I want to prevent this story "curb-stomp fest" for the UNSC against the races of Mass Effect. I hope you can respect this. SO I hope you can answer these 4 questions.

1) What do you want to see in chapter 3 and from whose point of view?

2) How long chapters would you prefer, shorter or longer than 1 and 2? (First one is 7 pages and this one is 9 pages long)

3) What time difference between chapters would be frequent enough? (Example once a week, twice per month,…etc)

4) Would you prefer to see more combat or non combat focused story?

Date: January 16, 2164

Location: New Earth, System Alliance Military High command

"So, mister illusive man, you are the leader of Cerberus, is that correct?" spoke the female admiral among the group of five individuals. The room, in which they were sitting in, however had seats for nine people.

In the middle of the room was a holographic projection of a human male with gray hair and unusual cyan eyes, they looked almost like they were synthetic instead of biological. The illusive man drew a sweet Williams cigar, light it and puffed smoke "I'm THE Illusive Man and yes, I am leader of Cerberus" The Illusive Man then pressed on a tab that he was holding and a blueprint of a ship appeared on the holographic projection instead of him "As you know, our combined raid on the Turian world Magna was a success"

"What exactly does this blueprint have to do with Magna raid?"

"During the raid, Admiral McNatt, a Cerberus fire team managed to infiltrate the Magna shipyards. It was there, that we recovered specs on the new Volus dreadnought"

"Volus? I was not aware that they have dreadnoughts, our reports state that they rely on bombing fleet, with which they support allied ground troops" said the female admiral who spoke first. "And even if they do build dreadnoughts, why should we worry? They are not in war with us like Turians or Batarians are."

"This particular dreadnought class is designed to replace the Turian Menae-class dreadnought." The picture of the Volus dreadnought then zoomed on its weaponry "As you can, clearly, see, its main mass accelerator gun is much more powerful than any other capital ship weapon, with exception of the Destiny Ascension, but not by much" The image then zoomed out and focused on the dreadnought's broadside weapons "But that's not all, this type of dreadnought has its broadside mass accelerators build on same specs as the main gun"

"This,…this is almost impossible to believe" spoke the voice of the young male admiral "The citadel council wouldn't simply sit back and watch, while the Volus are building kilometer long ships armed with weapons that can very well alter the balance of power in the known galaxy!"

"Ah, you must be admiral Seaborn, the new addition to the Alliance military leadership. Well, to answer your question, since the Volus technically are not member of the citadel, therefor they are not bound by the "Treaty of Farixen" and the one, who ordered the design for it, is one of the Turian specters" answered the Illusive Man to Seaborn and tapped ash from his sweet William's cigar into ashtray.

"And this Spectre wouldn't happen to be the same Spectre that exposed our Artificial Intelligence to the council" spoke Seaborn once again "Which I still can't believe that we actually made research for a sentient artificial intelligence and so far, no one told me where exactly we got one in the FIRST place!"

"That, admiral Seaborn is classified data, and you will not ask this question ever again, if you know what is good for you!" spoke the elderly admiral, who thanks to age augmentation is almost 90 years old but still in service, easily making him the oldest member of System Alliance military.

"Admiral Seaborn does state an interesting question, even Cerberus doesn't know this information, and we do rival Salarian STG group in intelligence gathering" spoke the Illusive Man and continued "But this is not the point of this meeting"

"The point of this meeting is that new dreadnought. Does it have a weakness that we can expose?"

"None that we can determine so far, however we know where they are building it and their defenses are,…surprisingly undermanned, considering what are they meant to defend"

"So, if we attack now, we could destroy it before it becomes a threat"

"Or admiral Seaborn, we capture it and use its weapons against our enemies"

"But at the same time, we need something to counter it" spoke admiral McNatt as she took a closer look at the dreadnought weapons, all classified under codeword "Thanix cannon" and frowned "I find it ironic that it carries same name than our rocket artillery we just start to deploy on the battlefield"

"It's quite possible that it's only a coincidence, or are you implying that we have a spy in our systems?"

"It won't hurt to release couple of virtual intelligence units to scan for any unregistered ones" said The Illusive Man and changed the blueprint from "Thanix dreadnought" to the blueprint of a cannon "This here, admirals, is a prototype of a Cerberus planetary defense cannon" the image then zoomed in at cannon barrel "It's designed to fire a 1000 kilogram heavy shell at 4% of light speed, and such, much faster and heavier round than those mounted on dreadnought class"

"The sheer power needed to perform this feat is so much, it would take almost as much Element Zero as to build a frigate wolf pack. How do you suggest we power it? And, because its only a defensive weapon, we cannot use it in any offensive!" spoke admiral Seaborn with slight hint of anger in his voice "It would be better, if we would somehow manage to mount this cannon on dreadnoughts for extra mobility and more versatility!"

The Illusive Man only let out a long column of smoke from his mouth and replied "If we would put it on a dreadnought, it would lose power after each shot, not to mention that the dreadnought would have to be almost 3 kilometer long, so with material needed to build this one, we could build three Alliance dreadnoughts. But if we put it on solid ground, it will use a ground based power plant to power up the cannon and fire it. This way we will save on Eezo"

"What would the rate of fire be? Did you have any theories on that?" asked McNatt with clear curiosity and approval in her voice. Seaborn on other hand was nervously tapping on desk, clearly not thinking much about the cannon as a defensive weapon. The other two admirals, who remained quiet so far, also show interest on their faces. The elderly admiral however shows no interest to cannon at all, almost as if he didn't care about it.

"Due to the weight and speed of the round, it has a slower recharge rate than other mass accelerator cannons. The only existing prototypes we built so far had a 27 second recharge before they fired another shell"

"So you tested it? On what?" spoke McNatt once again as the Illusive Man switched to a video recording of the cannon opening fire and then focused on its target, a Batarian dreadnought with three cruiser escorts. The shell propelled at the speed of 12,000 km/s then impacted on the dreadnought. Its kinetic barriers flashed and were gone as fast as they appeared resulting in the dreadnought exploding. As a added bonus to that explosion, the cruisers which escorted it were also destroyed by wreckage following the massive ship explosion. There was a clear sign of amazement on Alliance admirals, even on admiral Seaborn as well as on the elderly admiral.

"As you can see, these cannons can deliver devastating damage on their targets, as well those close to it. Our V.I.'s and engineers have calculated that it would take about 36 months to put one of these cannons on each human colony, I belive we should focus on building the defensive cannons on the planets that currently hold the most value to us."

"Tell me "Illusive Man", does this cannon have any nickname or codeword?" asked Seaborn with a voice that hinted, he means it more as a joke than a serious question.

"We simply dubbed it, "Reaper", since it will reap the aggressors against mankind" replied the Illusive Man with a voice that shows both seriousness and humor in his voice at the same time.

XXXXX

Date: February 2, 2164

Location: Citadel, embassies, council chambers

The Asari councilor Tevos walked inside the chamber where both the Salarian and Turian councilors have been waiting for her. This chamber is bug free and Salarian virtual intelligence is always monitoring for any sign of espionage bugs.

"Councilor Tevos, glad that you found some time to join us" spoke Sparatus the Turian councilor. "Now could you tell us what this meeting is about?"

Councilor Tevos brought out a tablet and slide it towards Sparatus's side of the table "This new type of dreadnought being develop for Turian military by Volus. Its size is over a kilometer, which is against the Treaty of Farixen and you know that perfectly well"

Sparatus looked shocked at Tevos, clearly he did not expect her to know about it. The Salarian councilor picks up the tablet from the table and examines the specifications of the dreadnought. "An interesting design. If this capital ship would be ever built - now that the council knows of it -, could easily become the mightiest ship inside council space. These "Magnetic-Hydrodynamic Weapons", codenamed "Thanix" are much stronger than mass accelerator weapons. Where did Turians learn of them?"

"That is a interesting question councilor Valern. I too would like to know that" spoke councilor Tevos.

"The design for Thanix was provided by Turian specter Arterius, where he got it I was not told" admitted Sparatus and looked at Tevos "We need this new Kwunu-class to fight the human System Alliance more effectively. They began to utilize prohibited nuclear weapons, and our kinetic barriers are neither able to protect the crew from its radiation, nor can it protect against electromagnetic pulse those weapons release upon detonation"

"This brings me to our second point of this meeting. The war against the humans has been raging on for almost four years. You destroyed or captured nine colonies and killed almost a million of human soldiers and decimated their fleet. But, you arent the only ones scoring, this war is not one sided. You yourself have taken high casualties. If my reports are correct you lost six colonies, and 16 dreadnoughts have been either destroyed or damaged beyond repairs. Councilor, this severely weakens not only the Turian Hierarchy but the citadel forces as well."

"And what do you propose we do councilor Tevos? Are we supposed to retreat and let the System Alliance win? That will most definitively make us look weak in the eyes of Terminus Systems"

Councilor Valern then spoke "The alternative would is rather simple, stop the war by achieving a peace treaty with the humans"

Sparatus simply shook his head and spoke "Impossible, we achieved peace after we first met humans and fought them, only to start fighting again three years later when we learned about their artificial intelligence and after their attack on our fleets with nuclear weapons!"

"This time, we would ensure that humans do not possess any weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear weapons as well as any A.I.s" spoke Valern and was about to continue when they were interrupted by a beeping over their communicators "Please councilor Valern, hold your thoughts" spoke Tevos as she tapped on the table. On a small holographic projector an image of an asari assistant appeared and spoke. "I apologize for the interruption councilors but the Batarian ambassador would like to speak with you as soon as you are able, its about something important, I'm sorry, but he did not specify what exactly he would like to talk about"

"Thank you Esara, tell him we will see him once we are done with our meeting" spoke councilor Tevos and as soon as Esara bow in respect she cut the feed and turned to Valern "Please continue councilor Valern"

He coughed once and spoke "This time we ensure that peace would last by deploying specters to safely destroy and, or, disable any A.I's they would locate. Naturally we won't tell them about this. Conditions for surrender would be …basic"

"Humans won't accept it, not again"

"We will give them this chance to end the conflict peacefully, why do you think they would not accept it?"

"Because the Batarians, our allies, are in war against the humans, and have taken unspecified number of colonists as slaves, and the humans know that"

"Those four eyed idiots, they know that we are against slavery and they are still practicing it" exclaimed councilor Tevos with slight detection of anger in her usually calm voice"We would need to somehow get the Batarians to free them"

"Perhaps the opportunity that we are presented now could not be better" suggests Valern as he and Sparatus stood up and walked outside of council chamber, leaving the Asari councilor alone to make a call of her own.

Date: January 12, 2164

Location: SSV Thermopylae, Unknown region of space

The captain of the SSV Thermopylae, Estella Zepeda, woke up to a sign of beeping from her personal terminal in the captain's cabin. She got up and stretched as she walked towards her terminal and opened the message she received.

"System Alliance HQ to SSV Thermopylae.

Eden Prime has fallen to the enemy at 9th of January 2164

Alliance forces managed to evacuate all colonists from the planet surface. However reports state that two platoons of marines are stranded on the planet. Admiral McNatt orders are to head out there and attempt a rescue mission"

Estella murmured something to herself, put on her uniform and headed towards the elevator that took her down to the bridge.

"Greetings captain" saluted one of stationed marines. Estella returned the salute and walked past him towards the Thermopylae pilot. "Hey cap, what's new today?"

"We got ordered by admiral McNatt to scout Eden Prime as it was conquered by the enemy three days ago"

"Ouch, that sucks man …hey cap, don't you have family on EP?"

"I do Tony, I do, now plot a course to Eden prime relay"

"Aye aye cap"

SSV Thermopylae is a sister ship to the SSV Normandy, designed for "deep scouting" into hostile zones thanks to its state of the art stealth technology powered by an experimental drive core being developed by Cerberus. In addition to the Normandy weapons, the Thermopylae has a pair of nuclear mine layers, making her armament heavier than its sister ship. Those mine layers are able to deploy 14 mines each, thus making Thermopylae capable of setting up ambushes unlike her sister ship.

Her pilot, Tony Esprey, took her toward the relay and had the ship born V.I. to calculate the course correction for the mass relay jump. Once they reached the required distance the relay activated and once V.I. sent the desired coordinates the relay accelerated the small ship at speed a much faster than any ship can achieve on its own. The journey took several minutes. As soon as they jumped into Eden Prime system, the Thermopylae activated its stealth system, thus hiding from any hostile forces in the system.

"Esprey, give me status report" spoke captain Estella from her com as she observe the debris field around the Eden prime that marked the battle which took place here three short days ago. Estella took some comfort in her hearth, knowing that Turians didn't take this planet without a fight. A clear testament to that was a wreckage of once proud and might Turian dreadnought close to the relay. In fact the Thermopylae nearly crashed into it when they arrived.

"Our scan determined that most of hostile forces in system are Batarians, counting 13 frigates and dreadnought, plus 9 freighters. Turians only have 3 frigates and a carrier is keeping a perimeter around EP. Batarians are landing troops on the planet itself"

Estella angrily spat "Damn Batarians, this is most likely another of their attempt for "merchandise""

"Orders captain?"

"Deploy 12 mines behind the orbiting moon, and then start a system wide scan to get their attention for long enough for them to reach our location" ordered Estella from her position on bridge to the Thermopylae crew.

"Aye captain" was heard from various crewmembers and Estelle continued "After mines detonate make top speed towards the Eden Prime in attempt to rescue stranded Alliance marines"

On her orders, the SSV Thermopylae moved from the relay towards the nearby moon. Upon arrival Thermopylae deployed 12, 20 kiloton mines and scattered them to make them harder to detect until it's too late.

"Captain" came voice from Esprey as they deployed the last mine "I did the system scan, we have all Batarian frigates heading our way, but the dreadnought stayed at its position"

"It would be too good if they send dreadnought to investigate as well"

"There is more captain, scanning also revealed the position of an alliance cruiser that landed on Arcadia. Registry recognizes it as the SSV Berlin!"

"How is that possible? Report states that it was destroyed when a frigate, SSV Kurks, collided with it during in system FTL jump!"

"I don't know captain, scanning revealed that it's without any Eezo, we cannot salvage it at the time and on unrelated note, Batarian frigates are 40,000 km away from us, now it's as good time as it can be"

"Top speed towards Eden Prime, we have soldiers to save!" spoke Captain Estella as SSV Thermopylae flew out of moon cover and made its way towards Eden Prime. Just as it cleared the moon cover the 13 Batarian frigates approached the minefield. SSV Thermopylae weapon officer monitored this from a terminal. When they arrived at the minefield, the officer activated the mines. Being small in size, mixed along with the asteroids and have almost no Eezo, they managed to attach themselves onto Batarian frigates before they realized what happened. Only a few seconds later all of them exploded, whipping out entire frigate fleet. However that was only a secondary objective of Estella. The primary objective is to provide a distraction for Thermopylae to land onto planet surface and save stranded marines.

"Captain, the minefield tactic was a success, all 13 frigates destroyed, and on top of that, the dreadnought is accelerating to location behind the moon, to investigate what happen if my guess is correct. We now have a clear to land, since Turian patrol is on the other side of the planet"

"Contact the surviving marines and tell them we are coming for them"

"Already on it captain"

The Thermopylae, when it reached orbit, shut down its kinetic barriers in order to land on planet directly due to shortage of any Kodiaks on board. Esprey, once he received the location for marine extraction, guided the stealth frigate towards a building ravaged by airstrikes and Batarian assault. Esprey could make out Batarian bodies as well as debris of Turian fighters shot down by anti-air weapons.

"Captain, whoever has been holding this building must have been one hell of a leader, just look at all the corpses of four-eyes who tried to seize it" spoke Esprey over com to Estella and after witnessing the battlefield herself she replied "It's quite possible that four-eyes priority was to capture slaves, not to kill marines"

"Whatever the case was, it still had to be some intense fight"

"Captain, I have visual on LZ. We have Turian tank pinning down Alliance marines!"

"Esprey, do your thing, weapon chief, get rid of that tank with GARDIANs!" ordered Estella and held onto the iron fence around the bridge. A few moments later the Thermopylae was above LZ and received small arms fire from the hostile ground forces as a greeting. This fire barely scratched Thermopylae's armor. It was then that Turian tank turned its turret to open fire on it. Its cannon were capable of blowing a hole in the stealth frigate's armor. Thermopylae however was faster and thanks to her GARDIAN she destroyed the tank in a 3 shots, the first one to bring down its barrier defense, the second one to melt away a portion of the armor, and the third one to hit cannon shell storage, resulting in an explosion that destroyed the tank.

"Lower the ramp, and have our marine squad provide covering fire for EP marines!" gave Estelle another order as Thermopylae lowered its ramp, allowing surviving Alliance platoon to evacuate under covering fire of both Thermopylae marines with avenger rifles as well as GARDIAN turrets. Any Batarian hit by GARDIAN laser was instantly killed while marines with rifles managed to force them to stay in cover.

"Everyone is on board, now Esprey, get us out here!"

"Got it captain!"

"Captain, we have Turian fighter squadron directly above us. They are diving!"

"Fire everything we have at them, do not, I repeat DO NOT let them open fire with disruptor torpedoes!"

Turian pilots must have an overwhelming wish to join the spirits, since not only that they were diving at Thermopylae at high speed they were in tight formation of only a few feet in between them. This allowed Thermopylae GARDIAN lasers to easily acquire target and quick barrage of lasers engulfed 7 Turian fighters, destroying them in a mere one or two shots.

"Fighters dealt with, but now those crazy birds know were here, we have cruisers waiting for us in orbit!"

"Get those barriers online and AS soon as we CAN jump to FLT! No matter where, just JUMP!"

When the Alliance ship closed distance towards the cruisers, they begun to align their broadside magnetic accelerators in order to open fire. The amount of firepower that was fired at would easily destroy the stealth frigate. But to Estelle surprise, only one cruiser opened fire at them, and even then it was fired only a second before Thermopylae kinetic barriers were once again online. Thermopylae was hit only twice, but those two hits shock it violently and left a gaping hole in middle of its armor. The remaining fire was stopped by her kinetic barrier, but it was quickly weakening under sustained assault. They did however manage to hold long enough for Thermopylae to make a FTL jump outside the system.

"Phew, I didn't think that we were going to make it there, for some moments" admitted Esprey as he whipped out sweet from his forehead "I wonder if joker has missions this exiting"

"Captain, sergeant Mike Corp wants to have a word with you" said an alliance marine, stationed on Thermopylae, who walked up to Estelle "Thanks, I'll spoke to him ASAP" replied Estelle and walked to the elevator which she then took down to the hangar bay. Inside she noticed about 30 marines, all which had their blue armor dented and damaged in multiple different ways. She spotted Sergeant Mike, which wasn't exactly hard considering that he was the only one without a helmet. Instead he had a barrette on his head. She walked to him and saluted "Sergeant Mike Corp? I'm Captain Estelle Zepeda, captain of SSV Thermopylae". The marine nodded and returned the salute "Thank you captain Estelle, if you hadn't come along, we would have most likely be killed or worse"

He spoke with someone who hasn't sleep for a whole week and had a daily dosage of coffee measured in gallons. "If you don't mind me asking sergeant, why was that bunker spared by the enemy? The other bunkers were destroyed if our V.I. report is correct"

"That is because, it was not a bunker at all, it was a research station"

"What were you researching?"

"I'm not a scientist ma'am, but from what I heard, it was to be a biological weapon of some sort"

"And now the enemy has it?"

"No ma'am, I had my people to scout the facility for it, we found nothing other than a picture of alien, thing" he then brought out the picture he was talking about and show it to Estelle. The thing on it was about a feet tall, it didn't have a feet or arms. Instead it had tentacle like things on it. The whole thing looked rather discussing, but in terms of threat, it was questionable. "I take it that scientist how were working on this …bug were evacuated?" Mike nodded in agreement and replied "They were among the first one to get evacuated"

"Thank you sergeant, we're heading to Terra now, so I suggest you and your men get some rest, I suspect you will be asked several interesting questions about this thing."

"I have no doubts about it ma'am, but yeah, you re right we earned some sleep"

Date: January 12, 2164

Location: Eden Prime, Alliance bunker, biological weapon facility

Now that Alliance marines were out of the picture, the Batarians were raiding the facility for anything that could bring them some extra credit. Turians on other hand were recording what little information they could find about the experiments the Alliance scientist were working on.

Several Batarian soldiers opened a box which contained several glassy pods. Inside those pods there was a weird liquid. Convinced that inside of it is nothing of value they mostly throw it away or shattered it just for fun to smash something. What they don't know about those pods was that, it contained something alive in it. Now that Batarians have broken the pod in which it was contained they released it and thus signed their death.

Only an hour later, Turians couldn't contact any Batarian that was in the room in which they found the pods with weird liquid in it. All they heard was static and strange voices. Convinced that something was wrong and/or that Batarians got infected from alliance biological weapon, they deployed a squad in hazmat armor to investigate. They found nothing but blood on the floor and walls. It didn't take long for Turians to find out what happened to them. Only one Turian managed to come back, with armor badly damaged and too terrified to speak. In response to that, they sealed the doors, hoping that whatever the Batarians have released, will not spread.