Lions in Blue and Silver

The story of unintended consequences, and of paranoid preparations.

Ahern sat, brooding.

The assembly hall at Quantico was massive, almost two kilometers long and at least one kilometer wide, supported by the primitive mass effect repulsor pillars that hummed and bulked here and there along the walls. Banners of ancient military units that formed the core of the current SA military thinking – American Marines, German Heer, Japanese SDF – were set in positions of honor atop the high sides of the platform at the front and center of the building.

Huge murals depicting scenes of valor and bravery had been sprayed upon the long massive walls, making the entire hall look like a disjointed version of Valhalla, given the fact that there were thousands of seated soldiers arranged in semicircular rows around the central plinth.

Ahern pulled at the collar of his dress blues irritably. The new SA uniform had moved away from the mix of Marine and Heer designs, to a new blue abomination trimmed in gold and with actual leather paneling. He felt like some kind of third-rate fascist goon in this getup, and it didn't help that the Commissariat version looked similar except for high boots and that it had been designed by the Boss-Armani Corporation.

Hugo Boss had not only designed the uniforms of the Nazi SS, but the São Paulo Guard. Ahern felt very strongly that giving them a contract for the SA uniform was just asking for trouble, but no one asked him.

The previous week had been one of polishing existing skills, getting uniforms up to spec, and endless completion of all manner of paperwork. Although paperless options were ubiquitous, like Greentooth wireless datapads and voice-driven constructed-intellect systems – that could almost beat a Turing test – simply asking the questions and recording them, the SA insisted on paper.

Tradition, they said. Goddamned backassward waste of time and trees, he said. And given that there were more people than trees on fucking Earth nowadays, paper seemed especially stupid.

It was worth all the hassle, though. Out of some fifty-seven thousand applicants, only five thousand had been chosen for Phase One. A thousand five-man teams. Of those thousand teams, a good two hundred had already been eliminated and dismissed, and another three hundred reassigned to other postings with promotions. A nice bonus, to be sure, but not the holy grail of SpecOps. Putting up with the paper had cut the competition in half.

By the end of the week, Ahern knew their number would be decimated or worse – rumor had it that they were really only looking for maybe ten teams, or fifty men.

The best one percent, out of the best one percent. That was a motto he could get behind. A little more badass than merely 'the best of the best.'

He glanced around the table at the faces of his teammates. Yonis was reading his datapad. Kyle was checking his uniform for the nine hundredth time. Saracino was staring at Florez, who appeared to be meditating.

He didn't have any real concerns about Yonis Chu. The man was both book smart and crafty, and while his dedication to the plan was wavering a bit, he had known Yonis all his life. If it really came down to it, he fully expected Yonis to tell the AIS to go fuck themselves, and then use his name to get in later on if it turned out SpecOps wasn't his cup of tea.

Yonis had a big thing for conspiracies, and maybe their conversation yesterday was his way of just letting Tradius know how nervous he was. He'd dealt with Old Man Chu enough times to realize that the family elder was not really human, but a massive walking penis, cunningly disguised in human shape. Anyone who set up his own father to be killed off by the Commissariat and then complained when the life insurance didn't come through wasn't worth pissing on if they were on fire.

For Chu to go into a safe career in the Marines as some aide-de-camp or d'attache affairs was one thing. To get involved in highly dangerous special operations or the AIS was another, and Chu had a point that the AIS would have much better luck in fending off Old Man Chu's outrage once he learned the truth than a brand new command with no big names backing it. Hell, half the reason Ahern had asked Yonis to join is that he'd be the biggest name in the unit.

None of that affected Yonis's ability to perform, which is all Ahern really cared about.

Kyle, of course, looked immaculate, posture perfect, eyes glinting with intelligence. Bastard probably slept three hours a night. On paper, Kyle was the most likely shoo-in for the SpecOps. Brilliant, multi-talented, and a physical god, Kyle could master anything in short order. His flexibility would allow him to thrive, while his combination of mental and physical excellence was exactly what typified the best special operations soldiers of the past. The fact that he would be a perfect poster boy for whatever crumbs of truth the public got fed wouldn't hurt either. Performance-wise, Kyle would be as close to humanly perfect as possible. No worries… at least in terms of that.

Kyle's biggest problem was his lack of confidence. He wasn't a leader, preferring to follow someone else's lead. His promotion to Lieutenant was pro-forma BS to snap up good officer material and Kyle knew it, knew he hadn't earned the bars the way so many other LTs had. And Ahern didn't think he would ever find that confidence, until he went up against something he was sure he couldn't do and actually did it.

Then he'd either be a truly dangerous soldier… or completely fucking insufferable.

Ahern grunted. Rachel Florez had the opposite problem, she was cocky. She was good and she knew it, she was beautiful and she knew it, she was smart and she knew it. An intimidating woman who'd dragged herself up from slums and deprivation to where she was today, Florez couldn't even spell 'modesty,' much less feel it. Her arrogance and mouth had gotten her busted back from Chief to Sergeant to Corporal, and it wasn't the first time.

Rachel had a chip on both shoulders, and a part of Ahern – the quiet part he liked to kick in the head and tell to shut up – admitted she probably was justified in having said chips. A yakuza father and a prostitute of a mother didn't equal a nice childhood, and Florez was just a touch too hardened around the boys when it came to dirty jokes or seeing them naked – he suspected she'd sold herself when she was younger. Like most pretty women, too many guys assumed she was just looks, but her fierce intellect took that as an insult. Her temper needed work. Her ability to accept that others could beat her needed work. Most of all, her assumptions that she was the baddest motherfucker in the valley of the shadow of death really had to go.

The fact she was banging her teammate didn't help in Ahern's book. Michael Saracino wasn't really a complicated guy. He could kill you with a pistol at a hundred eighty meters or shoot a playing card in half at ninety – turned where the narrow edge was toward you. But around people, Saracino was an ass. He'd been through some kind of hell when he was younger and more than once woken up in the middle of the night, screaming or crying. Michael's back had enough ugly scarring on it for him to draw his own conclusions. Instead of curling up or being shy, Michael instead lashed out with hard, cutting sarcasm. It was rarely funny, often hurtful or insulting, and the guy was a master at finding just the one thing to push people over the edge.

The problem wasn't his past or background. If he had been some emo, woe is me loser, Ahern would not have picked him, no matter how good he could shoot. No, the man just pretended his past didn't hurt or matter, and that he didn't care about what people thought of him. He had no filters and refused to care about consequences of anything he did. He was the best sniper in the world, and other than that, he seemed not to need much else.

His thoughts interrupted by an increase in noise, Ahern glanced up as murmurs around them rose in volume, seeing some brass arrive and set up at a table beside the main podium. No one was addressing the gathered teams though, and none of the officers approached the mic, so he shrugged.

He returned to his thoughts on Saracino. He and Rachel had been doing shit off and on for the past year. Rachel said it was nothing serious, just some fun in the sack. Saracino made sarcastic off-color jokes. But Ahern didn't buy that shit. Saracino was broken somewhere inside, somewhere that drove him to find peace by blowing people's heads off. That kind of broken pushed everyone away. Rachel had pushed through that barrier and Ahern doubted Saracino took that lightly. If she bought it, God help the fucking galaxy, because the only thing that scared Ahern was the idea of a mentally unstable sniper on a rampage.

Rachel had one pathetically easy thing about her, she adored honest praise. Saracino couldn't bullshit to save his own life, and if he'd reached her as well as she'd reached him…

They were both needy people. Ahern didn't like needy people.

As a rule, he always felt that if you couldn't get your shit together without someone wiping your ass for you, you were a goddamned waste of oxygen. Lots of people called that cold, but Ahern called it fucking life. Crying about things only wasted time you could spend moving on and finding something to not goddamned cry about, like getting laid, smashing drunk, into a good fight, or… something. Anything.

They lived on a dying world full of toxic shit, where poor people starved every day so some fucker with six names and a coat of arms could have a holographic opera house added to his summer home. They had a government that did nothing to fix it because the founding fathers made it impotent on purpose, because some nutjob in Brazil tried to take over the world and another nutjob in Germany actually succeeded. They had colonies they abused because, hey, he who owns the guns wins the argument.

The SA had lots of fucking problems, and life sucked ass. Then you died and rotted into slime in a shitty coffin until they made a golf course over you, and some rich asshole pissed on your remains as he wondered why his slice was so bad. There was shit-all nothing he or anyone else could do about it, and piss-moaning over it like some kind of child only made you miss out on opportunities to enjoy life or make something of yourself. Doing so over some bullshit like 'people don't like me' was absolutely infuriating to Ahern.

People who demanded that their lives be validated by the opinions of others – usually strangers – completely baffled Ahern. He wasn't obnoxious about it like Saracino, but he couldn't have given less of a fuck what other people who weren't his close friends thought about him.

He couldn't do anything about Rachel and Saracino, but what they were doing out of a need for someone else's approval was going to be problematic down the line. He was lost in thought trying to figure out how to deal with the issue when another team sat down at the table next to them.

Three of the team were black males, all heavily built, all Marine lieutenants. A young blond woman with bright blue eyes sat next to the biggest of the guys, while a hard-faced Asian man sat across from her, eyes flicking about in narrow assessment.

The oldest-looking of the lieutenants smiled as he walked over to Ahern. "I'm guessing it hasn't begun yet?"

Ahern shook his head. "Nope. Wish they'd hurry up, the damned game is on."

The man smiled. "Lieutenant David Anderson, 2nd Marine, Thanas."

Ahern gave him a firm handshake. "Captain Tradius Ahern, 1st Solguard."

The Lieutenant winced. "Well, hell. Didn't think we'd be up against that kind of competition. Figured the Solguard would already consider themselves pretty special."

Ahern snorted. "Yeah, well. We don't get the kind of action we'd like sitting pretty in Sol, you know, unless it's terrorists." He gestured toward the stage. "Any idea what the holdup is?"

Anderson shook his head, his wide features turning into a small grimace. "No, they haven't really handed down that much information since the last of the tests. Most people think we're going to do live-fire exercise evaluations. I wouldn't be worried, except two of my best people are being poached by the AIS."

Ahern raised his eyebrow at this. "Huh, you too? They're after a couple of mine."

Anderson nodded, then frowned. "I wonder if this entire event is not only for the recruiting of a special ops force, but some kind of military distaff for the AIS as well. It isn't as if they would just hold an open job fair for spies, after all."

Ahern laughed at that. "That would be fucking hilarious." He was about to say something else when finally another knot of officers approached the podium.

The man in the middle was one everyone knew by a mere glance. His broad shoulders were surmounted with the broad white, gold, and red of the Grand Admiral of the Fleet, and the blood-red ribbon around his neck was proof positive of his identity. Everyone in the entire hall shot to instant attention.

Admiral Jon Grissom looked around the huge auditorium for several seconds before speaking. "As you were, Marines." He waited for the rustle of noise to subsume before continuing.

"You are all here as part of an ongoing evolution by the Systems Alliance military. You all have been carefully vetted, examined, and evaluated. Your loyalty, intelligence, and potential are the best humanity has to offer. "

He paused, smiling thinly. "It's time we all discussed what you were really brought here for. One thing we have been doing is ensuring this group can be trusted with sensitive information. The information about to be presented is, I assure you, very sensitive."

Grissom touched a control on the podium, and a series of projectors on the ceiling fired up, coming together to throw an image of a mass relay hanging in the blackness of space. "Almost three months ago, Explorer Corps Vessel SAV Discovery performed primary relay activation on the relay in the Sheldon System. Upon relay stabilization, we discovered a G-class star with what had once been five worlds."

He clicked, and the image shifted to that of a vast asteroid belt. "The system appeared to be dead at first, like most such systems we come across. However, the SAV Discovery picked up element zero readings in multiple areas of the asteroid belt, along with faint traces on the third planet. A closer investigation discovered very troubling elements.

"The third planet had once borne life, my fellow Marines. Someone bombarded it with radioactive saturation bombs and kinetic strikes until every single continental plate was broken and the mantle was exposed. The asteroid belt contains enough organic and heavy nickel-iron content to make us believe it was also a planet, one that was hit hard enough to reduce it to rubble.

"From radiocarbon dating on some of the organic material we found on the third world, this atrocity was conducted well within the last two thousand years. We have only fragmentary evidence of what happened. The other relay out of the system was… damaged. It appears some form of bomb or high-energy emissive device was used to deactivate it. There is a great deal of vaporized wreckage near the mass relay which we have determined are the bits and pieces of space ships."

Grissom faced them, his features iron-hard. "From our best extrapolation, one race entered the system, overpowered their fleets, and then literally destroyed their worlds. Before the aggressor could escape, however, the race being attacked managed to destroy the relay leading out of the system away from us. The backlash from this appears to have destroyed every spaceship in the system as well as heavily damaged the nearby gas giant, which is missing three quarters of its mass. It is… possible… that the fourth planet was not shattered by bombardment, but by the failure and sabotage of the mass relay.

"Our scientists, the AIS, and the Manswell Security Force have all been active in the Shiva System, as we are calling it, for the past month. We have found fragmentary bodies and pieced together some rough idea of what the races involved look like."

Two outlandish shapes flashed on the screen. "The one on the left, currently codenamed 'Contact Alpha,' is what we believe to be a reptilian carnivore. Assuming the boffins didn't get the reassembly wrong, this creature would have stood over two and a half meters tall, two mouths full of teeth, and scaled hide five centimeters thick. Amazingly, this appears to have been the victim race, not the aggressor.

" 'Contact Beta' is harder to reconstruct. We assume it is bipedal, like us, although the legs seem very strange and the torso is off. It has a somewhat lizard-like, somewhat avian appearance, although we suspect they are cold-blooded. The teeth are needle-like and sharp, and claws a good eighteen to twenty centimeters long were found, coated with metal and electronics of very advanced make. The ships they came on are too wrecked to salvage much from, but we are working on fragments of technology we found on a few corpses."

Grissom glanced back at the crowd of Marines. "There is alien life out in the stars, my brothers and sisters. And they are even nastier that we are."

Author's Notes:

In case you are wondering, yes, those are turians. As described in the Cerberus Files (my AU history) before their discovery by the Citadel types, turians expanded through a mix of FTL and relay travel. And they got into it with one race:

'Their FTL wanderings were done in overwhelming, crushing force. They would not open a relay until they had a complete war fleet prepared, and refused to colonize except with full resources. They came across two other sapient races in their expansion. The first of these, the arcaeas, engaged in combat with them and were literally obliterated. Turian warships crushed their fleets and rained asteroid strikes down on their homeworld until not even algae-analogues survived. They strip-mined the planet brutally, deliberately crushing cultural relics and left the world a burning, plundered wreck, a stark warning to others. Or so the history claims. No one can find the world the arcaeas hailed from, and I suspect the turians may have a darker secret they are hiding about the ultimate fate of this race.'

The turians genocided the arcaeas, but the big lizards got the last laugh, blowing up their mass relay. This killed everything in the system, although it wasn't a total blowup like the event in Aratoht by Shepard in Arrival. The other end of the relay never got opened or examined by the arcaeas, and the turians never had the chance to open it.

Centuries later, humans open the other end, and find the mess. When they run across turians again, this pre-knowledge is one hinge point in why my AU is different than canon. They see the turians as genocidal monsters already, and thus surrender is not seen as a feasible option.