Tevos rubbed her eyes in an attempt to stave off her impending headache, "Let me see if I've got this straight. In their infinite wisdom your Primarchs decided that instead of having you pass the news of first contact to us, they decided to make a show of force because they were upset that you were beaten in a skirmish. And when that didn't work you launched an invasion of their world. Am I missing something here?"

"I was only informed about this recently, they decided that if the newcomers were hostile it'd be better to have the initiative," Maxilinus said for what must have been the fifth time.

Tevos groaned, "Yes, because sending a war fleet into one of their systems won't send the wrong message. Okay, let's just focus on damage control from here on out. Jaexo, I assume you've already compiled of profile of the species."

Jaexo nodded and typed into his omni-tool, "Watch the image. Standard ship design functional, no frivolities, efficient surface area to interior. Sensor number on station indicative of research post. Likely species emphasizes practicality, possibly focuses science. Space tactics show theoretical knowledge, little experience, attempts to make up for deficiencies with numbers. Fields disproportionate amount of mechs, no fighters either, possibly low population growth. Drones and mechs react too fast and too unpredictably, possible AI usage. Planet deployment has focus on defense, directly counters orbital superiority via ground to space weapony. Resources needed for gun, significant. Resource demands indicate defensive mindset, likely significant amount of industrial base devoted to military. Indicative of warlike history or hostile prior contact, if latter likely planetside given inexperience in space. Possibly have authoritarian regime, uses military to oppress population, if so possibly will attempt to invade."

Tevos sighed, Jaexo was excellent at analysis but could get lost in the data, and cleared her throat "I'm sure you could write this up in a report for us, but right now we need to know their likely reactions to the war and diplomacy."

Jaexo shook his head, "Impossible to tell, too many variables. If totalitarian regime, unlikely to surrender unless it has something to gain and low risk of revolt. If oppressive, leadership unlikely to surrender as it could trigger revolts. Best course is to appear as liberators. If support is ingrained in populace plans for occupying Hegemony worlds should be used as baseline. If not totalitarian and we're correct in practicality, choices determined by battle outcome. We win, we negotiate from position of strength, they'll likely give in to demands as long as we're not too unreasonable, will be able to make them associate species if we wish. If stalemate, will likely attempt to get as much as they can in negotiations, low possibility they'll decide not to join but most likely will. If they win, four possibilities. They negotiate from position of strength, depending on nature of battle they may or may not join, likely join. They decide to carry on the war and are unable to compete with our industrial base, we force stalemate and eventually win, both sides considerably weakened, likely raiders begin harassing both our territory. Think immediately post Rachni Wars or Rebellions. They carry on war and can compete with our industry, stalemate, same weakening as before, higher risk to remain independent. They carry on war and outclass our industry, we hope for stalemate and peace talks, forced to work on Genophage cure or uplift Yahg, precluding that, three options. They occupy our worlds and begin assimilation efforts. Cripple us to halt our being a threat, something along the lines of the Genophage. Or they go for genocide. Their apparent paranoia or history indicate unlikeliness for them to initiate peace talks unless we win."

Tevos frowned, "Surely you don't think it could get that bad."

Jaexo shrugged, "Is impossible to say. They might've been unlucky and lack many habitable worlds so they pour resources to protect the precious few. It might be a core colony near their homeworld and this is their main fleet. It's also possible they've spread throughout an unknown portion of the relay network and can rival us in controlled space." He paused for breath, "There is just not enough data. All we have is speculation, nothing more."

Tevos' frown deepened, the headache had arrived full strength, "Okay, since we can't do anything without losing face, and have no clue on the bigger picture, why don't we let things play out and choose when to intervene?" When the other two councilors nodded she glared at Maxilinus, "In the meantime why don't you explain to your Primarchs why it's important to tell us these things?"

Maxilinus nodded and sighed, he hated when he was right… and things just kept getting better. He was out of alcohol.

\n

Shepard groaned as he slowly regained consciousness and opened his eyes to a room that was not a normal medical bay and mercifully lacked the bright lights.

"Good you're waking up, was starting to think that I screwed up the injections," said an unfamiliar voice.

Shepard turned his head to view the speaker, a man who seemed so nondescript as to set off all of Shepard's alarms. He was maybe about five foot eight inches with brown hair and eyes. His face was devoid of any distinguishing characteristics yet gave off the feeling that its bearer had an easier life before choosing hard work.

When he saw that Shepard was fine the man started pulled up his tricorder and started tapping, "Okay, you people are either the luckiest or the unluckiest bastards in existence. Something must've gone wrong 'cause you landed here and not behind our perimeter, planetfall overloaded the inertial dampeners more than expected and you all either passed out from the g-forces or got a concussion, on the bright side you didn't get reduced to paste and landed practically on my doorstep. You've all been on nectar for the last four days to repair the internal damage and prevent radiation sickness, your pod lost some of its shielding and you all received a noticeable dose when your ship went nova, and my readings are showing that you should be fine."

Once he had processed this Shepard spoke, "Where are we? Who are you? And where are the rest of my people?"

The man smiled and continued tapping, "Safe room hidden under the house. Turians already did a sweep and couldn't find anything so we're safe. I'm Gabriel Harper, call me Gabe, chameleon section. The others are already awake, you had the worse injuries, and are eating in the next room. Margaret's been alternating between yelling at you, brooding, and being useful while you've been out."

Shepard frowned, "Take me to them."

Gabe smiled and helped him up, when Shepard swayed he frowned and moved to support him, "Hmm, might be a day or two until you're ready for anything. Come on, let's go see your friends."

Together they moved into the next room, this one painted a similar metallic greyish blue as the last one. It was mostly bare save for shelves, cabinets, a sink, and stove at one end serving as a makeshift kitchen. A vidcom and several chairs at the other end in what appeared to be an entertainment or briefing area. And a plain table where his fellow crewmembers were sitting around on functional wood chairs.

Udina smiled when he saw Shepard, "And he lives. Now maybe you can explain why I always end up waiting on you when things like this happen?"

Shepard snorted as he made his way over to the table, "Funny, I seem to recall waiting an extra two weeks after the bio-attacks for you to be well enough to leave your room," he groaned as he was lowered into a free seat.

Udina smirked, "Sounds like you're looking forward to the customary after injury jog later today."

Shepard's groan increased in volume, "How 'bout we just say you won it? Ugh, don't think I was this sore after getting my genes sorted out."

"No, pretty sure that was worse." Udina tilted his head slightly, "You know, maybe this'll teach you to wait until after we get of the ship to ram it."

This brought Gadsden's attention back to the present, "No, we've only been in the same room for a few minutes and I am not putting up with this until the battle is finished."

The room's atmosphere turned grim at the reminder of their circumstances.

Shepard sighed and leaned back, "Just what's going on out there? Things feel… off. Wrong somehow."

Gabe nodded, "Was just about to get there, let's see. Okay, front line's going like planned. They've started trying to dig their own lines just to survive the artillery and are trading lives for automatons. Out here things are different. We think that they're stretching their supply lines to capacity between trying to supply their fleet with ammo, food for all of them, and medical supplies, and then some of our people sabotaged the cities food stores when they tried rounding those of us in the countryside up so they'd either have to feed all of us or let us be. That lead to a different problem though; hastatim units have been in the population centers outside the Circle and they've been ruthless in suppressing any resistance."

Gadsden was the first to connect the wrong feeling with that statement, "How many?"

Gabe shrugged, "We can't be sure but estimates put it in the thousands for the first day and double digits ever since save for one spike into the hundreds, however it has only been a few days since they landed so we can't be sure. Note that those estimates are for each individual city. As it is the cities are one push away from a revolt and everyone can tell, that's caused everyone to be tense, especially their soldiers since they haven't been able to lock down the city since they're so unfamiliar with our infrastructure, and this leads to them being more on edge and harsher than their records show which in turn pushes things closer." He took a breath to gather himself before continuing, "Now that leads us to the real import of these strong rooms. Are any of you familiar with the Chameleon Project?"

"You mean the secret project to place specially trained personnel in the outer colonies in case of hostile contact with an alien power that's been denied no less than eleven times in the last five years and that I've never had progress reports for our allies pass my desk ever? Nope, never heard of it," Udina said in a vain attempt to cut through the melancholy.

Gabe nodded, "Excellent, then I'll skip straight to what needs to happen. Those of us outside the cities have been given orders to relieve pressure by drawing their attention away from the cities. It would consist of hit and run attacks on vulnerable targets and is volunteer only. I understand you're all Astro, but are you willing to help?"

The three people shared glances before Shepard spoke, "What do we need to do?"

Gabe smiled and passed a few sheets of paper out, "Good, if you'll read these they show just what this entails. Mainly things like putting you formally under the command of the OSS until either relieved or the invasion is over." Once they had read the papers he continued, "They set up a base a few miles from here and due to needing the drones for less secure areas are relying on foot patrols to ensure their security. Several of these patrols go through a forest that they haven't been able to properly clear yet, we think due to the tendency of some of the plant's tendency to explode when on fire, and it should be possible to pull their attention to that area. But we need to get everyone armed first. Question, are any of you certified on a grav-suit?"

Gadsden raised her hand, "I am, B level."

Gabe raised an eyebrow, "Impressive, especially since you're ship based. I have one in the armory but it's only a C class, though I have the equipment to modify it. I assume you're familiar with the necessary modifications."

When she nodded his smile returned even stronger and they proceeded to divide the weapons, Shepard and Udina each received GP-46 rifles while Gabe chose an engineer rifle.

Intersystem Network Accessed

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Tricorder: Named after a device from a classic science fiction series, tricorders are humanities counterpart to other races' omni-tools. They can both serve the same functions, however unlike the omni-tools, they do not rely on a holographic display and may be a physical device, a network of implants between body parts with ocular implants providing the images and periphery equipment for specialist work such as scanner that would be unsuitable for implant, such is the military standard, a hard light display like the omni-tool, or any combination of the above. Recently work has succeeded in bridging the gap between the operating systems of both them and omni-tools.

\n

Nectar: Nectar, named after the mythical drink of the gods, is the liquid counterpart to medigel and is designed for intravenous administrations to treat internal injuries. While medigel focuses on sealing external injuries and preventing bleeding with only a slight increase in healing speed, nectar focuses on drastically reducing the recovery time for internal injuries. It does so through containing large amounts of nutrients and the microorganisms designed to accelerate physical genetic modifications. As a result it also serves as a viable treatment method for acute radiation syndrome. A side effect of this is that future recovery times are reduced as long as material is available for the body to work with, though there is a slight increase in the patient's food requirements.

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Chameleon Project: The Chameleon Project is a rumored long term operation to place specially trained operatives in the colonies to deal with threats. There is controversy over the idea, despite it being denied repeatedly, due to how it blurs the lines between military and civilian, questions over what operatives would do when not actively fighting, and ambiguity over just what they would be protecting against, just external threats or would they operate against internal unrest also? Despite the numerous denials, the rumors remain prevalent and some theorize that it is a natural result of the human government's unique methods of handling problems, in this case how to counter a galaxy where species do not necessarily differentiate civilians while avoiding a police state.

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Grav-suit: Due to the adverse human reaction to Eezo (see Eezo poisoning in humans) rendering the possibility of human biotics impossible human and Quarian, who due to lifestyle have an extremely low number of biotics, teams have worked together to create a synthetic alternative to the formerly purely biological phenomenon. While it was decried by some as a waste of resources the additional results such as improved pressure suits for both races, with several decades of refinement bypassed for humanity, a better understanding of mass effect fields, and improving mechanical exoskeletons.

Appearance: The grav-suit's basic appearance is that of a standard mechanical pressure suit, though thicker, with the addition of a metal exoskeleton running from the neck down the limbs along the lines that natural Element Zero nodes would form

Rating: Grav-suits are currently rated on an alphabetical scale according to capability with the most advanced as A and the remainder shifted as development occurs. Currently there are three ranks: A, B, and C.

A/N: First off i wish to apologize for my absence, which was the result of a mixture of my attention being distracted by plot bunnies, school work, and a reading queue that is still too long, my muse deciding it wanted to taunt me, and losing all of the work I had done past this point and a belief that this was included in the loss (for those curious it was because up until recently my work has been split between using a mac and a PC and the mac lost the data before it could be transferred into triple redundancy system, that I ironically used to prevent that very thing from happening).

On the bright side my schedule has cleared up (barring the aforementioned reading queue), inspiration has returned to at least an extent that words can put put out, I discovered that this part had actually been moved beforehand which has helped vanish the irritation and feeling of just spinning my wheels from the loss, and I've gotten more of the total plotline mapped out.

Back to my original point, I am sorry for leaving this for so long. Work has resumed alongside the plot bunnies I mentioned earlier (some of which may be posted in the relatively near future should I deem them as holding promise). And I swear that I have no intention of abandoning any story I put up, they may go on a hiatus (such as this one went on an unannounced one), in which case I will endeavor to give some announcement in the future, but they will eventually be finished.

Also I will be going over the preceding chapters to fix errors I noticed while reading over to bring myself back up to speed, and standardize the formatting so if you look at them and something seems different know that nothing has changed except layout and error correction

PS: Currently I am having to read over everything myself and would appreciate it if someone would be willing to act as a beta/idea board