Hegemony vessels glowing an angry, violent red. This was a situation, he knew, that required a fine hand - as much as the baser, animalistic parts of him wanted to order his heaviest ships to just shoot and shoot and shoot until they smashed all of the batarians vessels to oblivion, he knew that that tactic put the planets at risk.
Batarian naval strategy was to blockade planets and use them as shields against naval fire - and to anyone who played by Citadel rules, such a tactic was more or less foolproof. If an enemy wanted to take down their ships, they would need to advance to close, 'knife fight' ranges, or risk breaking galactic convention and shooting the planet, meaning the Hegemony navy held all of the cards. But Hackett wasn't playing by Citadel rules, because this system wasn't in Citadel Space. They were in Alliance space, and that meant they played by Alliance rules.
One such rule, being the conditions under which weapons of mass destruction could be used, and in this situation, one of the conditions for a very specific WMD had been met. It wasn't anything as raw or terrifying as a nuclear weapon, nor as conventional and massive as a dreadnought. No, there was one weapon - one uniquely human weapon - that Hackett had in mind, one that hadn't been used in decades. The one weapon that, perhaps even above the SIGMAs themselves, was the reason the entire galaxy feared the Human Systems Alliance.
McGraw's Antimatter Particle Beam, the weapon that literally annihilated anything it touched.
The AMPB bypassed kinetic barriers completely and, upon contact with any physical matter, annihilated it at the speed of light - turning once mighty spaceships into enormous explosions and piles of rapidly expanding matter. It was a weapon just as capable of wiping out fleets as it was of scarring planets and destroying moons. This weapon had been partially responsible for the Alliance having been able to tear apart Palaven's defense fleet with so few losses, twenty years ago - all it took was one hit, one touch of the antimatter to a ship's hull, and then there would be no ship anymore. Even armor made from the metals of Mass Relays didn't stand a chance against this weapon of literal mass destruction. It was so powerful that only one enemy had ever warranted its use, meaning it had only ever been used once, and that had been during the Human-Turian War. The AMPB was so deadly that its use was more regulated than even their nuclear arsenal. It had been functionally outlawed in any conflicts outside of total asymmetric warfare, or in defense of Alliance territory, and in this situation, the poor Hegemony forces fulfilled one of those conditions.
This meant that the kid gloves were off.
The Alliance was pissed.
Hackett, was pissed.
"All non-Carrier Battlegroups." He grumbled, "surround the dreadnoughts and the Might. Dreadnoughts, I am authorizing use of antimatter weaponry." He said, his deep voice cutting through not just the CIC of his ship, but the vacuum of space, as it was carried out to all of the ships under his command. "Use partial charges and missiles to break their shields and then I want you to unload on these bastards, clear them out as fast as you can."
Another advantage of War travel was one the Alliance rarely spoke about, and for good reason: It allowed them to stick to the conventional naval tactics, perfected during the days of ocean-based ship travel. With the sheer distance an object could cover in warp, and the speed at which they could do it, Alliance ships could park in orbit around the solar system, and so long as their warp cores were functional, they could still be able to fire as accurately as if they were facing down the nose of the enemy ship. Compared to Citadel ships, which could hardly rest more than a few tens of thousands of kilometers at their absolute maximum range, Alliance vessels were practically untouchable. Hackett's fleet versus the batarian armada was analogous to a sniper going up against a shotgunner, and with their first option being to open up with the antimatter weapons, it was like giving that same sniper thermonuclear rounds.
The only thing Hackett truly had to worry about, was how the Hegemony navy would be using their warp capability: Offensively, or defensively. If it was the former, he could be facing some casualties before his dreadnoughts and the flagship's missiles could penetrate the batarian shields and open them up to antimatter fire. If it was the latter, it was very unlikely they would try to attempt any 'tennis' strategies and send Alliance slugs back at friendly ships; instead, they would probably try for the relay a few systems over, and if that were the case, they had a very large present waiting for them. As it turned out, they would try a little bit of both.
The moment his fleet opened fire, hundreds of batarian ships panicked and went to Warp. Some simply vanished from the system, fleeing for their lives, while others tried going for the Alliance ships at the edge of the solar system. Their thoughts had likely run along the lines of, if they could bring the enemy ships into knife right ranges, and hit their stomachs or their main engines, they could win. Unfortunately for them, that was perhaps the dumbest thing they could have done in the situation. It was true that, despite the sheer strength and impregnability of any given Alliance warship, that their weaknesses were their engines - which could explode from direct fire - and their stomachs - which had no weapons to speak of, to facilitate landing and dry docking in space stations or on planets; but that was where Frigates came in.
Where their larger cousins, the Destroyers, would charge headlong into combat and actively seek out knife-fight range engagements, and Carriers would go straight for orbit and start pouring out troops and fighter jets, Frigates by and large played two roles: Defense of the bigger ships, and pinpoint strikes on the ground. They either stuck back with the Dreadnoughts and the Flagship, or charged straight in with the Carriers, serving a role not at all dissimilar to fighter jets. Better yet was, since Frigates were the smallest ships in the entire navy, that meant that they were similarly the easiest to produce, to the point where the adage had become that if every single frigate in the Navy joined up into one fleet, they could darken the skies of an entire continent.
So, when the Hegemony ships that had chosen offense as opposed to defense, exited Warp right underneath or alongside the Dreadnoughts and the Might, they found not the weak underbellies of the mightiest ships, but a fleet unto itself of frigates. Most of the enemy ships got one shot off if they were lucky, before they were shredded and blasted apart by magnetic fire, rendered clouds of shrapnel by missile strikes, or turned to Swiss Cheese by their autocannons.
It took less than ninety minutes for the Fifth Fleet to wipe out the batarian armada. By the time they were done, the only ships left were the ones crippled and cleared by the saltorians, or blasted apart by the frigates. All others had literally been annihilated by antimatter strikes.
As Hackett leaned back and looked at the casualty reports - less than one hundred ships damaged, and only ten critically so - he clenched his fist, zooming out on the galaxy map. "Zed. What's the word from Charon squadron?"
The Might's AI was silent a moment. "Negative comms. Last word was seventy eight minutes ago, whereupon they received positive radar contact of batarian vessels exiting Warp and approaching the Mass Relay, whereupon, following orders, they detonated the Planet Shaker."
Two plates, one foot total, of a tungsten-titanium alloy, a thick layer of electronics, and several rocket-boosters on the sides and bottom of a pill-shaped re-entry pod, with an emergency parachute in case all else failed. That was all that protected 2-15 and his six hundred brothers from first the unforgiving void of space, and then moments later the even less forgiving environment of the planet Saltor. By the time the Orbital Insertion Vehicle had reached the planet's exosphere, he was already feeling a pull equivalent to one G - the very same pull that earth had at ground level. When his OIV reached the mesosphere, that pull had tripled, and when it broke through the clouds in the troposphere, John felt the full force of Saltor's heavy gravitic pull.
"Alpha squad, report in." John spoke, his voice hardly reaching past his helmet.
"Two-Sixty Six up."
"Two-Eighty Two, up."
"Cassidy up."
"Weapons check."
"Ready."
"Ready."
"Ready."
"Ammunition."
"Full."
"Full."
"Armor integrity."
"Good."
"Good."
"Thrusters are tasked to max, but they'll slow you down enough." Came Cassidy's voice.
"Objectives."
"Kill."
"Kill."
"Help you three kill."
The shaking in John's OIV, and the roar of the engines outside of it, intensified the closer to the ground he got. He and the II's were being dropped outside of Innsua, where the main bulk of Hegemony forces were located. Half of the I's were joining them for this, whilst the other half spread out in two-squad teams to assist the other cities in clearing out their ground troops.
"Terraforming Disk deployed. Visibility should be one hundred percent across the continent. We're already getting orbital scans." Cassidy announced, just preceding a bright blue flash and the dissolution of all of the smoke choking the planet's dense atmosphere. "Impact in ten… Nine… Eight..."
John's pod grew closer to the green grasslands surrounding the city with each passing second. There was a horde of saltorians and hegemony forces clashing both outside and in the continent-spanning capitol city. His squad was deploying right into the thick of it, to rally the fighters orbiting the city and pulling them back inwards. Their staging ground would be the city's tallest standing buildings, with their capitol building - their 'Temple of the Hoomanisire' - being the main point from which all operations were coordinated. First they would fight from the inside out, with the intention of clearing Innsua of batarian presence, and then spreading across the entire planet like a blanket, combing across its surface until there wasn't anything but humans and saltorians standing victorious.
"Three… Two… One." And on one, John's pod slammed into the ground with a loud crash and the sound of bending metal.
His suit automatically adjusted to the gravitic pull of the ground underneath him, and before the OIV's door groaned open, he already felt as if there wasn't any resistance to his movements. John stepped out of the door without a problem, and his eyes scanned over the horizon passing over the skyline of the city, taking in the tens of thousands of Alliance fighter jets flooding the air, and coming to rest on a batarian barely feet away from him.
Upon making eye contact with the soulless red plates on John's gas mask/helmet, the batarian roared out in anger and dashed forward. John reacted faster than a crack of thunder, ducking under the batarian's wild, stupid haymaker punch and jerking his upper body forward, tackling the batarian to the heavy ground with the equivalent of a tap from his shoulder. Before the batarian had even hit the ground with a bone-breaking grunt, John was back to his feet, with one foot planted on the alien's chest, and his rifle hovering above his face. Two bullets, one to destroy its helmet, and another to perforate its skull, and the batarian lay still on the ground.
John turned his head over his shoulder as he took a step back, and saw a saltorian, clad in thick kevlar body armor, with forest-camo fatigues underneath it, marking it as a BattleVector, the three red stripes around its bicep and one thick marking on the helmet above his left eye marking it as a Lanceman. It was on its back on the ground, staring at the SIGMA in abject awe, its mouth moving but no sound going past its thick, scaly lips.
Even if it was an alien, John knew shock when he saw it. He was above the saltorian in a second and had his free hand thrust in front of it. The saltorian visibly flinched at the sight, as if expecting some sort of weapon.
"He…" It struggled with words, "you… Thou…" It blinked once and shook its head, before the BattleVector reached up and grasped the SIGMA's hand. As if the gravity were nothing to him, John hauled the saltorian to its feet.
After snatching one of the saltorian laser weapons from the ground, John thrust it into the Lanceman's hands.
"MOVE TO THE CITY!" He thundered over the noise and madness of war, his words being translated automatically and broadcast out of his helmet's speakers, allowing the saurian creature to understand him.
The saltorian blinked once, before he took the rifle and, with a determined glare entering his eyes, he cried "Amen!", before John slapped him on the back and they, joined by the rest of the SIGMA II Alpha Squad, charged towards Innsua city.
Had John not even known that Saltor was a five G planet, he wouldn't have been able to guess, what with the way his power armor augmented his motions to lower resistance to zero. Falling in behind him were his two squadmates, who said not a word as they all crossed the grassy plains and ran alongside the thick concrete roads, the battleground turning from a horde of saltoriand and hegemony forces battling it out, to all of the green creatures, rallied by SIGMAs, charging right back into their city. It was as if a swarm of ants were intermixed and battling a swarm of cockroaches, only for the former to flee to its anthill, leaving the dirt upon which they fought populated solely by ants.
As they grew closer to the city, three Frigates broke atmosphere and came in from outer orbit, followed closely by a fourth ship, a carrier, several times larger than them, wreathed in fire and trailing a thick column of smoke behind it as it barreled through the atmosphere. The Frigates, capable of much higher in-atmosphere velocities, zoomed ahead and met the batarian ships head on. The air exploded with thunder as each of the three frigates unleashed their rail guns and launched dozens of missiles, before the smoke-trailing Carrier's deck guns fired thrice, each multi-hundred ton slug tearing apart the batarian ships. The Hegemony vessels exploded in bright blue-white balls of fire before they began to list sideways and fall to the ground. The three Frigates completed their run by breaking off from eachother, each pulling up and leaving thick contrails in the air as they hurtled back up towards orbit; and to finish the display of power, the Carrier finally drifted to a halt, the enormous vessel hovering above the city and pouring out fighter jets and anti-aircraft fire. It didn't take more than five minutes for the batarians to lose any air dominance they had.
As they grew closer to the city, John shifted his gaze downwards, seeing several hundred I's and II's tearing apart the battlefields they had been dropped onto. Some snipers set up in the high-rise buildings, others who landed in the buildings used their EVA thrusters' micro-mass effect cores to leap off of said buildings and land directly in the field of battle. John noted with an odd feeling in his chest and a twitch of the corner of his lips, that more than a few of the I's he could see were all doing double-takes as they saw the II's mostly forgo their ballistic weapons and instead charge right into the fray to bring it into a melee. Many were using knives or were appropriating saltorian energy weapons, or were straight up going for their fists, while others affixed bayonets, used hardlight, or even just beat their enemies with their weapons, as if they were clubs. The best part was that it was working - even better than the efforts of the I's!
Already off their game due to Saltor's intense gravity and the Alliance's arrival, the batarians were by and large completely unable to change their tactics in time to effectively fight the II's. Better yet was that their modified weapons, whose projectile mass was increased instead of the standard decrease, worked directly against them - anytime they fired at these melee II's, they killed themselves and did little else than stun the II's and shatter their shields. The only thing they could do was attempt to counter melee with melee, but in that field the II's had the unequivocal advantage with their augmentations and their power armor. Combined with the I's gunfire keeping them from being able to maneuver effectively, and the sheer numbers of the BattleVectors employing a combination of the conventional tactics of the I's and the unconventional tactics of the II's, the batarians and their slave soldiers were being torn apart.
Now at the edge of the city, John spared a quick glance to the BattleVector he'd brought back into the fight - the enormous saurian was distracted by the sights and sounds of the Alliance entering the fight. John increased his stride and smacked the BattleVector on the back of his head.
"Snap out of it!" 2-15 ordered, pointing to his right with a knife-hand chop. "we need men on the right and left flanks, ours will push the center!" He gestured with harsh chopping motions, "I want you with the men on the left! We are not leaving until this city is ours!"
The BattleVector followed John's arm with a firm look, which only tightened into a stony, determined expression before it nodded its helmeted head once. "Yes, sire!" It roared out in a baritone, slithery voice, before it charged down the left advance and 2-15 bolted down the center, fastening his rifle to his back and ripping his knife out from his harness.
With a loud bellow, John, joined by his two closest allies, leapt right into the battle, landing in a small crowd of batarians, crushing two, and rolling over a third before he sprung to his feet with a wide, bloody swing of his knife. He would lose count of the bones he would break, the throats and chests he would carve open, and the bullets he would fire in the eighteen hours it would take to win back the half-continent spanning city.
A/N:
Funny story, the original plan - and I mean WAAAAAAAAY back before I'd even published the prologue - had been for this chapter, and the preview at the end of TFW, to *remain* in TFW. Under that plan, it would have gone straight from the Jorban bit at the last chapter, to the events coming up, next chapter.
But, multiple things (not the least of which being that a lot of time and a lot of changes had passed since the initial preview) ended up making me decide a quick refresher/remaster was in order. If you go back and look at that, and then come here and look at this, it should hopefully be pretty clear exactly what changed, where, and when.
Now, if you've been following my Twitter, as of this chapter's publishing I was actually having something of a meltdown. First I'd finished it with a week to spare, then I'd had an awesome idea to add on to the end of this chapter - a 'whammy', so to speak - to make it an even bigger Five-Oh extravaganza.
Then, I decided the addition it was too big (in length and importance), and chopped it off.
Then I decided - maybe I can change it! - and I tried.
Didn't like it.
So I cut it off again, and now all of a sudden Chapter 51 is pretty much *already done*, drafting-wise, at least.
And oh boy, I think you guys will love it. It's big.
'Till next time!
-PFB