"Heh, so, it's over then?" asked one of the bridge officers, looking out over the scene before him. Ahead of them was the Terran fleet, broken and battered, but still there. A few ships had exploded for unknown reasons, but others held strong, and their boarding parties, while being immune to the energy weapons of their foes as promised, were being beaten back by more mundane means. The bridge had gone quiet when one of the incoming reports had been cut off as the one giving it had been stepped on by a Terran girl.
"This shouldn't have happened! How did they adapt so quickly?!" demanded the admiral in his chair, kicking the station beside him. Around him, a few of the officers had opinions, but didn't voice them. Foremost among them was that the assault had been foolish from the start. Attacking a Terran world, even if they could hold it, was never going to end well for the Hegemony. They would have faced the enemy's counterstroke regardless of how well this assault went, and the special weapons and defenses given to them by Leviathan Command were not yet ubiquitous. Heck, most of them were here, in this fleet.
"Your orders sir?" asked some brave commander as he turned to face the admiral. The four eyed face fumed with rage at the officer, but after a few seconds of heavy breathing, he decided. Giving a few commands, he set the fleet on a slow course out of the system. So far, it didn't appear that the Terrans knew where they were, and if they could get back to the relay before they were spotted, they could escape back to home, and hopefully prepare for whatever counterattack the Terrans would launch for this assault on one of their worlds.
OoOoO
The climb to the bridge deck took only seconds, as Jane slid out of the tube. Her sword in her hand glistened with blood, hungry to drink more, as she spotted a few batarian mechs still holding out at the end of the corridor. They appeared to be trading fire with a squad of Terran marines, armed with their own blades, who kept pressing them back, but only just, as the return fire drove the Terrans to cover positions, while the threat of their blades kept the batarians from growing much closer.
Smirking, the girl advanced down the corridor slowly, her foot falls quiet, despite her weight, allowing her to get just behind one of the two mechs. The soldiers, seeing her, acted like you would expect. Namely they began to whoop, holler, and otherwise start insulting the four eyed bastards, keeping their attention solely focused on the soldiers in front, so their first warning of someone behind them was a sword neatly slicing its way through the back of one of them, emerging from the other side covered in gore.
She wasn't done yet, however, as she'd timed the slice so that just as she pushed it through, the other mech was firing, and with a hard pull, she was able to turn the destroid to the side, the other pilot only just able to see his doom, before the guns of his partner began to tear their way through the unit. As Jon had said, the layered barriers were great against protoculture based weaponry. Against kinetic weapons, like the slugs being fired now, the barriers began to buckle almost instantly, the glass and armor following soon after, and leaving the second unit a pile of destroyed parts, even as the first unit's guns finally overheated and melted to slag.
"Jane, what are you doing here? You're mother ordered you to an escape pod," said one of the five soldiers as she approached them. It was odd, seeing the men and women she was used to seeing in their armor in bare skin. But she quickly adapted, turning to the man who'd spoken, a slightly taller than average Terran(Almost eighty feet in height), and still seemed to face him down despite her not coming up past his stomach.
"I have some intel from the surface the captain needs to know. Also some new plans she might want to act on," he told them, and the five soldiers, all enlisted rather than officers, just looked at each other. They then all decided silently that this was officer stuff, and made to escort her the rest of the way to the bridge, emerging on a scene that could easily be described as organized chaos. Around them, officers were shouting, displays were showing entire libraries worth of information, and in the center was the captain, doing her best to take it all in and give the appropriate orders.
Most of the news was less than encouraging. They were winning, sure, but at a cost. Hundreds on every ship had been cut down before they'd known to take off their armor and rely on their swords rather than their guns. Worse, some ships had been invaded by idiots, who took no care as to what they destroyed. Protoculture engines weren't like the generators the batarians were used to. When you broke one of those, all the energy stored inside exploded outward in a sphere of destruction, and it seemed spheres of that nature had claimed far too many lives today, including most of the upper command structure for the fleet.
"We have confirmation, Captain Aldaris' ship has been destroyed as well," said one of the AIs from his station, his hologram directly touching the monitor in front of him as he linked with it. Behind him, Hannah Shepard used an entire array of curses. The chain of command was becoming a frayed rope of command, as these gaps kept appearing.
"Find out who's in charge of this fleet then. We need orders, and we need them now!" she shouted, looking towards another display.
"Ma'am, we have confirmed kills on all but half a dozen of our own borders. Those few stragglers are holding out in blind corridors or other tight spaces," shouted another voice, this one a lieutenant by his stripes.
"Good, keep them in there for now. See about pumping in some heat from our engines into whatever rooms they've found themselves trapped in. I've been wondering what roasted four eyes taste like for a while," she told them, turning at last to the door that had opened behind her, and then freezing.
"Mom," said Jane, giving a salute, and Hannah just stared, before getting that 'I'm in charge' look on her face that any enlisted person knew. The five who had been escorting the young Miss Shepard quickly made themselves scarce, running into the corridor outside and retaking their guard positions, just in case one of those last boarders somehow found their way onto the command deck.
"Jane, I thought I ordered you off this ship," she said, a statement of fact rather than a question.
"You did ma'am, but new information came to light that required your review," said Jane calmly, and Hannah silently gauged her for a moment, before motioning her to approach the Captain's chair.
"What new information could have come to you that I wouldn't know about?" she asked as the young girl stepped up to her.
"Jon called me, and he had some intel on the ground situation," began Jane.
"Go on," said Hannah, motioning for her daughter to continue her report.
"Jon said he devised a modification to the overload program that disabled their ground troops. What's more, he's also disabling their mechs on the surface with some of those chakram things he was throwing around for his act in the show this afternoon," she explained, and her mother seemed to take this in as she would anything else.
"Jon is a nine year old boy," said Hannah at last, as if this were some kind of argument against her son's word.
"He's a Shepard," retorted Jane, and after a few seconds of thought, the older woman nodded.
"He's also got a plan on how to deal with the ships that launched those knives," said Jane, walking over towards one of the targeting stations.
"Jon believes that they would have to be close, since the jamming field isn't that large, a few light seconds at most. Knowing that, and the fact that we know the angles those knives came in on, we should be able to hit those ships with a few blind fires," she began, while the officer allowed her to toy with the controls for a moment, pulling up a situation report from the time the knives were detected, and then overlaying some firing angles on their point of origin.
"Even if they were launched from ships we can't see, why would they stick around in the place where they launched from?" asked the lieutenant whose station Jane had co opted.
"Because they'd still be mass effect ships. That means heat, and a lot of it, so they've got to be using some kind of massive heat sinks to keep themselves cool and hidden from us. It also means that any time they fire up their engines, they put a lot of strain on that system. Right now they're probably hoping we'll give them up for runners, and then be able to sneak away later," she answered.
"Makes sense. But what good will knowing where they are do us? If even a few of their ships are using this new barrier system those knife ships were, and let's not kid ourselves, they probably all are, we'd do almost no damage to them without kinetic weapons, and we wasted all our missiles," countered the lieutenant.
"We could perform a Deadalus Maneuver, use whole ships as big rams and smash them through whatever forces are out there," explained Jane.
"If they stayed put for it, I'd say go for it, but what makes Jon think they would?" asked Hannah, putting a voice to the concern of the lieutenant and the listening bridge crew.
"The same reason they wouldn't be moving fast. Their ships have got to be operating at low power mode, to preserve their heat. It would take them a few minutes to spin up to speed. If we get every ship in the fleet to assist, we hopefully will have enough battering rams to bust up their fleet. If not, we'll at least make them more wary about trying this trick against anyone else," explained the thirteen year old girl. It was implicit in her tone what she meant by that last bit. This could well end in death for them all, and yet, a death now to prevent the same in the future, that was how the Federation Fleet worked.
"It's as good a plan as I'm hearing. Alright, patch me through to the fleet," ordered Hannah, motioning for her daughter to take a station near her that had been unmanned, as the tactical officer that had supposed to be sitting there was one of those caught off the bridge, and likely dead in the boarding action.
"This is Captain Hannah Shepard to all functioning Federation ships in Rannoch orbit. If you're hearing this, we're starting to gain ground on those four eyed bastards on the planet and up here, by all reports. However, they still must have a fleet out there, hidden somehow from us. We're not gonna let that fleet go without giving them a black eye, however," a few grunts of approval at her tone came from around the bridge.
"I want all ships to fire in a strobing pattern at the area within four degrees of the appearance points of the boarding craft. If our intel is good, most of their hidden fleet should still be around there. Everything cruiser weight and up should prepare for a Daedalus Maneuver, as it's the only thing we've got to throw at them that might get through. I want all vertiechs to launch as well. Even if you've got no missiles, these new barriers of theirs have proven weak against melee attacks. That means I want to see a lot of punching and kicking out there," she ordered, and then waited. After a few seconds, multiple bleeps from her console said the fleet was prepping to follow her orders.
"Alright, sync now, and we go in one minute. All ships unable to perform Daedalus should clear out. I'm afraid you won't be much help today. But you can be damn sure that this isn't the last shot you'll get at the four eyes," she ordered, and then waited. Targeting computers traded data, AIs began to work together to create a firing pattern that would make best use of all resources, and a countdown began to appear on every monitor. It ticked down, almost slowly, from sixty, down to zero, and as that O filled the screen, lines of light flew from reflex turrets, into space.
More than ninety nine out of one hundred shots sailed through space, dispersing themselves after a few light seconds into nothing but background radiation that wouldn't be dangerous to anyone. One out of every hundred, however, found a target, splashing against barriers in most cases, though in a few those beams tore into hulls, the liquid energy spreading over the metal and exploding it outward into space, creating a backlight to the view the Terran fleet had, of more than a thousand ships in front of them.
The formation was typical of a Citadel fleet. One large command ship in the center, with wings in V formation around it. Said big ship was a dreadnaught, on par with any of the ships that remained in the Terran fleet when it came to size. The rest varied, from cruisers to frigates, all of them now exposed as heat signatures to their enemies. Said heat signatures soon became mass, and with them revealed, a monitor could zoom in on them, revealing the oddity that these ships had in common.
Said oddity was a bulb shaped apparatus that every ship had behind them. A quick look at a thermograph proved these bulbs to be the source of their ability to shed waste heat, as the things were thermically dead, only visible due to the light from the few ships that hadn't had their barriers up exploding. They soon got hotter though, as the ships began to dump the pods, and then grow warmer as their engines started to spin up, allowing every vessel in the Terran fleet to pick their targets.
"The big one is mine, everyone else, let loose the dogs of war!" shouted Shepard, and the engines of her own ship began firing. Outside, her cruisers pinpoint defense barriers flew over the hull, before gathering at the front, becoming a single shining force of light as the ship tore through space. Ahead of them the enemy ships obviously saw what was coming, as some tried desperately to shift course, opening air locks to give themselves slight pushes. It was all for naught, as the Terran ships corrected for their miniscule shifts almost instantly.
Some ships in the enemy fleet had other plans, however, and as the Terran fleet came close, they let loose with their weapons. Most fired impotent shots, mass effect accelerated slugs that either bounced off the pinpoint barriers, or impacted the hulls only to scrape along the side without doing significant damage. A few ships had better weapons, though. Beams of red light speared out from their cannons, and the Terran ships found themselves cut to pieces by them when they weren't intercepted by the pinpoint barriers.
"Those are the same weapons that took out or missiles," commented one of the bridge staff, as nearby, another cruiser exploded in a ball of blue light.
"Indeed, some sort of counter to our own protoculture weapons," acknowledged Hannah, as she watched one of the ships beside her get a good angle, and fire their reflex turret right into one of the red beams. The result was interesting, as the protoculture quickly overcame whatever was inside the red beam, slicing back along the path it had made, before impacting against the cannon that had fired it, annihilating the ship in an orgy of kinetic violence, even as every Terran ship that saw it tried to match the feat.
Few ships had angles like that, especially as the enemy shifted their courses, their drives slowly powering up to allow the to move. Still, both fleets were reeling with losses as the Terran ships made contact, their barriers slamming straight into the batarians, and creating crackles of lightning at the meeting points. Shepard watched for that one horrid instance as it seemed that the barriers of their enemy would hold, only to shout victoriously as the barrier on the enemy vessel finally gave out, and they crashed into them with the sound of ripping metal and tearing deck plates.
Monitors showed ships, material, and personnel being crushed against the pinpoint barrier as it rammed through them. Some faces were frozen in fear, others in rage, but when it came down to it, the four eyes all died just the same, and when the battering ram that was Shepard's cruiser hit the eezo core in the other ships belly, it literally blew apart with the collapse of its mass effect field. Around them, that same scene played out a dozen times over, the batarian fleet falling into a few divergent flight plans, as their engines finally came online.
The Terran fleet was in bad shape as well, however. Cruisers, veritechs, and support ships littered the space between where the fleet had begun, and their target. Some were still operating, their guns still firing at the enemy, impotently. Most were simply glittering clouds of star stuff now. Of the nine hundred ships that had begun the charge, only five hundred had made impact, and now the enemy was flying free, their red beams slicing through decks and hull with ease.
"Ma'am, our fleet strength is down to twenty-seven percent of the original. Totals of their fleet gives similar results, but given our situation, that still puts them in a superior tactical position," said one of the officers, and Captain Shepard nodded, watching out of the ports as those valiant crews that had followed her command were cut down. Luckily for them, Daedalus was not a weapon used lightly, as it drained all but emergency protoculture engines, leaving the ships dead in space. That meant that as the beams tore through them, none of the ships that had smashed into the batarian line exploded in blue light. Whether a quick death beat one of a slow thousand cuts was up to the individual, but she felt it would give them all that much more time to make peace.
"I'm sorry, honey. I don't think we'll be seeing your brother or father again," said Hannah to her daughter, and Jane nodded.
"I figured. I already told Jon to take care of dad. He'll never be as strong as me, but he is brilliant," said Jane, and Hannah almost wanted to laugh at that absurdity. A nine year old taking care of a grown man. Then she thought about the fact that this entire strategy, that had at least taken some of the fire out of the batarians, was her son's. That boy would grow up to be something special, and she smiled at her daughter, reaching out her hand to take it, even as beams of red light tore into their hull.
"Are we too late to this party?" suddenly came a voice over the open comms, and every head shot towards the display that showed local space. In it, their own blue ships of various shapes were surrounded by the enemy, who pounded against them with their weapons, while always flying away before a counter strike could be fired. Then, like a swarm of avenging angels, yellow glowing blips appeared at the edge of their sensors, hundreds of them, all taking firing positions, and flying just as fast as the red blips.
"This is Heavy Fleet Command, to the Rannoch Defensive Fleet. We will be engaging the enemy fleet momentarily," said a much older voice, and then suddenly the red ships began to wink out. As surmised, the layered barriers were fantastic against protoculture weapons, but proved quite weak to mass effect based ones. More than half the red ships were down in the first pass, and those that remained seemed to spin in place unsure of what to do, before a second salvo of fire slammed into them, and suddenly, the sky over Rannoch was clear of enemies.
"This is Captain Hannah Shepard to Heavy Fleet. We owe you our thanks," she said as the battle wound down to its conclusion, her ship, battered but still functional, soon displaying the face of her rescuer on screen.
"And we owe you Terrans for defending our home below. We'll start tracking the source of the fold jammer, once that's done, we'll get rescue ships to your positions as soon as possible, please stand by," said the quarian commander. Minutes later, one of the smaller ships that had continued to play dead was discovered to be the center of the field, and was promptly ordered to surrender or die. The crew of the ship chose the former, and the instant that field dropped, thousands of new vessels folded in around Rannoch. The battle was over. War would not be far behind, however.