Ambassador Yuhi'Raemos vas Shiram
UNSC Everest, Valiant-class Heavy Cruiser
UNSC Military Calendar: February 3, 2561
Ambassador Yuhi'Raemos vas Shiram turned back to gaze longingly at the Shiram's Actina-class shuttle attached to the octagonal door behind her, then turned back and stared at the long, silvery-gray walls of the alien super dreadnought, its clean, spartan interior, and industrial, tiled floor. "Feels like the end of an era, doesn't it?"
"Sure," Chief Engineer Daro'Xen vas Moreh replied as she took in the sights, "but it's the start of one, too." The two continued walking down the hallway of the Everest with the visitors to the migrant fleet towards a contingent of humans. The airlock doors behind the group closed with a soft swish as the shuttle departed.
"Yeah, maybe," Yuhi turned to her friend, "but I'll miss being a captain."
"Says the first quarian ambassador in 300 years," Daro'Xen beamed at Yuhi. "Just remember that you'll be able to answer questions that no Quarian in history has ever even thought to ask."
"Ever the scientist, eh Daro? Speaking of which, Admiral Cole-"
The human admiral stopped with his contingent of black-armored soldiers next to a group of troopers with light-brown metal armor atop gray clothes. "Chief scientist, marines, Corporal Pressly here," he waved his hand past the first soldier in gray, "will escort you to the hospital. You can work with the ship's chief doctor, Lieutenant Commander Enders and the XO, Commander Maximovna to get some sterile living space set up for you and your folks. Now, Chief Engineer Daro'Xen vas Moreh was it?"
"Yes-"
"I'm going to ask that you and your team please refrain from conducting your interview-slash-pen-testing until after we get underway. Tyr needs his full attention on systems diagnostics. Clear?"
"Perfectly clear, Admiral," Daro'Xen responded, "and again, thank you for this opportunity."
"Not a problem. Lastly, while onboard, I'm going to require that all alien visitors be escorted by an armed guard at all times. If boarded, UNSC standard operating procedure would be to wipe the AI and self-destruct but I'm fine with bending the rules a bit. Clear?"
"Of course, Admiral," Yuhi interjected, "not a problem."
Admiral Cole put his the knuckles of his very alien five-fingered hands atop his hips and took a deep breath. "Good. Ambassador, Gunny, you're with me. Everyone else, dismissed." The various soldiers yelled out a rattling "sir!" before turning around and going about their business, quarians in tow. A quarian marine, Mal'Rofal, stayed behind to guard the quarian ambassador. "Now," the human admiral started towards the bridge as the others followed, "these 'turians' and 'batarians.' The Everest is a sitting duck. I need to know what I'm up against, here. Weapons, armor, defense, strategy." Despite his advanced age, Cole walked briskly through the moderately wide, completely unidentifiable, twisting hallways of the Everest.
Yuhi wasn't sure what a duck was, or a sitting duck for that matter, but standing idly by in what equated to enemy territory was always dangerous proposition. "Well, defenses are the standard mass effect-based ones," she began knowing that the humans were new to the technology, "kinetic barriers and thick, ablative armor, though nothing like yours. Turian ships are universally better than batarian ones, might I add. If you prepare for a turian attack, you can handle a batarian attack."
Cole nodded in understanding to the ambassador as he continued his brisk pace down the hallway. "Good to know. What's the maximum energy dissipation of turian barriers per unit time? And is there a maximum per impulse? Is concentrated fire more effective than sustained barrage? Will their shields leak from a massive burst?"
"That depends." Yuhi took a deep breath. Arming galactic newcomers with artificial intelligence with this information sat uneasily with her. "While no one in the quarian fleet would have access to hard numbers, most fighting slows down when ships overheat. Keeping weapons firing, barriers up, point defense lasers going, and engines burning radiates a lot of heat. Outlasting the enemy could be a viable tactic, I suppose, though it doesn't happen since everyone has the same defenses."
Mal sped up momentarily to join the line of people walking across the hallway. "I don't know specifics about their defenses besides the standard stuff but I did watch an interview with a turian admiral on the news. He claimed their newest dreadnought could shoot a twenty kilo slug every two seconds at nearly one-point-one percent the speed of light."
"Mhmm," Cole paused his movement for a bit to think before he continued walking. "Thanks, that gives me some idea. What kind of ships stand up to a shot like that?"
"A cruiser could take a shot like that and lose most or all of its barrier strength, but a frigate would probably just get vaporized," Yuhi responded. "Frigates rely on their maneuverability to evade kill shots like that at distance."
"To respond to a shot that quick," Cole trailed off for a moment, "your ships must be extremely maneuverable."
"Compared to this lumbering beast?" Mal chuckled, "probably."
"Don't fool yourself," Jon chimed in, "this old gal can hustle."
The group of four turned left around a corner, then a right. Human soldiers and crewmen passed by in gray garbs and armor, all armed, and all saluted the human admiral. The admiral nodded back in acknowledgement as he continued talking. "What's the maneuvering mechanism?"
"Localized mass-effect fields," the ambassador explained. "They change the mass of the ship in an area while engine output remains unaffected."
"Like a door on a hinge," responded Cole thoughtfully.
"Yes, almost exactly like that," Yuhi smiled.
Mal took the pause in conversation to sate his curiosity. "What about human ships? What's the output on those massive guns on the front of the Everest?"
Yuhi turned her head to gauge the humans' reaction. The human soldier, Jon, smiled ever so slightly at the question. Pride, maybe?
Cole's skyllian-five face was as unmoving as ever. "Valiant-class ship main cannon information is classified as secret," he paused his explanation, "but a Charon-class frigate's magnetic accelerator cannon is one hundred eighty three meters long and fires a six hundred ton projectile at thirty thousand meters per second. That's a little over two times as powerful as your dreadnought by energy alone, but the shot speed is considerably slower."
"But you don't use the mass effect?" Yuhi asked.
"Nope, just some coils, capacitors, and reactors. Recharge time is lengthier, too."
Mal lifted his eyebrows slightly. "So this ship is more powerful?"
"Yep," Cole responded with his usual dry as-a-matter-of-factness, "every shot should be a kill shot if we can hit our target."
The four members of the group rounded a corner and past a door with a few defensive emplacements behind it. A human woman with stark yellow hair and bright blue eyes turned to see who entered. "Admiral on deck!" she yelled out, as the two-dozen or so humans on the bridge immediately stopped what they were doing and stood at attention.
"At ease," Cole responded with an immeasurable fatigue. The bridge immediately came back to life as the humans began the difficult task of resuscitating a long-dead ship. "Commander," he addressed his charge, "you're relieved. Work with Doc Enders and the quartermaster on setting up some living spaces for our guests, then get yourself some shut-eye."
"Aye-aye, sir," she saluted, and walked off.
Yuhi hadn't ever actually seen the bridge as she was trapped in a hallway a few hundred meters away. As befitting the nerve-center of a ship of such size, it was as busy as a garrah hive. Dozens of humans paced in and out with an unfailing sense of urgency. The ship-wide standard gray enclosed the entirety of the large yet cramped room. In the center, a large table hooked into the floor with a glowing blue surface dominated most of the open space- a very large holotable. Above it hung displays stretching across the entirety of the vertical space above it. Further out from the centerpiece, various consoles, monitors, crash-seats, smaller holographic pedestals, and a seemingly infinite number of buttons took up the majority of the remaining space. Twenty, maybe thirty people were seated in various locations, all facing forward.
"Tyr," Cole said as he walked over to a well-worn chair and looked at a glowing pedestal front and left of him, "give me a ship-wide rundown."
From the table, the spectral form of a nearly naked male human with a single hand appeared. "Yes sir!" he said with enthusiasm. "Life support, magnetic accelerator cannons, and the upper main reactionless drive are fully functional. Point-defense is mostly functional. Reactors two and five are offline- damaged by the slipspace backblast back on Viperidae- but engineering is working on it. Translight drive is also offline, but replacement parts are being fabricated. All other reactionless drives are offline but the selenium for the coils is being processed as we speak. Both will be online in less than a day. Armor is heavily damaged and the superstructure is extremely warped, especially in the aft 40-percent of the ship. Nothing we can do to fix that, sir."
Yuhi's eyes widened as a real-life AI spoke to Admiral Cole before she turned to her bodyguard, Mal'Rofal vas Shiram. Her eyes widened further when she saw that Mal had his hand over his sidearm. The human marines reacted in kind and raised their krogan-sized weapons at the quarian bodyguard.
"At ease, Mal," Yuhi ordered her bodyguard.
Mal looked at Yuhi's tense posture, then back to the AI, and finally to the irritated face of the human admiral. "Yes sir," the quarian said with no small amount of mistrust.
"Old habits die hard, marine?" Cole asked the tensed quarian.
"Yes, Admiral Cole. My apologies," Mal said while gazing down at the floor for a few moments.
"Don't let it happen again," the alien admiral chided the burly marine with a parental-like disappointment, "Tyr, let engineering know the slipspace and reactionless drives are top priority. We're sitting ducks without them."
"Yes sir!" the hologram enthusiastically replied, raising his lone, incorporeal hand to his right temple before disappearing.
"Now, ambassador, marine," the admiral fell back into his chair before turning, "feel free to grab a seat," as he motioned to the spare chairs in the wall, "and tell me about turian armor."
The discussion, or maybe interrogation, continued for almost an hour. Cole and assorted bridge staff pulled as much information as they could from the quarians on the bridge. The bridge itself never calmed down during the hectic rush to pull the ship back together. "Material transfer from the QCS Xaavum complete," someone said. "Engineering reports slipspace turbo-encabulator fabrication is complete," said someone else. "MAC diagnostics show it's at 100 percent." "Bridge is detecting a shimmy in Helix 47. Can you confirm?" "Bridge is ready to begin starboard-side maneuvering thruster twenty-one diagnostics."
While the human crew was running around, a map of the system was positioned in the center of the bridge. The mass relay with the Shiram orbiting twenty kilometers away. Another thirty kilometers away sat the Everest and the Xaavum, a quarian mining barge, both menacingly pointed at anything that could come through the mass relay.
"Admiral, the gate is activating!" someone yelled out.
The human admiral turned to the former quarian captain. "Yuhi, are we expecting anyone?"
"Not that I'm aware of."
"Tyr, open shipwide comms." The admiral didn't wait for an acknowledgement, clearly having practiced this plenty of times before. "This is Admiral Cole. Battlestations, everyone, tactical condition two. This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill." Cole turned his head slightly to a human officer at a bridge station. "Jackson, how's the MAC charge?"
"One hundred percent, sir!" the dark-skinned alien yelled back.
"Good." Cole repositioned himself on his crash seat. He leaned forward, slightly. "Rotate the Everest to face past the exit point of the relay. Tyr, you have the guns. If whatever comes through there is hostile, blow it to pieces." A chorus of acknowledgement echoed through the bridge room as monitors throughout the bridge displayed the various maneuvering thrusters arrayed across the hull firing at full blast.
Moments later, the holo pedestal next to the vice admiral produced a holograph of Tyr as powerful external cameras attempted to resolve a visual on the new ships. "Five contacts, Vice Admiral." Ambassador Yuhi made a mental note to deposit some credits in her cursing jar. "Four corvettes and a frigate." The bridge went quiet as the AI spoke. "Citadel IFF tags show them as belonging to the 'Turian Hierarchy.' They're opening fire on the Shiram, sir!"
The identification confused her- frigate? The identification of ships she knew as cruisers and frigates as corvettes struck a chord of curiosity in Yuhi before the realization of what the AI was saying hit her. "No!" she yelled out.
"Fire on the frigate, if possible. Second shot on the corvette if the frigate dies. Prepare to launch all fighters on my mark. Get me visuals on the battle." Vice Admiral Preston Cole had experience, that much was clear, but his calm right now was almost unnerving. Every order was said with total calm and after each order, people moved with practiced precision.
A monitor switched the Shiram, then another monitor switched to the largest turian ship, what Yuhi instantly identified as a turian cruiser. The enemy ship was firing at the quarian-owned frigate and not a moment later, the Shiram's barriers fell. Cole's Everest gently shook in response as the main gun fired. A gout of flame erupted from the other side of the turian cruiser as the enormous shell obliterated kinetic barriers, cut through armor like so many centimeters of qwib-qwib batter, and exited out of the other side carrying with it chunks of scrap and body parts. The shot, however, did not come in time to save the Shiram from a withering barrage of turian fire. Its reactor went critical in a bright flash as the light of over eighty quarian souls were extinguished.
"Turian frigate destroyed as is the Shiram, Vice Admiral. No survivors from the Shiram." the AI said. Its hologram, clearly a male human, turned to Yuhi, "We'll get revenge for this injustice to your people, Ambassador."
Yuhi walked back into her crash seat and slumped her way into it. They can't be dead, she thought. Her marine bodyguard tensed up, but she didn't say a word.
The ship shook again. "Another corvette down!" another human yelled out. The monitor displayed the fiery end of some decent number of turian crew as the Everest's shell gored the tiny vessel, nearly vaporizing it. The venting atmosphere of the ship threw shards of metal and pieces of turian crew spherically outwards from the impact site.
"Two corvettes just did a precision jump behind us, sir!" another yelled out.
The admiral reacted with machine-like efficiency. "Target the port-side corvette with a salvo of archers. Split the longswords up across both of the remaining enemy ships at aft. Charge the MACs. Pilots, try swinging by the bow for a kill shot. Tyr, you have control of the main guns."
"Archers away!" A monitor showed hundreds of missiles streaming at one of the frigates. Point-defense lasers started chewing through the swarm of seekers though it was nowhere near enough. Dozens upon dozens missiles slammed into kinetic barriers as a flight of human fighters descended upon the turian ship.
As the comms on the bridge opened up with fighter pilot chatter, the turian ship at the gate fled from the fight and back through the mass relay. Yuhi knew turians never ran-this was a tactical decision to inform turian command.
"Red group on approach!" "Bugeye just got hit!" "Their point defense lasers are weak as shit!" "Armor heating up!" "The big fucker's fast!" "Guns ain't doin' shit!" The main guns of the human fighters had next to no effect on the kinetic barriers, but the salvo of missiles from the Everest knocked the barriers of one of the turian frigates. That was enough. "Bogey five is on fire!" "Escape pods are being jettisoned!" "Everest, pour the helix point-defense guns into it!" Moments later, one red dot became a yellow one, then disappeared off of the map entirely as the humans continued pouring a deluge of projectiles onto the vessel.
"Cole here," the admiral talked into the pedestal next to his chair, "see if you can move the last one past the main guns. We'll take it out."
"Roger that!" responded a pilot, "all fighters converge on bogey four!"
The admiral's idea ended up not being necessary. Between the volume of fire from the fighters, the ship overheating from constant usage of its point-defense GARDIAN lasers, and the unending barrage of missiles, the little turian ship eventually bowed out of the battle with an explosion.
The Admiral addressed his crew almost immediately afterwards. "Good job everyone. Thanks, Tyr." The holographic AI bowed as the admiral continued, "get started on damage reports and bring up engineering." A redheaded human male popped up on a monitor. "Lieutenant MacQuinn, what's the ETA on the drives."
The engineer scratched the red fur on his head, "well, I think we awt-ta get it to ya in 14 hours."
The admiral turned to the quarians on the bridge. "How long before they bring a larger fleet here?"
Yuhi snapped herself out of her quiet mourning, "umm, maybe five hours? They have a colony only a few relays away."
"You hear that, Lieutenant? You have four hours. This is absolute priority. If you need anything, you have it. You," the admiral pointed to another bridge officer, "Get a flight of pelicans to search for Quarian survivors only. No turians. Tyr," he turned to the AI, "open a comm to the quarian mining vessel, the Xaavum."
"Wait," Yuhi stood up from daze, "why not rescue the turians?"
Cole turned to Yuhi. "Food shortage," he callously replied.
"We have to pick them up," the quarian ambassador yelled out, "it's the right thing to do! If my ship were blown up, I'd want to get rescued!"
"My ship, my orders. If they wanted to get rescued, they shouldn't have shot at us without provocation." Cole turned back to the monitor he was previously glancing at, ending the conversation. "Tyr, that connection?"
"Admiral, this is Captain Hula'Sunar vas Xaavum." The quarian captain was grimacing. "Thank you for your assistance."
"Not a problem, captain. Listen, when we're up and operational, we'll go first and cover your escape. You can follow us and warp out."
"Admiral Preston'Cole vas Everest, your ship is so much more important. The Xaavum, well, it's just a freighter but onboard, you hold the future of both of our people. We'll fight to the death for you."
The human admiral stood there for a moment, tapping his thumb and middle finger against each other for a moment. "Alright Captain, transfer all of your nonessential personnel and gear to the Everest. I think I have a plan."
Minutes felt like hours and hours felt like days to the silently grieving captain. Yuhi's back was positioned fully against the worn, black material of the crash seat as her head rested against the right side of the semi-circular headrest. She hadn't moved much from her seat since the Shiram exploded and instead just kept her gaze fixed on the in-system monitor.
A depressing blue background overlayed a series of yellow lines indicating orbital trajectories, a few red circles from assorted celestial bodies, and blinking white marks showing turian crew that had been spaced from the recent battle. One or two had since stopped blinking and turned into the dull gray of space debris. Oxygen tanks had limits and theirs had been reached.
Yuhi imagined herself floating through the void, the backdrop of the stars lighting through her tinted facial mask, finding it increasingly difficult to breathe- how miserable such a death would be. At least the crew of- no, her family- on the Shiram died quickly.
She laboriously moved her head to look at Mal. He had been leaning forward, elbows on his thighs, head looking at the floor. Him and Liru had been close for many years. Yuhi could only imagine what was going through his mind.
Had her decisions up to this point been correct, she wondered to herself. Would it truly be worth to unleash such a heartless species, such monsters, on the galactic community even if it may benefit the quarians in the short term? What about the long term? Even after the assistance from the admiralty board, would these humans just let the quarians suffocate in space as well?
"Sir," the black-armored soldier, Jon, from the trip to the migrant fleet stepped forward to the admiral, "permission to speak freely?"
"Go ahead, Gunny." Admiral Cole didn't look up from his datapad as he responded.
"Sir, what you said onboard the Neema about us being the last humans." Jon took his right hand as scratched the back of his neck, "How likely do you think that is?"
The admiral looked up and met Jon's gaze. "Don't cross your fingers, son," he coldly responded.
"Sir."
It's for the best, the ambassador silently thought to herself. Yuhi's mind raced through images and solcitudes of geth, the quarian-built homicidal AI, and the rachni, an insectoid species hell-bent on annihilating all life besides itself. No, the last thing the galaxy needs is another galactic horror.
"Admiral," a human officer called out, "engineering just called. Slipspace drive is up."
The admiral stood at the bridge with his two asari-like legs in an upside-down V shape and his hands behind his back, one hand holding the other. "Good. Let me know when the fusion drives are operational. Ambassador," the admiral turned to face the seated quarian, "I need your head in the game right now."
She quickly looked up. "I'm fine," she defiantly responded.
"Good. These relays," Cole turned to the holographic display table in the center of the bridge, arms still at rest behind him, "Tyr, galactic map." The table in the center of the bridge changed to display a crisp picture of the milky tones of the galaxy with the known mass relay network overlaid on top of it. "Zoom in on where we are." The map did as it was ordered. "Good. We're here," he pointed to the coordinates before placing his arm back, "right at the edge of this spiral arm." A blinking green box was overlaid atop a blue node representing a secondary relay. Bright, white lines sprouted from the point across the edge of the "So this a secondary relay, correct?"
"That's right, admiral" Yuhi lifted herself out of her seat, "secondary relays connect to a small network of other secondary relays spanning a few hundred light years or so each, and the secondary-prime relay is usually in a system with one or more prime relays, which connect to each other. Those are usually a thousand or more light years apart."
Cole rumbled a guttural acknowledgement. "The system over, this 'prime relay.' We predict that it will hop over the edge of this galactic arm and right into the next one, but first we need to get there. What can we expect, monitoring-wise, in the system over?"
"There's going to be a sensor system dropped by prior turian patrols, of course, but we saw no communications buoy. Those are expensive. Patrols just drop by and pick up the sensor data rather than have it relayed in real-time."
"And just to confirm, that's located on the opposite prime relay, the active one going back to citadel space?"
Yuhi confirmed the information as the admiral's second-in-command entered the room. The admiral turned back, satisfied. Mass relays were often located past any major planetary bodies in a region known as the Kuiper belt. "That's about 9 light hours from our relay to their sensor. We'll be long gone before they even see us."
"Unless they have a fleet at the relay, sir," the admiral's XO corrected.
"That's what the backup plan is for."
"Vice Admiral, sir," a human woman with black hair and muted brown skin called out, "engineering just called. Fusion drives are back online!"
"Tyr, ship-wide comm." Admiral Preston Cole vas Everest stood near the center of the bridge, paced for a bit, then looked around at his charges. "This is Admiral Preston Cole. We are about to embark on a mission to go through unknown space and find our way back home. Battlestations, everyone, until we're in slipspace towards Earth. When we're all back home at a bar, the first round is on me." The admiral paused as a cheer erupted for a short moment. "All crew, prepare for hard burn in two minutes."
The Marines guarding the bridge door pulled hidden compartments from the bridge walls out to reveal more of the same black crash chairs present throughout the ship. Everyone frantically moved to strap themselves and their belongings into place.
"Take us to the mass relay at maximum speed," Cole announced, "Captain Hula, have Xaavum follow."
A chorus of aye ayes and yes sirs echoed out as a constant, gentle rumble from the massive engines and inertial compensators reverberated through the massive dreadnought. The holotable in the center showed the lumbering column of metal that was the Everest approaching the solar system's relay. The map showed the relay being brought closer- slowly, at first, then faster and faster. In a minute or two, the signal was sent and the relay's rings began spinning. Electricity danced on the intricate protrusions of the human vessel before it was flung a few hundred light years into a new territory.
"Contacts!" yelled out a sensor officer.
Not a second later, the sensor projection lit up as the bridge lights dimmed to an expectant crimson. "We're seeing three-no, over four hundred contacts." The AI on the holographic podium glanced up at the admiral, still looking ahead at the tactical map with the Everest at the center facing a sea of red dots. "Two cruisers, two hundred thirty two frigates, and one hundred ninety nine corvettes. All of apparent turian make, Vice Admiral."
"We're going to plan B. Helm, engines to one hundred twenty percent. Captain Hula," the admiral stood straight up from his chair, knocked his boots together, and brought his right hand up to his temple in a rapid motion, "it has been an honor."
The quarian freighter captain looked down for a moment before looking back at the monitor. "Keelah se'lai, Admiral Preston'Cole vas Everest, and may the ancestors guide you."
Unlike human slipspace drives, mass effect-based faster than light travel happens in real space. Complex calculations are required to ensure that no major bodies of matter are between the ship and its target destination and, when those calculations are complete, a bubble of spacetime extends over the vessel as it careens through the void of space at blisteringly quick velocities.
The crew of the Xaavum mining freighter, however, chose to ignore those calculations entirely. When the freighter went to FTL, it ran into a major body of matter known as a turian cruiser (what the humans were calling a frigate). The remnants of the Xaavum, without an active mass effect field, now slowed to a speed just under the speed of light in the form of a shower of extremely energetic constituent particles. Those same particles then ran into another turian cruiser, and then finally into two frigates, annihilating the freighter and all of the targets entirely, crew and all.
A burst of ferocious acceleration from the Everest threw the human admiral back into his crash seat. "Push through the hole. Fire the MAC at anything that gets in our way."
Turian frigates, about the same size as the Shiram, moved to fill the gap while the rest of the fleet turned to begin firing. The main cannon fired once, then again a second later. Explosions lit up the monitors in the bridge. "Two corvettes down, but we have a third in the way." The ship started shaking from the volume of fire pouring down on it and alarms started blaring.
The admiral didn't skip a beat. "Drive through it. Adjust azimuth to face the primary gate out of the galactic arm." Emergency thrusters at the aft of the ship fired throwing the occupants of the Everest into the left side of the crash chairs.
Objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. In this case, the outside force was a relatively miniscule turian frigate which conveniently slowed the angular and forward velocity of the hulking, human-made vessel. "Starboard-side decks 27 through 30 are losing pressure! Starboard-side superstructure reporting buckling! Port-side decks 10 through 15 are reporting atmospheric leaks! We're taking massive damage!" an officer yelled out.
Plan B had been to place the Everest right in the center of a turian armada. The turian's heavier ships couldn't fire on the human super dreadnought without worry of friendly fire or return fire from the Everest's terrifying main cannons, so they didn't.
"Engaging slipspace drive!" yelled out the pilot.
Space itself seemed to warp and time itself seemed to slow for just a moment. A glittering, blue sheen rippled on the surfaces of the bridge and its occupants and a split second later, it was gone. The monitors connected to the outside cameras turned pitch black and, what seemed like a minute later, turned back to their usual starry selves.
"50 kilometers from the gate!" yelled the pilot, referring to his slipspace exit. The human-made FTL went through matter like it didn't even exist- stars, planets, ships, they may have all as well been motes of star dust.
"Good job. Burn hard for it. Engines to full."
"Full speed ahead!" yelled the pilot.
"Sensor contacts, sir!" warned the AI, "above and below the solar plane!" The galactic map updated to match the new information, "they're firing at our engines!"
"Evasive maneuvers. Fire forward-movement emergency thrusters."
"Firing!" responded the pilot. A split second later, a jolt of acceleration crushed everyone back into the crash seats well past the limits of the ships' inertial compensators. Yuhi's arm fell back into the arm of the chair, possibly breaking it. Definitely bruised, at least.
"Activating the relay!" shouted the pilot.
"Engine cowling has been breached!" yelled out the alien called Jackson, "main engine two is overheating! Cutting engine power down to seventy-five percent!"
"Relay activated, entering in three, two, one!"
Every monitor went blank for a moment and the system map flickered before coming back up to an entirely new display.
"Contacts?" asked the admiral. The screen started populating with dozens of green dots, not red ones like in the previous systems.
"Sir," Tyr began, "I'm reading human-pattern identify friend-foe signatures. Most ships in orbit are UNSC. There's a defense garrison in orbit, sir, fourteen ships. Another ship off the port-bow belonging something called 'Joint Species Alliance.' It's next to an ONI base. Colony is called Shanxi. It's human, sir."
"Did our comms make it?"
"Bidirectional? Only tertiary comms, sir, so just radio." someone responded.
"How's the FTL?"
"Only a single charge coil is functioning, Vice Admiral, sir. It'll take us about five minutes to go to FTL."
"Start spinning up the FTL and burn hard towards the planetoid this gate is orbiting. We'll go for a slingshot to gather speed. Open a comm, system-wide, unencrypted, maximum power."
"Open, sir."
"This is Vice Admiral Preston Cole of the UNSC, onboard the UNSC Everest. We have a hostile alien fleet on our tail coming through that gate. Requesting immediate assistance. We have friendly first contact VIPs onboard and our slipspace charging coils are damaged." Seconds later, dozens of turian ships began streaming into the system.
Author's note:
A special thanks to DragoLord19D for beta-reading this chapter. If anyone else is interested, let me know.
First-off: reviews. I want to thank people tremendously for their constructive criticism, questions, and general interest. Hopefully this is better written- more descriptive, better flow, that kind of thing.
Secondly, I'm really happy that everyone seems to like the story. It's fun writing it and even more fun cracking open the ol' college textbooks, calculating differences between spaceships, and getting into the minds of the people that would have to reconcile these differences on the fly. This chapter took a while as I had to dust off the ever-relevant "Quantitative Astronomy" by Thomas Swihart, a fantastic if terse book on things like astronomical time, coordinate systems, and general back-of-the-envelope calculations which are forever useful. Surely a book like that would be required reading for any starship captain and their crew. If considering a career switch to interstellar explorer, I recommend giving it a good once-over, or maybe even a twice-over.
Now, the next chapter will take some time to get out the door. I've been having a lot of trouble writing space battles that don't sound like simulation log files or chess instructions. If anyone has any recommendations for books, short stories, etc that have interesting spaceship to spaceship combat, let me know through PM or review so I can engage in that most sincerest form of flattery known as imitation. In the meantime, I'll write the future chapters during downtime.
Some took skepticism to my "lack of genetic diversity" claim from the previous chapter. While I have no idea if this is valid or not, I'm basing my numbers on "Estimation of a genetically viable population for multigenerational interstellar voyaging: Review and data for project Hyperion" by C. Smith who puts a lower bound of 14,000 people for safety. Marathon-class heavy cruisers have complements of 1,000 people (unclear if that is or is not considering marine compliments; Halo: Fall of Reach pg 242) so the Everest, at 25% larger, must not have a dramatically larger crew. I've been keeping it at around 1,400 in my mind, so an order of magnitude less than the lower-bound specified within the paper.
Additionally, the Everest's AI has been active for some time now- assume at least a year- and inevitably, rampancy will set in. To search for new life-supporting stars may take years and years, meaning the AI will stop being active at some point and the Everest will have to become generational, the crew will have to cycle in and out of cryo, and maintenance nightmares will set in. The Everest's best bet, Cole believes, is to find humanity, or whatever's left of them, and see where they all stand.
Finally, and extremely related to the point related to college textbooks, several calculable space things happened here but I like to talk a bit about Cole's plan B maneuver, where that came from, and why it could be even remotely plausible given how the various technologies works in canon.
We begin with special relativity: nothing moves faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Full stop. What does that mean?
The best explanation starts with an example. Let's say I've got a great way to launch satellites into space at 95% the speed of light. The first thing that I launch is another launcher that launches much smaller satellites at 95% the speed of light. So now we have two objects: one is the first launched object that goes at 95% the speed of light, and another is an object that's hauling ass at 190% the speed of light. Or is it?
It's not. The second object, relative to you, is moving at ~99.9% the speed of light (I'll be honest here and say that I didn't calculate the reference frame changes but the example is still sound, but I'm a few decimal points off) because the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit of everything. It's also why we can't just strap big honkin' rockets to a pod and drive our way over to Proxima Centauri from Earth: no matter how fast we go, it would still take us a minimum of 4+ years! So, why is that speed limit thing happening?
High school graduates may be familiar with the question for classical kinetic energy: mass times velocity squared divided by 2. Special relativity states that nothing moves faster than the speed of light. One of the adjustments that special relativity makes is something called the Lorentz factor, which actually scales the right side of that kinetic energy question relative to your speed. When moving really slowly in a cosmic sense, such as driving some exotic racecar an average of 200 kilometers per hour on the autobahn, the factor is very close to one. However, when your speed approaches the speed of light, it takes more and more energy to increase your speed. The end result is that you can never actually reach the speed of light, even with an infinite amount of energy at your disposal. One way to think about the effect is that your mass just keeps increasing and increasing the faster you move, preventing you from ever reaching the speed of light. This leads to the unpopular but technically effective weight-loss program of "standing perfectly still," but I digress.
Then we introduce the mass effect and its implications into special relativity. A mass effect field works by increasing or decreasing mass. The field can't just make your ship a few kilos lighter- as long as your mass is above zero, the equation is still asymptotic and you can never actually go above the cosmic speed limit of light. No, it would make sense that faster than light travel through the mass effect is achieved by reducing mass to below 0, also known as "negative mass," which creates utterly bizarre effects like runaway motion. Negative mass is used in certain exotic, experimentally unproven (obviously) hypothesis for things like wormholes or the Alcubierre drive.
FTL in the Mass Effect universe, however, doesn't use such mechanics. It's hinted at that mass effect drives propel ships faster than the speed of light in real-space which is mind-boggling to even think about to the mildly trained physicist that I am, but I try my best, damn it. When moving faster than light under a mass effect field, you get kinetic energy that's both imaginary and negative and I just don't even understand what that means (and the universe might not either), so I just took it as lots and lots of regular energy and moved on with my life, and the story (this is where I raise a toast to the fiction part of science fiction).
Particles with imaginary mass are called tachyons, by the way, so feel free to read up on those and ruin approximately 20% of Star Trek plotlines for yourselves forever. For the more math-savvy reader, I recommend "An Introduction to the Theory of Tachyons" by R. Vieira (arXiv:1112.4187) and "Classical Tachyons and Possible Applications" by E. Recami.
Pivoting wildly, cosmic rays. We talked about a possible mechanism for cosmic ray production last chapter called "diffuse shock acceleration," and the briefly about the properties of cosmic rays. When these cosmic rays slam into our earthly atmosphere, they break apart into more and more particles. This cascade of particles is called called a cosmic [ray] shower. Each level of the shower generates more and more particles with each moving more and more slowly until those particles impact the ground. This mechanism right here is Einstein's famous mass-energy relation in action. Experiments like Super-Tiger and the Pierre Auger Observatory are examples of experiments performing indirect measurements on cosmic rays by measuring cosmic ray showers. This is also one of the functions our atmosphere serves in protecting our fragile, fleshy, human bodies from deadly space radiation and part of why a colony on Mars may be so difficult (nevermind getting there).
But regularmother, what does that have to do with anything? Great question! I treated the QCS Xaavum as a block of matter traveling with extremely high energy in real space and Cole, a clever commander and brilliant physicist in his own right (calculating new slipspace travel mechanisms, for instance) happened to know about cosmic ray showers. Putting the two together lead to some pretty explosive results!
