"I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way."

-John Paul Jones

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At the very edge of the Shanxi system, a bright light flared into existence for only the barest of moments from the view of the planet. To a casual observer, it merely appeared as if some star had twinkled brighter than usual or perhaps it was a shooting star if viewed from the planet's surface. The truth though was far more ominous and momentus than such commonplace events.

No, the shining light was the flare of Cherenkov radiation as dozens of human vessels re-entered normal space, their warp drives activating to shunt them out of their bubbles of accelerated space and into the space at the very edge of the Shanxi system, the icy blue light of the radiation remaining only long enough to show the ships in silhouette before it faded away.

Amongst the ships that had entered the Shanxi system were the hulking masses of six battleships towards the front of the fleet, each one an enormous two and a quarter kilometers in length and armed to the teeth. Further back in the formation, protected by screens of frigates and destroyers sat a trio of dedicated carriers, all even bigger than the battleships at an even three kilometers and filled with hordes of firestorm fighters and legions of SHIV fighter-bombers.

Over shadowing even the carriers though was the massive, gracefully curved hull of humanity's first super battleship: the Last Order.

Sitting at the front of the fleet, nestled in the mass of its smaller cousins, the Last Order dwarfed everything around it at a staggering fifty-eight hundred meters. Protected with over a dozen meters of single plate Vahlenite armor and barriers strong enough to shrug off a full speed collision, the vessel out massed anything else in the fleet. With fourteen Fusion Lance turrets, each the size of a destroyer, dozens of blaster launcher turrets, hundreds of point defense turrets, and her own fleet of SHIV fighter-bombers, the Last Order technically required no escort, but for this mission she would have company.

Humanity had been attacked, and those who had so brazenly violated the peace would be punished for their crimes.

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Victus sighed as he sat down in his command chair, taking a sip of his caffeinated gotten before looking at the main tactical display's view of fleet and the colony below.

Normally, he reflected, the Turian military moved in and suppressed their opponents in a single sweep of power, devastating them to the point where the former enemy was forced to rely upon the Turian hierarchy to survive. This had been the case in more than a few of the incidents where the Turians had taken on a client state, but this current fight had been anything but the norm.

Instead of the usual of what had become the norm for him, sitting down and reading over the status reports of the last eight hours, Victus found himself struggling to stay in his command chair as his frigate rocked and heaved beneath him. The sudden motion was only accentuated as alarms began to blare a moment later, the standard lighting of the ship shifting to the red illumination of emergency lighting.

Struggling to take status of the situation, Victus looked up to the main tactical display as bridge officers shouted in the background to see warning markers appear in three separate spots as ships began to appear around the Turian fleet. The ship board VI was already registering nearly a hundred vessels in each group with massive heat signatures nestled in the center of each group some forty thousand kilometers away.

Even as he struggled to find his voice to give an order, Admiral Trenus's voice came over the fleet comm line ordering every vessel in the fleet to fall into formation and retreat towards the relay. Silence followed this order across the comm lines and the vessels of the fleet. Before quiet acknowledgements followed scant moments later.

Struggling to swallow his pride, Victus tried to voice his acceptance of the order but found his mouth dry. Swallowing, Victus finally spoke as she quietly ordered "Helm get us out of here."

Silence met his statement before the engineering officer spoke up saying, "Sir, we're dead in space. That hit we just took destroyed the engines. They're completely gone."

Victus could only nod in quiet disbelief as he watched the tactical display. Before his very eyes on the map of local space, Victus could see the main bulk of the fleet beginning to accelerate towards the Mass Relay, leaving behind over two dozen of their number in orbit above the planet. As he read the data on the display Victis noted his own frigate amongst those left behind in the sudden first strike by the aliens, other vessels in similar situations and a few nothing more than floating clouds of metal particles and gas.

"Sensors, route all of our data to the fleet, keep them appraised of anything we see until they leave," Victus said in quiet resignation. The Turian Hierarchy was running, something nigh unheard of in Citadel history was occurring before him as he watched and waited, giving a brief order to have the ship's crew prepare for possible boarders.

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Captain Hackett sat in the command chair of the Last Order, watching from halfway out the solar system as the alien fleet dropped and ran in terror. The alpha strike he had launched using his three fleets had done exactly what he'd wanted and given the aliens a big bloody nose before sending them into a full retreat towards the relay.

Hackett had purposefully jumped the fleets in with a gaping hole in their formation pointing right towards the Mass Relay, giving the alien fleet only one direction to run as his ahips closed in around them. Now that they were running in a predicable path, he had control of the battlefield, able to make the aliens react rather than act on initiative.

With calm professionalism, Hackett watched as the battleships opened fire, their two hundred meter long fusion lances impacting on the back of the enemy fleet and disabling a dozen vessels as their engines melted under the attacks. Another seven detonated mere instants after impact, their cores breeched and going up in nebula like fire balls.

In the far back of each fleet, the dedicated carriers entered the fray as hundreds if not thousands of SHIV single ships lifted off their skins like a cloud of dust. The seven meter long SHIV fighters rapidly began to form up into wedges before rushing out into the fray, the computers aboard the friendly vessels telling them what paths to take in order to avoid friendly fire.

As the fighters raced into the alien formation and began to strafe the alien ships while others began engage enemy fighters, Hackett gave the required order to the men at the Last Order's helm before looking at the front view screen as the space around them disappeared-

-And was replaced with the sight of the oncoming alien fleet, only a scant fifteen thousand kilometers distant. With grim determination, Hackett looked to his crew and gave the necessary command.

"Open fire."

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For a brief moment, perhaps a full second, the super battleship Last Order was silent as it sat in space, interposed between the fleeing Turians and the relay. While the Turian fleet did not halt, there was clear hesitation in their ranks as some ships slowed and others diverted to avoid a collision with the mammoth vessel ahead of them.

Then the Last Order came alive.

Pointed head on at the approaching fleet, the eight forward active turrets began to glow with venomous green light as they charged, each one traversing to track a different target in the approaching fleet. Even as they prepared to fire, a cloud of dust seemed to fall from the hull of the titanic vessel, drifting free in space before suddenly rocketing forward and swirling into formations as the dust revealed itself to be a mass of SHIV fighter/bombers, hurtling into the heart of the enemy lines.

As the Turian ships began to bob and weave, guardian lasers flaring into life as brief points of light and heat to attack the SHIVs, the turrets across the Last Order's hull reached critical mass. In flares of eezo activateion comparable to the jump of a frigate, each gun fired their plasma blasts at four and a half times the speed of light.

At a range of a mere fifteen thousand kilometers, it wasn't a battle, it was a turkey shoot.

Each massive form of plasma hit their target ship in center mass, splashing over the vessel and melting them away as the metal and ceramics in the Turian armor struggled piteously to hold against the tide of fire. Four ships detonated instantly, theirs cores breached from direct hits while four others flashed with fire as the oxygen aboard combusted with everything on the vessel under the frightening levels of heat, killing the ships before those aboard could even register what was happening.

Still the fleet of Turians closed on the Order, determined to make it past the ship and into FTL to run to the Mass Relay. As the Turian fleet moved around the order, their numbers moving like water around a rocket, pockets of armor across the great vessel opened, revealing a hideous green light before hundreds of blaster launcher rounds flew from their launch ports, casting both the Turians and the Last Order in an eerie green light as they made an end run on the Turian vessels.

While these blaster launchers were a great deal smaller than their planet borne cousins, they were still several dozen times more powerful than an info try mounted shells flew through the gap between the ships, pinwheeling around SHIVs that darted through the target zone before impacting and detonating across hulls of the Turian navy.

Sixty ships went up like flares, their armor sometimes successfully staving away the heat of the plasma based attacks for a single hit before cracking and splitting apart under the weapon's shock wave or secondary attacks that were impossible to prevent. Their interiors burned and bodies spilled out into space as the destroyed ships tumbled about the vacuum.

The Turians didn't take the hits lying down though. Dozens of disrupt or torpedoes flocked towards the Last Order, only to be cut to pieces as powerful point defense lasers sprang to life, their crimson beams cutting the missiles to bits or outright destroying them. Mass Accelerator slugs were launched as well, from broadsides and by those ships that had yet to pass the Last Order and were thus pointed at her. The relitivistic projectiles impacted in flares of silver light as they triggered the kinetic barriers aboard the super battleships before they were vaporized by their own kinetic energy being turned into heat.

And then the Turian fleet was gone, long past the Last Order as they went to FTL and fled to the Relay.

But even that wouldn't save them.

As the Turians dropped out of FTL to access the relay, six vessels exploded as plasma impacted them in the stern, vaporizing their engines and melting through to the Mass Effect core. And then the Turiwn fleet disappeared, the Relay scooping them up and sheparding them to safety, two-thirds of their number nothing but burnt, melted hulks, scattered clouds of debris, and dead in space vessels, trapped above Shanxi.

There were troops too, several thousand of them in fact, still trapped on the colony's surface with no hope of escape. But they weren't the concern of the ships, no they were the concern of the thousands of X-COM soldiers preparing to launch for the surface.

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And there's the new chapter, filled almost to the lip with naval fighting. Next chapter will be the post battle cool down and the deployment of soldiers to the disabled ships and the surface. Also will be X-COM, finding out who they're fighting and preparing a counter attack.

So cheers everybody.