Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect nor Honorverse. I am merely throwing the two worlds together. Any original characters, however, are mine.
As much as I love our puppy, I have discovered that cute little animals are creativity killers. I'm spending almost every waking hour watching over her, and by the time I get free time…no juice . This chapter is mostly being written when the pup falls asleep.
Chapter 4: The First Battle of Shanxi
Admiral Williams looked into his repeater, taking in the assembled fleet. 170 of the Alliance's ships of the wall, 60 of those being top of the line stealth ships. The civilian ships had been evacuated out of the system, leaving only vessels capable of engaging in the looming battle.
He'd split the fleet into several groups; Home Fleet had taken position orbiting Shanxi itself, 2nd and 4th Fleets were holding position around the Hypercom Hub, 1st fleet had taken position covering the terminus and 3rd fleet was patrolling the inner system. Stealth cruisers and destroyers were scattered throughout the system in small capable flotillas. He had no idea where the enemy was going to emerge, but he was hoping that the stealth ships would give him a wide enough net to ensnare them before they could deal fatal damage to Shanxi's infrastructure. The Grand Alliance's 5th fleet was being held in reserve, leaving most of the fighting to Torch's growing navy as a matter of honor.
Admiral Williams knew the CO of Fifth Fleet well. After all anyone who mattered would have heard of the black sheep of the Houseman family; Reginald Houseman the Third had proven himself to be a capable commander several times over. Still his musings were not going to get the battle over with already. He looked out at his Flag Bridge, taking in his officers, officers who were more than ready to lay down their lives for their people, and he could not wait for the battle that was to come.
-TED -
Bellona Censorious could not help but admit that she was nervous. True she had most of the Turian navy at her back this time, but she still remembered the holocaust of destruction that had besieged her first fleet command. Now here she was, one of the division commanders of an outright attack against the aliens that had so humiliated her before.
"Ma'am, Fleet Commander Scipio's flagship has sent the signal. We will be entering the alien's home system in twenty minutes," her com officer stated and she gave him a nod. Soon, soon she would get her second chance. Soon she would be able to avenge the spirits of her comrades whose deaths haunted her dreams for the last two weeks.
"Sound General Quarters. Prepare the vessel for long range combat. GARDIAN lasers at full power," she ordered as she prepped the Invictus for what might prove to be one of the greatest battles of her career. She prayed that the spirit of Invictus would keep her crew safe.
-TED-
Shala'Raan was sitting at a café enjoying something that she hadn't expected. She was drinking coffee, a human dish that she could actually ingest safely. What she was eating was considered a delicacy, imported from another planet and given only to certain dignitaries, because only dignitaries from the planet the coffee beans had come from were able to drink it. She still had distilled the drink at least three times, making it lose a lot of its potency, but being able to taste an alien meal through an emergency induction port was something she had not expected.
The drink, and many of the meals they had had, came from the planet Grayson. A heavy metal world whose plants and animals were poisonous to the inhabitants. In fact, the very air was poisonous to humans and yet they'd settled the planet anyway. The food she was eating was actually a hybrid designed to take root in Grayson soil and was engineered enough so that the Graysons, who had genetically engineered themselves to be some weird amalgam of both dextro and levo species, could drink it. The changes to both the fruit and the Graysons made it poisonous to anyone not from their system, and yet only mildly toxic to a Dextro. This allowed her to eat Grayson style meals once every two or three days at the expense of Queen Berry. The small diminutive monarch was definitely a force to be reckoned with, and had proceeded to pull both Shala and Daro to see all the great sites that Shanxi had to offer.
She was smiling as she listened to the small elderly woman chatting with Daro'Xen about some sort of technology or other. While she was understandably nervous about the looming battle, Queen Berry seemed to have faith that her people would beat them back and to be honest Shala expected them to. Oh she might only be twenty three and extraordinarily young to be an Admiral, but she knew that the Turian military was heavily outmatched with the juggernaut that the Turians were going to fling themselves against, and it was only a modest sized star nation to boot! She wondered how the Turians would have fared if they'd engaged the Republic of Haven or heaven forbid the Star Empire of Manticore.
Then one of the Queen's bodyguards stepped forward and murmured something into the woman's ear. The elderly woman stopped smiling and nodded grimly. After a moment she shot both Quarians a grin. "Come Shala, Daro. We're going to go see my great grandson," she said to the two women as she stood up and started to leave the café, a large portion of the patrons following her. That had been another thing that had puzzled Shala when she'd first met the queen, her lack of a severe body guard detail, but now she knew that any citizen of a Torch world would be more than willing to put their lives on the line when it came to their monarch and there was nowhere that she was unprotected.
-TED-
"Sir the enemy fleet has just jumped into the system. They're hiding on the other side of the sun" Williams' astrogation officer reported.
"So they decided for an in-system jump," Williams said frowning. "Alright, send Lieutenant Anderson's stealth squadron to scout it out. Activate the outer system defenses and all vessels cut their accelerations and bring up their bow walls," he added. Anderson wouldn't have the combat strength to effectively wipe out the enemy forces, nor could his stealth squadron get away if things hit the fan but they needed the intel from Anderson's drones.
"Roger that relaying orders," Williams' com officer stated.
"Admiral detecting blue shifts to port!" His tac officer stated just before TNS Genghis lurched after taking several hits from enemy energy fire.
"Report!" Williams shouted.
"Missile tubes 1 and 3 are out. Magazine 5 is open to space. Lasers 5, 7 and 13 are damaged as are Grasers 7 and 9. Radar 3 is down."
"Santa Rosa, Wildcat, and Fredericktown are reporting mild damage. We've lost the cruisers Appomattox and Blakely."
"Mikhailovich! Take evasive action! Get those cruisers closer and provide covering fire! Have all CLACs launch their squadrons!" Williams ordered his Flag Captain. The man on the screen seemed just as grim at the losses he'd suddenly taken. He gave a curt nod and began issuing orders.
"Admiral, they did another in-system jump. A force of about fifty cruisers and another hundred frigates ran slashing attacks on our ships." Even as he spoke Williams repeater flashed showing enemy ship losses as those vessels vainly tried to dodge the returning fire. With the LAC squadrons joining the fray, those small agile crafts were quickly losing the edge they had over the heavier ships. The slaughter continued for another two minutes before the surviving ten cruisers and forty-two frigates activated their FTL drives.
"Spread the Masamunes, Polecats, and Fiscal Shrikes throughout the fleet. Do we have Anderson's recon yet?" Williams ordered as his officers began to relay his orders.
"No sir, Anderson's drones won't reach that area for another twenty minutes."
"Admiral! Anderson's drones are detecting projectiles. Their using the sun to slingshot them at higher velocities at Astro control. SteaCruRon 16 and SteaBatCruRon 8 are vectoring in to intercept."
He nodded, focusing more on his repeater. With those Stealth Squadrons out of the picture he was going to have to reinforce them with some of the other stealth squadrons nearby, otherwise both squadrons were going to be wiped out if they were blindsided. Stealth ships didn't have gravitic shielding, and would thus be more vulnerable to enemy fire than his standard ships. "Reroute SteaDesRon 24 and 27 as well as SteaFrigRon 32 to cover them. Then have CLACRon 4 and DreadRon 3 take position at Astro Control."
"Sir! There's a civilian transponder squawking at Sector 13!"
"Who the hell is it?" Williams growled. All Civilian ships should have left four days ago. Whoever had stayed in the system was going to throw the system's defenses out of whack. He did not want to lose ships covering a civvy that shouldn't have even been there.
-TED-
"Captain Lentinus there's a lone dreadnought making itself known. Its twice the size of any of the larger dreadnoughts in the fleets sir!"
The captain frowned as he looked over, noticing that the dreadnought in question did indeed out mass the other vessels by quite the margin. "Alright, our squadron will head in and take it out in the next run. Something this massive must be the command ship," he mused. After all it had only made its presence known after their first strikes. Sure they lost a lot of good men feeling out the enemy, but now they could focus their attention on the ships that were the most dangerous, like those Destiny Ascension sized dreadnoughts.
-TED-
HMAMC Lonely Mountain's bridge was a hive of activity. The merchantman was twice the size of any of the dreadnoughts in the system and was pitifully slow in comparison. Sure she had military grade impellers, and could thus pull an acceleration rate of 600 gravities, nearly twice that of other merchantman of similar size, but she was an eggshell in space. Any engagement with the enemy would tear her vulnerable hull apart, not that Penelope Cruz cared about that.
True she was currently disobeying her orders to patrol the Maya Sector, but when she had heard of the events developing around Shanxi, and of her own personal loss in that system, she was not going to sit idly by while an ally was attacked. And by God as her witness she was going to make sure that the bastards that killed her baby brother were going to pay!
"Ma'am CIC is detecting gravity ripples heading towards our position. ETA six minutes," Lionel Montoya, her Executive Officer, stated from his own command chair. The gravity ripples were something her men had noticed after watching the first few moments of the battle and it allowed them to track the enemy with accuracy. From what she knew, the enemy used dark energy to tunnel through n-space at faster than light speeds, this would result in a blue shift of energy when entering and leaving FTL, but the tunneling effect left a gravitic wake that her astrogation officer had discovered.
"Alright pop the hatches, start rolling the pods and prep the Dwarves for battle," she said to her crew as they responded with a flurry of activity. Whoever had named Lonely Mountain had been a fan of prediaspora literature and had named most of the hulls he had built after notable places in a certain literary world. What that man probably hadn't expected was that someone, namely Penelope, would catch on to his naming scheme and would thus name her parasite ships in the same fashion.
Easily replaced plastic covers burst from the merchantman revealing the devastating weaponry hidden underneath. While her armor was pathetic, the Lonely Mountain's energy fire was equal to that of a superdreadnought. Anything that got within her range was going to know that she meant business. Her massive stores of missile pods gave her a devastating punch but her lack of telemetry links prevented the Lonely Mountain from being able to launch more birds than any superdreadnought could have hoped to carry in a single salvo.
"Do we have an estimation of where their exit point is?"
"Aye ma'am," the tac officer said as he started to train his guns in the most likely exit points. Since that first battle at the Mass relay these Turians hadn't allowed the navy to utilize their most deadly tactic. Missile swarms were going to become largely useless in this battle, since it was more a fight of energy weapons than anything else.
"Ready the Crippler," Penelope ordered.
-TED-
"We're coming up on the dreadnought now sir. Thirty seconds until engagement range."
"Good have the squadron converge on multiple vectors. We don't want that thing to," what he had to say next was never heard as a six hundred meter wide cone of condensed gravity ripped through n-space, piercing his ship and clipping the wings off of two others, their FTL velocities causing those ships to disintegrate. The remaining ships of his squadron dropped out of FTL only to be met with hundreds of Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth. Disoriented and unable to accurately lock on to threats they were unable to protect themselves from the wave of missiles and graser torpedoes that tore into their flanks. What survived the holocaust of destruction was picked apart by the fourteen parasite LACs that launched from the Lonely Mountain's docking bays.
-TED-
He had thought that they'd been too late to save that stupid civvy when those Turian cruisers converged on it. Imagine his surprise when the merchantman blew the entire squadron apart. Admiral Williams sat back as three other merchantmen followed through the same process, squawking their transponders to suck in enemy forces and then annihilating them. What were Manticoran Trojan ships doing here?
"Admiral receiving a hail from the first Trojan," his com officer stated and he nodded accepting the transmission.
"Captain Penelope Cruz and Task Force 136 reporting for action sir," a bronze skin woman said. He frowned as he looked at her. He recalled that Captain Shepard had a young com officer named Jason Cruz on her ship, a relative perhaps?
"Well captain I think your crews gave me quite a start," he said as his ship bucked from another attack. "Rendezvous your ships with SteaCruRon 17 through 20. Keep up the tactics you've been employing," he stated to the woman.
"Aye sir, I'm also sending you tactical data that might prove useful. Cruz out," she said before turning off her end.
"Sir I'm receiving data from the Lonely Mountain, it's a way to track these bastards while they're in FTL!"
Well that definitely was going to soften whatever court marshal Penelope was going to face later. "Alright, send that information to the rest of the fleet. Let's see if we can set up a few ambushes ourselves."
-TED-
Bellona was quiet as she listened to the reports. There were reports of entire squadrons of cruisers being wiped out in combat, hundreds of her people were dying left and right. So far they'd managed to take out a couple hundred of the small corvette sized ships, and seven of the smaller dreadnoughts. Still this battle of attrition was not going well for the Turian military.
Somehow these aliens had discovered a way to track their navy while they were FTL. She hadn't even heard of a race that could do that. Still the bulk of the navy was intact and they were just about to launch their biggest strike of the battle, they were going to go for the prize, the planet itself.
Six dreadnoughts and several hundred frigates, cruisers, battleships and thousands of fighters were going to launch themselves at the biggest enemy fleet. While the two fleets engaged each other, the troop drop ships would land on the planet and take control of vital areas. If they acted quickly enough, perhaps they could acquire the head of state and use that person to force the fleets to stand down.
If this gamble failed, the Turian navy was going to retreat and request the aid of the Salarians and Asari. Hopefully with those two navies joining in they would be able to take down this enemy.
"Commodore, Fleet Commander Scipio has given the order. The Assault Fleet will launch."
She nodded as she listened to her com officer. Her division would be taking part of the assault and she prayed to the spirit of Invictus to lead them to victory. "Weapons to full power, Inform the fighter squadrons to form a screen around the dreadnoughts. We need to soak up the enemy missile fire as we engage as close as possible." That was the plan. They would jump within the enemy formation, the distance between the enemy's ships would allow them to jump in close and assault them with energy fire, hopefully the close quarters knife fighting would buy the ground troops enough time to reach the surface.
The fleet moved into position before they activated their FTL drives, a massive blue shift of energy as they tunneled their way to Shanxi.
-TED-
The fleet burst into orbit of Shanxi in a massive shift of blue energy. The warships were met with missiles and energy beams from the Torch Navy's Home Fleet. Fighters met LACs in head to head combat, destroyers and cruisers on both sides exploding as energy pierced them. The smaller dreadnoughts squaring away against their massive counterparts as they pounded at each other with every weapon on hand.
The thousand troop ships made their attempt at landing on the planet's surface protected by a fairly robust fighter screen. Planetary gun emplacements and orbital weapons platforms opened fire, downing fighters and dropships left and right. Three hundred and fifty troopships managed to land on the surface of Shanxi, their troops spilling out as they made their way into the cities, prepared to occupy them. If they could claim the planet than the battle was won and the sacrifice of the fleet fighting to the death above them would have been worth it.
-TED-
Her Mousety Queen Berry I of the House of Zilwicki was trapped in the hospital that housed the unborn embryo of her great grandson. The fetuses had been bathed with eezo from one of the ships exploding above the city and the staff at the birthing clinic fought tooth and nail to keep their charges from dying. Shala'Raan and Daro'Xen were proving themselves to be godsends, helping the hospital staff correct the genetic anomalies thanks to the Quarians experience with fetal exposure to Element Zero.
Her bodyguards tried to get the Queen to evacuate, but she refused. She would not leave the next generation of Torch's citizenry vulnerable in their iron wombs. She would not leave the thousands of unborn children this facility housed to their fate, nor would she leave the doctors and nurses who were trying to save them unprotected. If this was going to cause headaches for her military so be it. She would not move.
-TED-
Codex:
Armed Merchantmen: As a counter to piracy in many of the underdeveloped star nations, the Trojan Merchantmen, or Armed Merchantmen, were developed to counter such threats with lethal accuracy. These vessels are either built to look like merchant vessels, or were retrofitted from merchant vessels into warships in order to lure unsuspecting pirates within their weapons range.
Crippler: With a range of a million kilometers, the Crippler is one of the most devastating weapons in humanity's arsenal. Utilizing Grav-lance technology, a Crippler pierces the impeller band of a vessel, preferably a civilian craft, and overloads the bands causing emergency shutdown. Commonly utilized by Spider-drive and Armed Merchantmen, the Crippler remains one of the most devastating FTL weapons utilized by humanity.
Fiscal Shrike: The Successor to the Manticoran Shrike-class LAC (Light Attack Craft), the Fiscal Shrike is an anti-capital ship assault platform. Additionally, the Fiscal Shrikes have the carrying capacity of five missile pods, vastly increasing the missile combat capability of LAC Squadrons.
Iron Wombs: Developed by the planet of Beowulf, and oddly unused by its citizens, the Iron Wombs allow a fetus to mature outside a mother's womb. This allowed women who were either very busy, in the military, or were otherwise incapable of bearing children to have children. Tubing a child also allows for the correction of genetic birth defects and the physicians can even halt the growth of the embryo until such a time that the parents wish to birth it. In advanced human societies there is no social stigma attached to those who had either natural or tubed birth.
Masamune: The Successor to the Grayson Katana-class LAC (Light Attack Craft), the Masamune specializes in LAC to LAC combat. Thereby making them a credible threat to any enemy LAC Squadron.
Polecat: The Successor to the Manticore Ferret-class LAC (Light Attack Craft), the Polecat serve as support squadrons to Fiscal Shrike attack forces. Developed to focus on missile defense, the Polecats have also been utilized to increase Fleet defense in most LAC doctrines.
Torch Squadron designations: Torch's Royal Navy splits their vessels into several squadrons based on type of vessel. Most designations begin with class of vessel and the squadron number. Instead of continuously stating Stealth Cruiser Squadron 24, Torch Naval Personnel instead use shorthand to designate the 24th Stealth Cruiser Squadron as simply SteaCruRon 24.
You know since I don't have any ME supplementary material other than some of the codex entries I've read, they never do state how large the Turian navy is, just that it is primarily made up of cruisers. True the Quarians have the largest fleet in the galaxy, but the Turians have the largest military, what with 20% of their population serving in the military at any given moment.