Smoke on the Water
by P.H. Wise
A Mass Effect/XCOM Crossover Fanfic

Interlude 02: Second Shanxi

Disclaimer: I own neither Mass Effect (EA) nor XCOM (God only knows). This chapter covers the Second Battle of Shanxi and its associated ground invasion. If you despair of the thought of reading yet another Mass Effect crossover that addresses this plot point in exhausting detail, its author once more treading upon very well trod ground, then I welcome you to the club. Membership will cost you one shiny penny, and will allow you to read or skip this chapter as you please. The rest of you, enjoy.

It was a strange feeling, knowing the star system was under siege without the ability to respond effectively to it. When the alien fleet had first arrived in the Sanmenxia system, General Paul Williams had damn near had a heart attack; they'd come in at FTL speeds in realspace, completely ignored the hyperlimit, blown right past the system picket (whose hyperwave warning only gave them minutes of advance notice), and hadn't slowed until they were in attack range of Shanxi itself. To make matters worse, his flagship, the only battleship assigned to the Shanxi garrison fleet - the SSV Sun Wukong - had been undergoing refit at the Shanxi orbital shipyards: a refit that had begun two months prior to the arrival of the aliens, and was expected to take at least another week from the day of the battle to be completed.

The human race had been caught with its pants down. And the hell of it was that after those skirmishes at the Shanxi-Theta Gate, they'd known it was coming, and still hadn't been able to properly prepare for it.

General Williams had done the best he could with what he had, and he'd driven off the attackers, though not without cost. They'd lost 15 of their defense satellites, and though his tactical officers had redeployed the other satellites to try to make up for the reduced coverage, it was still a significant reduction in ability. Much worse than that were the ship losses. They'd lost four destroyers and a frigate outright. Of those, the frigate and one of the destroyers had been lost with all hands. Rescue operations had recovered survivors from the other three wrecks, but fewer than they'd hoped for. Four more destroyers and a cruiser had been mission-killed, but were able to limp away under their own power. The cruiser needed at least six weeks worth of repairs. One of the destroyers had so much damage that building an entirely new ship to replace it would only be marginally less expensive. The other three were expected to be up and running again within a fortnight. All told, that put 10 ships out of commission: Some permanently, some just for the immediate future. Those were 10 ships he couldn't afford to lose.

About the only upside to the whole bloody affair was that, ton for ton, aside from the alien FTL drive, Alliance ships outclassed the aliens. General Williams would have felt a lot better about that if he'd actually had an equivalent amount of tonnage. Unfortunately, the alien FTL drive more than made up the difference.

It was now nearly a week after the battle, and the refit on the SSV Sun Wukong had only just finished. It helped, being here in his own CIC and not sitting in a cruiser. Williams had sent for reinforcements immediately after the incident at the Gate, and again after the battle, but Shanxi was a ways out from most of the Alliance fleet bases. A carrier group dispatched after the initial skirmishes at the Shanxi-Theta Gate had arrived, thank God, bringing with it the SSV Einstein, a pair of cruisers outfitted for long range missile exchanges, two destroyers, a frigate, and perhaps even more valuable, several transports full of supplies. More ships were on their way, but Williams was inclined to believe that they wouldn't get here in time.

He had frigates scouting for the alien fleet, and the outer system picket was still in place at the hyperlimit, but he didn't expect to get anything more than he'd gotten last time: a few minutes warning before an attack.

Williams wasn't a tall man: he was only about 170 centimeters tall in his boots, but he was the sort of person who carried authority well; there was no ridiculous alpha male posturing here; Paul Williams was a man who knew that authority was not a thing to be grasped, but easily and effortlessly held; when he walked into a room, he was in charge, and that was all. He was an extremely fit man, with not even an ounce of fat on his muscular frame. He wore the gold-trimmed blue uniform of the Alliance, and both his slowly receding hair and his eyes were brown. His skin was a light coffee color, and his features showed a mix of Castilian and Aztlani heritage. There was no actual need for him to actually walk down to Alien Containment, but he enjoyed walking; it helped him think, and it didn't interfere with the exercise of his duties.

People came to attention and saluted as he passed, giving a few variations on, "Good afternoon, sir." General Williams returned greetings and salutes alike as he walked purposefully through the ship's corridors, occasionally making use of his Augmented Reality display to attend to a report that required his attention, and pausing only to board the lift that would take him to the medical deck.

Presently he came to Alien Containment. The guards at the door saluted, and he returned their salute. The doors hissed open, and he entered without additional fanfare. It was a pleasantly open space, or gave the illusion thereof, making use of vertical space to and tiered levels. There were three main areas to the facility: the actual containment cells intended to house an x-ray in the long term, a section housing a trio of interrogation-operating suites, and the monitoring area. Security in this area was high; the guards wore full powered armor suits and carried heavy arc-guns intended for riot suppression.

Most ships didn't bother with an alien containment facility anymore: Just battleships and carriers. There wasn't a pressing need for them, or there hadn't been; the Alliance hadn't run into a sapient alien species since the First Contact War, let alone a hostile one. Maybe that would change, now.

Williams hoped not. The place gave him the creeps.

Doctor Kwang Jinshu was in the central interrogation/operating suite. All three were in use, today, and the cells were full of x-rays captured from alien wrecks, from recovered escape pods, and abandoned fighter craft.

The x-ray he'd been working on was an ugly bastard. They all were. Six foot five, maybe, with strangely metallic skin. It had hands with two long fingers and an opposable thumb, each tipped with talons. When it opened its mouth, it revealed a set of vicious-looking mandibles and sharp, predator's teeth. It was a slender creature, and something about it said 'avian' to him.

The interrogation of a live alien was an unpleasant thing to watch. The new mind probes were far gentler than Doctor Vahlen's original techniques, but that was a statement of the same order as, "Being stabbed in the belly is less unpleasant than being vivisected'; they still required a direct access to the subject's brain. It was still a barbaric act, and for all that Williams could see its necessity, it turned his stomach.

The x-ray was screaming. There was no sound, but he could see it making the effort all the same. It was strapped to the table, its skull opened to the world, the neural probes plugged directly into its brain tissue as Doctor Kwang and a pair of analysts conducted their interrogation.

"Hello, old man," General Williams said, his commlink automatically connecting to the internal speakers of the operating suite in response to his intention to speak.

Doctor Kwang brightened. He looked up with a smile, and it touched his eyes. "Not so old anymore," he said amiably, his English extremely precise for all that his Chinese accent was quite distinct. And he wasn't old; he didn't look a day over 30, and it was weird; reversion had only become widely available a year and a half ago, and though they'd had plenty of time to prepare as a society for the reality of effective biological immortality, knowing it was coming and actually seeing an elderly man who had been like a father to Paul Williams grow younger before his very eyes were two very different things. People were born. They grew up. They grew old. They died. There was a natural order: A cycle of life and death. And the human race had taken a look at that seemingly fundamental part of their existence and declared, "We can do better."

Death was an engineering problem, and MELD had solved a large part of it. Not that people couldn't still die, but they would never again die of old age.

Paul still hadn't quite adjusted mentally to the new reality. He also hadn't reverted yet. He was 53, and comfortable with it. He had children and grandchildren. And one day, perhaps soon, he would be a man in his prime once more.

The Doctor went on, "I wasn't expecting you, Paul," he said, "but we're just about done here. Give me a few minutes to finish up, and I'll be right out."

The general nodded good naturedly. "Take your time," he said, and didn't look too closely at the x-ray, who was still screaming; no sound came from its lips. How long it would have had to been screaming in order to damage its vocal cords to that extent he didn't know.

Five minutes later, Kwang Jinshu came out of the interrogation/operating suite, took off his gloves, and shook the general's hand.

"Birdmen," Paul said dubiously.

Doctor Kwang smiled. "Distinctly humanoid birdmen. Not quite what we were expecting. You'd think evolution would have more variety than that." A shrug. "And maybe it does. Maybe between us, the ethereals, the sectoids, the floaters and the mutons, we're all the humanoid species in the galaxy, and everything else is distinctly alien. We can hope, at least. Nature's imagination is much greater than man's."

"What about the thin men?"

Doctor Kwang made a dismissive gesture. "Genetically engineered infiltrators made to resemble humans. They don't count."

Paul had to smile at that. "Fair enough," he said. "So what can you tell me about the x-rays?"

Kwang turned to consider the alien on the table, with the mind-probe still directly plugged into his exposed brain tissue. "We're still working to translate from their language into ours. We've got a rudimentary knowledge of it, but every one of them we examine like this helps us to refine it. We know that they're called turians. This one's name is Daceus Cyprian."

"Sounds like Latin," Paul said.

"A bit, yes. Many of the phonemes and grammatical structures are similar. The chances of that happening by accident are pretty low." Doctor Kwang shrugged, gesturing to indicate uncertainty. "Then again, someone always wins the lottery."

"Do we have anything yet that will help us plan for when their fleet returns?"

Doctor Kwang nodded. "I believe so. Combat doctrines. Information on how their technology is used. The engineering teams can probably tell you more about that, though. I should have a full report ready for you in a few hours, at least as far as the medical side of things is concerned. But if I'm going to have that ready, I should really get to writing it. I have a great deal of information to compile."

Paul nodded. "I look forward to reading it," he took in Kwang's newly thirty-something appearance and smiled ruefully, "Old man."

Kwang's eyes twinkled with amusement and he turned back to his work; Paul Williams saw himself out.

As promised, the report was on his desk two hours later, along with an extensive report from the engineers who had been examining the alien technology. He loaded the Augmented Reality objects into his commlink and began to review the information his people had provided.

It did not fill him with hope.

It began with the outer-system probes. One by one, they began to go dark. A few relayed the image of a Turian ship in their final moments, but most just stopped. Commander Zhao Mei-Ling of the frigate Shen Yang, head of the outer system picket, had known this would be a bad day when it began, but neither she nor her crew had anticipated exactly how bad. They were on course for the last known coordinates of Outer System Reconnaissance Probe 492, their sensor suite set to active mode, scanning all approach vectors about two light-seconds short of the hyperlimit.

Shen Yang was one of the new Shènglì class frigates. Built under the authority of the Chinese government for use in the Systems Alliance Navy, it was nearly 120 meters from stem to stern, with a beam on the order of 14, and, loadout dependent, massed about 8,000 tons. Shènglìs were the fastest hyperspace-capable ships in the alliance, and though their weapons loadout left something to be desired, their sensory capability was unmatched.

The enemy came screaming in at hyperluminal velocities; they had all of a few seconds warning before the Turian ship decelerated out of FTL, snapping down to conventional velocities with a suddenness that seemed impossible, and well beyond anything seen in previous engagements. Only the fact that running with shields active was standard procedure saved the Shen Yang from instant destruction. The turian frigate opened fire with its spinal-mounted cannon, and the first shot was deflected just enough by the gravitic shielding that it went wide of the Shen Yang's hull. The Shen Yang responded almost instantly, rolling to present its broadside turrets to the turian frigate, but even as it did so, the frigate darted to the side like a demented space-age hummingbird.

It was too fast. Insanely fast. It was able to cancel its own momentum seemingly at will; the only thing in the Alliance arsenal that could do the same was the fusion ball, and the technology that made that possible had never been successfully scaled up, though why that was Zhao did not know. Plasma fire criss-crossed the spot where the Turian frigate had been only a split-second earlier, and it fired again, and again, relocating to a seemingly random position each time, utterly heedless of where mass and momentum said it should be moving.

The third shot from the turian spinal mounted mass driver struck the Shen Yang amidships, and her armor buckled. The fifth damaged a drive pod. And then, exactly 2 minutes and 16 seconds after the engagement had begun, the turian ship spun completely around and accelerated at full burn away from the Shen Yang, rapidly accelerated up to FTL speeds, and was gone.

It was only the first of many engagements. Over the next four hours, every ship of the outer system picket faced combat at least once, some twice. They came it at varying angles and engaged at varying distances, every single one demonstrating that utterly insane level of maneuverability that outstripped what they had shown in orbit of Shanxi by an order of magnitude. Every single time, the Turian ships retreated at exactly 2 minutes, 16 seconds, each one radiating significant amounts of heat by the end of the engagement.

The picket began to pull back, moving towards the inner system. As they moved back, the turians destroyed the probes and hyperwave relays in the outer system, and the sensor networks went dark. They lost ground by degrees, accruing more and more damage, losing more and more ships; at the twelfth hour, General Williams ordered the system picked back to Shanxi. There was no point in losing more ships. By the time it was over, two frigates in the outer system picket had been crippled, another destroyed, and the rest had taken significant damage. In return, they had managed to destroy only a single Turian frigate.

Commander Zhao obeyed General Williams' orders; as the system picket fled from the invaders, she tried not to grind her teeth in frustration.

At 1500 hours on the day after the system picket's retreat, Doctor Benjamin Shen went over his notes one last time as he made his way to the communications room for his meeting. He could have just used his commlink, but he didn't want to deal with the lag that would come with that. Not for a real time conversation with General Williams.

The Shen-Valen Technologies campus at the Shanxi colony was a spartan affair - it had only been completed a few months prior, and most of the surfaces still gleamed. He never did like a workshop that gleamed. The nanoforges were humming along in their containment chambers on either side of the main workshop floor, which was dominated by several large robotic construction platforms. A dozen 3D printer stations lined the walls. There were people at work here, and in the adjacent rooms, most still examining some piece of Turian technology, or trying to build their own version of it with the knowledge gained by previous examination. He paid none of this any mind, intent upon his goal: the door at the far end of the workshop floor. He walked through it, down a short corridor lined with doors, passing several of his colleagues in the hall, and finally stepped through the doors of the communications room.

"... I'm telling you, we lost a hell of a lot in the Evacuation," said a man's voice that he recognized as belonging to one of the mechanical engineers who worked for him - Eduardo Delvientos. A good man, and good at his job, but he liked to argue, and he was one of those people who seemed to know a hell of a lot about just about everything. "I'm not saying the move wasn't necessary, but we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what we lost in the process."

"Oh, God," said another man. "Not this Earth nostalgia again. Whatever we lost, it was worth it. Hell, most of the people we left behind on Earth were the religious nutballs who thought our technology was sinful or some bullshit, right? No big loss." And that was Eduardo's brother, Alejandro. Very much his twin's opposite in temperament and not particularly impressed with him, but the two made a hell of a team.

"No big loss?" Eduardo sounded slightly offended at that. "Alejandro, before the Evacuation, we had almost 7,000 languages. Now we've got, what, a hundred and twenty? A hundred and thirty?"

"Still too many," Alejandro groused. "We should just pick a common language and stick with it."

"Most of those languages had some pretty amazing literature associated with them. All gone, now. We lost more than that when the nanotech started rolling out. Even more with MELD."

"Bullshit," Alejandro snapped. "There is no way you can convince me that MELD was a bad thing."

"We lost our sign languages. We lost Deaf Culture. Happened inside a generation after we figured out how to give hearing to the deaf. You remember how those people were protesting when the Alliance made those treatments mandatory for any kid entering kindergarten after the Evacuation? They knew. Gone in a generation."

Alejandro shrugged uncomfortably. "Seems like we got plenty of good out of the trade."

"They didn't believe there was anything wrong with them that needed to be fixed. We fixed them anyways. And that's not even going into the religion thing. We used to have 4,200 religions. Now we've got maybe a hundred at best? We don't even have information about most of those except the names. Unless they were used in a prominent work of fiction or something. You have any idea what kind of cultural loss that is?"

Alejandro shook his head, "You're making it sound like we haven't gained anything in the exchange. We might be less than we were in some ways, but we're way better off in..."

Benjamin cleared his throat. The conversation immediately stopped, and the eyes of both men snapped to him.

"Doctor Shen," Alejandro said.

"We were just…" Eduardo began.

"Talking," Alejandro finished.

Shen nodded, the ghost of a smile touching the corners of his lips. "So I see. I need the room, gentlemen."

Both nodded. "Yeah," Eduardo said. "Sure. We should get back to work, anyways. See you around, boss."

They left, and Shen tried not to think about the topic of their conversation. It was something his parents had been concerned would happen, but neither had seen a way to avoid it. Hell, all they had of most of the famous works of art from Earth were pictures. A few had made it to Mars, and expeditions to Earth were recovering that sort of thing all the time, but… He shook his head, dismissing the thoughts from his mind.

He had far more important things to do. So did his people, for that matter. He couldn't be wool-gathering. He stepped into the holo-field and initiated the transmission to the Sun Wukong.

A three dimensional virtual space unfolded around him. He was in General William's office aboard the ship. The general himself was waiting for him. "Tell me you have something I can use," he said.

Benjamin Shen smiled. "General," he said politely.

General Williams abruptly seemed to recognize him, and he straightened. "Doctor Shen," he said. There was a note of surprise in his voice.

"General Williams," Doctor Benjamin Shen said, "I have something for you." He gestured. With his gesture a second video image appeared, this one depicting the initial battle in orbit of Shanxi. Below it were a number of charts and tables measuring the performance of various weaponry against the aliens. "So you already know the Turians have shields that work pretty damn well against our plasma weapons. I think we've figured out how they work." He bared his teeth in a smile. "And how to break them."

"Doctor," Williams said, "You have my undivided attention."

"So the Turians are pretty much in the same boat as us. They got their technology from another species. For us it was the Ethereals. For them, the Protheans. We have Elerium. They have what we're calling 'element zero,' and an associated phenomenon that translates, near as we can tell, as 'mass effect.' I'm not going to bore you with the technical details. Basically, their shields create a repulsive mass effect field that blocks kinetic weaponry. Something massive can punch through without too much trouble. So can something that hits with a lot of force. Plasma weapons don't do either. They're basically balls of superheated, ionized gas in an electromagnetic sheath. Long story short, our plasma guns just don't have the punch to blast through without some serious concentration of fire. But my teams and I think we've found a better way."

Shen paused a moment before going on. "The turian ship design is pretty standardized. They have three main ship types which we believe match to our battleship, cruiser, and destroyer types. We've seen one of their battleships, one class of cruiser and two classes of destroyer. They've got one specialized for recon, but it's the same size as the other, so we're not calling it a frigate. The other seems designed for fleet escort duties. They're all built the same way, and we've had people going over every single inch of those wrecks in orbit since the second the battle ended." He made a gesture, and two partial ship schematics appeared in the air next to him, replacing the previous information displayed. "These are the primary kinetic barrier generators for the Turian cruisers and for their fleet escort type destroyer. Our ship to ship lasers go through the shields like they're not even there. Hit them in the spots I've highlighted, and they lose their shields. They have backups, but they're nowhere near as good. Once the barriers go down, hit them with all the plasma you can, and the birds will have themselves a real bad day"

Williams nodded thoughtfully. "It'll give us an edge in the next fleet battle. If they ever give us another fleet battle. But with that damned FTL drive of theirs, there's no reason for them not to just keep whittling us down with lightning raids."

"Not much I can do about the FTL drive," Shen said. "We're doing a joint build with the Systems Alliance engineers to put together a prototype to test a reverse engineered version of the alien propulsion system, but even with the knowledge we've pulled out of turian minds about how this technology works, we can only go so fast. Give us a month and we'll have a working prototype. Give us two, and we'll be ready to start installing these drives in ships of the line."

Williams shook his head. "We may not have that long,"

"We're doing the best we can, general," Shen said.

"Do better."

Doctor Shen raised an eyebrow. "Just like that?"

"It's that or die," Williams said.

Well. That put things in perspective, didn't it? Shen laughed, but the humor was a dark, morbid thing. "We'll do everything we can," he said. "Sending you the file now, General." He flicked an Augmented Reality object the General's way. It downloaded to the man's commlink after a brief pause for his authorization. The meeting went on another five minutes, but everything of importance had already been said: They would do everything they could. God willing, it would be enough.

Two weeks passed as the turian fleet tightened the noose. Two weeks of constant frustration, of gnashing teeth, of understanding exactly what the enemy was doing and why, but being powerless to stop him.

Now that they'd actually had time to figure out the technology - helped in no small part by their mind-probing of captured turians - there were no longer many mysteries to the behavior of the turian fleet. Systems Alliance ships were superior to their turian equivalents in every respect except for the turian ability to alter their mass at will. Williams knew it, and the turian admiral clearly knew it as well: it was why he was exploiting the living hell out of the one advantage he had. And the hell of it was, that advantage might just be enough. It had been two weeks of lightning raids, of maneuver and counter-maneuver, of every single probe in the whole damn system going dark and every outpost save Shanxi itself falling to the turian advance. He'd lost another pair of frigates during the system picket's retreat; then a convoy of civilian transports under the authority of Edgars Industries had the bad luck to arrive at the hyperlimit at exactly the worst possible time. Williams and his forces had been able to do little but watch as the turians captured the civilian ships, making off with vital supplies that otherwise would have come to Shanxi.

It wasn't all bad news, though - the performance of the turian ships had begun to degrade as they got closer to the star. Out near the hyper-limit, they were as close to godlike as he had ever seen. Closer to the star - and closer to Shanxi - they were just plain annoyingly nimble. And reinforcements were coming. The skipper of the SSV Einstein had told him that much: the 12th fleet was being assembled and would be here in another week. His job was to make sure Shanxi lasted that long. Damn it, how was he even in this position? He was a ground pounder. An army general. He had no business commanding a fleet, but he was all there was. No one had anticipated Shanxi seeing serious combat; a full fleet had not yet been assigned to the sector, and there was no admiral to lead it into battle. Just him.

Williams had made good use of his time; every ground position had been reinforced, civilian bombardment shelters made ready, every preparation had been made. Prospects for defeating a fleet already in orbit of your world were poor, but he knew he had to give the people on the ground every possible chance in the event that his fleet fell or was driven off.

So far, with the exception of the initial assault, the turian commander - Desolace - hadn't made any mistakes. Unless he did, Williams was pretty sure he was going to lose this. Williams couldn't afford to send significant fleet elements away from the orbit of Shanxi. If he did, the aliens would have free reign on the planet and the civilian population. And while he had reason to believe the turians would refrain from bombarding civilian centers if those centers were empty of military targets, he did not relish the thought of leaving a human population at the mercy of an alien fleet.

"Battle stations. Battle stations. All orbital forces to battle stations. All fleet assets to battle stations." The words echoed through every ship in the Systems Alliance fleet as weapons went hot and shields went from navigational to full combat power draw.

Then nothing.

Waiting and not knowing were the worst parts of battle. The long silences between sorties, waiting for sensor returns to confirm the enemy position, waiting for the enemy fleet to arrive, waiting to see if your salvo connected with what you fired it at.

Waiting to die when the incoming salvo struck home.

As he surveyed a holographic three dimensional map of the Sanmenxia system, Paul Williams showed no sign of his frustration in his bearing or in his expression. A General had an image to maintain. With the majority of the outer system probes and relay stations destroyed, most of the map was now subject to speed-of-light lag.

And the Turians were coming. They'd detected the fleet beginning its acceleration towards Shanxi about ten minutes ago from a point about 40 light-minutes out. Which meant they could arrive at any moment. Intelligence had already calculated a dozen different courses the Turian fleet might take, ranked in order of probability. The least-time course had already proven false, and when the Turians hadn't arrived, the probabilities assigned to the others were recalculated, and several more possibilities were added to the list. The defensive fleet could not position itself to cover every possible entry point, but their formation allowed a reasonable response to the most likely.

The addition of the carrier group had been a huge boon to the Shanxi garrison fleet, fully replacing the losses they had taken in the initial battle and then some. The completion of the SSV Sun Wukong's refit had also helped, and the fleet now consisted of one battleship one carrier, 5 standard cruisers, 2 missile cruisers, 27 frigates, and 24 destroyers. 17 of those frigates had been assigned to the outer system picket in the previous engagement, but were now drawn back to Shanxi in light of the Turian fleet's extreme mobility advantage. They had not been able to get a complete count of the Turian fleet, but their best intelligence suggested it was at least twice the size of the fleet that initially assaulted Shanxi.

The Turian fleet showed up on the human sensors about ten seconds before it actually arrived at its chosen position for battle, every ship flying backwards, fusion torches flaring as they decelerated. There were a few seconds in which the Turians appeared in two places simultaneously. Then they decelerated below the speed of light and kept on decelerating until they were merely traveling at an absurdly rapid speed in formation on a perpendicular vector to the human fleet, 500,000 kilometers distant. There were 6 of the kilometer long capital ships this time around, 20 mid-sized vessels, and a full 80 of the smaller, destroyer-sized ships organized in wolfpack formations in a sphere around the Turian fleet. .

The Alliance ships rotated to match the Turians, their formation shifting to account for the actual deployment of enemy forces. Even as they did so, the Turian ships spun to present their broadsides with absurd speed and grace for their size, and every ship in that fleet opened fire simultaneously, sending forth a wall of mass driver fire that, despite being fired at C fractional speed, seemed to crawl across the intervening space with an agonizing slowness. They were beyond the effective range of almost every human weapon.

But not every human weapon.

The Alliance fleet opened fire, each ship firing missiles that could completely cripple a Turian ship if they hit their mark; the two missiles cruisers and the battleship fired them six at a time, the rest in pairs. Standard tactics dictated that you waited until the missiles had closed to within 5 kilometers of a target to detonate their bomb-pumped x-ray lasers; analysis of salvaged GARDIAN systems had altered that math.

The Turian fleet continued to fire, again and again and again, filling space with tungsten slugs. Then, as the first of the missile salvos began to close, they pivoted and engaged their plasma torches once more, rapidly accelerating until they just breached the light barrier, then flipped on their axes and decelerated with a full reverse thrust. It would have worked on missiles that did not make use of elerium drives; but their elerium drives were effectively reactionless, and could therefore provide thrust for a much longer duration. It took a few seconds for the missiles to reacquire their targets, but reacquire they did, and burned off after the Turian fleet.

The Alliance fleet could not so easily negate their own momentum by altering their physical mass, nor could they achieve superluminal transit inside a solar system's hyper limit. They took evasive action, and most of their ships evaded salvo after salvo after salvo of mass driver fire, with their shields deflecting the rest. A few weren't so lucky. A pair of frigates took a dozen hits each, suffering rapid and explosive decompressions across their port broadside that rendered them each mission-killed. Turian missiles joined the fray, now even as the Alliance fleet continued to fire salvos of their own. Another pair of Alliance frigates went down, one of them blown apart, the second crippled like the first two. A destroyer lost its primary drive pod, and was mission-killed a moment later when it failed to maneuver out of the way of a shot fired from a Turian dreadnought's secondary batteries.

The Turian fleet had significant heat limitations. They could only perform so many maneuvers before they needed to retreat. So their commander made a mistake. He decided to allow the missiles to close to within GARDIAN range so they could deplete them a bit before they accelerated away this time. It wouldn't have hurt him if the missiles had followed what had been demonstrated in the previous engagement. If they had closed to within 5 km of their target before detonating, his tactic would have worked.

The missiles went off at 100 kilometers, intense gravitational distortions roiling within them, focusing their beams; each one sent out two lances of nuclear fury. At 5 kilometers, the beams were like the fists of an angry god. At 100, they were only somewhat more effective than the much longer ranged beam weapons of the Alliance warships. Over a hundred missiles filled old night with beams of destructive power that would have burned its afterimage into the retina of anyone witnessing the event with the naked eye. Three Turian frigates were destroyed outright by the missile attack, 9 more crippled, and 11 cruisers took deep, burning gouges into their bellies, damaged but not done; a lucky hit speared through another cruiser's mass effect core and rendered the ship dead in space. A thirteenth and particularly unfortunate cruiser was struck by a dozen different intersecting beams and was flash converted into an expanding cloud of partially vaporized debris and shrapnel, a brief fireball filling the space occupied by the ship's oxygen supply for the time it took for the vacuum to claim it.

Suitably chastened, the Turian General did not repeat his mistake; each time afterwards that a swarm of Alliance missiles drew close, his ships repositioned, using their superior mobility to ruthless effect. They never closed with the Alliance fleet, whittling it down, destroying a frigate here, mission-killing a cruiser there, playing the long game, the attrition game, and though the Alliance fleet could avoid the vast majority of the fire directed its way, and at times nearly half an hour would pass between impacts, it could not avoid everything.

And then, two hours into the engagement, with every ship glowing like a beacon to IR scanners, the Turian fleet spun about and accelerated away to attend to their built up heat.

No. Waiting was not the worst part.

That gnawing sense of helplessness was the worst part. Because as the enemy departed, the Alliance commanders knew that there was nothing they could do but wait for the Turian return.

Desolas acted with deliberation and patience, the fleet at his command like an extension of his own body, his own will. The enemy had been cornered, had been forced back to its planet bit by bit, and now he was peeling off pieces of the aliens' fleet. He still didn't know the name of this species, but he supposed that he would learn it once they had completed the conquest of their world. He had expended a fortune in antiprotons, had been forced to disengage his fleet time after time, first in corralling the alien sentry ships, and now in attack after attack on the fleet in orbit of their world.

Five times now he had performed this attack. Five times in three days he had whittled the alien fleet down, destroying them piecemeal, peeling off a cruiser here, a frigate there, slowly depleting the alien missile stockpiles. They had figured out how to counter those the second time out - a fighter screen deployed about 200 klicks out from the fleet could intercept incoming missiles just fine and with minimal losses as long as they remained at the distances they had been maintaining from the alien fleet.

It was almost sad to see so proud a foe felled not by a military blunder, not by superior strategy, but by a single chink in the armor of what was otherwise technological superiority. If the aliens had access to the Eezo and the Mass Effect, none of the shots they had fired at such an extreme range would ever have connected. None of the tactics he had used would have worked. But even as frustratingly powerful and durable as the alien ships were, he had their number, and he permitted himself the luxury of a grin as his fleet, heat sinks fresh once more and ready for battle, came out of FTL at extreme long range from the alien fleet once again.

For the last time.

"Have we worked out how they're communicating?" his tactical officer - Consetana Gavdas - asked from her station. Hers was the first voice to speak beyond the needs of the moment during this attack. The ship had fallen into a well-disciplined routine, with each attending to their duties and minimal conversation beyond what was necessary for those duties amongst the crew.

The communications officer shook his head. "Not radio. Probably not laser without comm buoys. Your guess is as good as mine."

Desolas glanced at the two, and they stilled, returning to their duties. "Signal the troop transports," he said. "Tell them we expect to have the orbit cleared within three hours."

His comms officer did as he was told. Outside, the fleet once again presented its broadsides to the human fleet, sacrificing power for sheer volume of fire. He felt the faint thrum of the guns on his dreadnought opening up like the heartbeat of the void. This time they would close. This time there would be no tactical withdrawal.

They killed another pair of alien frigates as they closed. Then, as they approached the effective ranges of the alien weapons, the whole turian fleet shifted exactly as planned, their formations loose to account for the damnable alien fusion weapons, rotating about to present their main, spinal mounted mass drivers to the enemy.

Silence. A silence so profound the whole universe seemed to be holding its breath.

"Fire," he ordered.

The main cannons of 6 dreadnoughts spoke into the night, accompanied by the lesser guns that were the primary armament of every cruiser and frigate in his fleet.

The alien fleet erupted with missile fire and a veritable storm of green plasma bolts. Invisible lasers gouged deep into the armor of three of his cruisers and a dozen frigates. They were targeted strikes, instantly destroying those ships' primary kinetic barrier generators. Six fusion balls came flying close behind the storm of green bolts. The destruction of kinetic barrier generators was an unpleasant surprise, but he had planned for this, too, the many engagements with the outer system sentries allowing his fleet to observe the aliens' weapons in action and to time exactly when they needed to move to evade plasma fire.

At Desolas's signal, the entire Turian fleet spun vertically and flew straight up, above the plane of the solar system, then spun back around to continue firing even as the fighter screen engaged the alien missiles. Four beams of white light lanced out from the alien dreadnought and carved neat, glowing holes directly through the three cruisers whose barriers were down, the fourth narrowly missing a frigate.

Some kind of particle beam? Why hadn't they used it before? "Continue firing," he ordered. He wished he could have ordered the fighters to close and begin firing their disruptor torpedoes, but he needed them for anti-missile duty if he was going to win this.

Not that it was in doubt.

A fusion ball claimed one of his frigate wolfpacks. Another erased a cruiser from existence. In exchange, he took down both of the alien missile cruisers and blew a hole in their tiny dreadnought's forward hull.

It was time to end this. He ordered his reserves into the battle. Another pair of dreadnoughts, 6 cruisers, and their accompanying 18 frigates emerged from FTL in minutes, decelerating rapidly to engage the alien fleet. The situation rapidly deteriorated for the aliens; the Turian fleet hammered them mercilessly, the dreadnoughts focusing their fire upon the slightly smaller of the aliens' undersized dreadnought - the one that appeared to be serving as a fighter base, and which had been positioned slightly closer to the planet than the rest of the alien fleet - mass driver impacts rippling across its armored plated hull, biting and gouging and cracking, every impact striking with the force of a 38 kiloton bomb.

Then a shot finally pierced the armor and set off secondary explosions throughout the alien ship. It shuddered violently, green light fountaining out like blood from a wound as compartment after compartment suffered violent decompressions. Another salvo fired from the spinal mounts of all six dreadnoughts struck home, and four of the six shots went through the hole that had been punched in the armor.

The ensuing explosion broke the ship's back. Fire guttered briefly in space, there and gone as the oxygen which allowed its existence flooded into the void. The forward quarter of the vessel broke free and went spinning away into space; the back three quarters of the vessel was thrown off its course by the explosion. Its engines failed, and without power, it began its agonizingly slow fall towards the planet's surface.

The forward quarter of the ship spun off into darkness and silence. The alien letters written across its prow held no meaning for Turians, but a human would have read, 'SSV Einstein.'

When it happened, it happened suddenly. The alien ships took blow after blow, loss after loss, and then, with their doom assured, those that were left each pulsed with whatever gravitic anomaly they used for propulsion. None of them turned or altered their orientation in any way, but they began to accelerate at 100 gravities, away from his fleet: away from the planet.

"They have to know they can't escape us," Gavdas said.

"They know," Desolas confirmed.

"Then why bother running?"

Desolas had no answer. He let silence linger in his command center for several beats before he ordered, "Let's clean up the orbital defenses. I want this planet wide open when the troop transports arrive. Signal pursuit elements to harry the alien fleet to the edge of the solar system, or until they engage whatever FTL drive they use. Tell them to destroy them if they can, but not to risk Turian lives unnecessarily.'"

His earlier estimate had been too conservative. It didn't take three hours. It took a little less than two and a half.

And when the last orbital defense satellite fell, Desolas Arterius considered the blue-green world in his command center's central holo-field, and he smiled a satisfied smile. "Let's get this invasion under way," he said.

Evacuations are supposed to be orderly. Everyone has their assigned duties. Everyone knows their tasks. Each culminates in the boarding of a lifeboat, escape pod, or shuttle. Maybe it was like that in some other section of the ship, but the hallway outside of her quarters had degenerated into pure pandemonium. The crew here had panicked. A few struggled to do their jobs, but most ran, or cowered, or cried. Fires were burning out of control, and smoke choked the hallway. The wail of alarms mingled with human screams. Some for help. Some in terror. Some in pain.

The ship lurched violently, and there was a deep boom and a shriek of rending metal heard through multiple closed bulkheads.

Lieutenant-Commander Hannah Shepard picked herself up off the floor and checked herself for injuries. She found nothing more serious than scrapes and what would become bruises. She was a handsome red-haired woman, every inch the professional soldier, her hair cropped short, her uniform crisp and without flaw. She was 26 years old, and she was terrified. She would never show it, never let it stop her, but her heart raced like a beating drum, and her adrenaline surged as fight or flight instincts did their best to prepare her for survival.

The ship had finally stopped rocking, though she noted she could no longer hear the background hum of the engines. That was not a good sign.

This wasn't how things were supposed to go. She was supposed to be on leave, on a transport heading for Mars to meet her parents. A month of vacation time. That's what she had. After that she was going to a two month-long seminar that was supposed to train officers in the latest anti-piracy techniques. At some point, she'd take her maternity leave. They probably wouldn't deploy her before that, but they might. A short deployment could work. You could take up to six months of leave for postpartum recovery. After that, she'd probably PCS out to another ship.

That had been the plan, anyways.

Adding an additional layer of complication was the fact that she was 18 weeks pregnant and just barely starting to show. It was a girl. She'd already decided on a name; she was going to name her Jane. Her pregnancy wasn't interfering with her duties, yet. Part of that was her extremely high level of physical fitness; one did not normally have six-pack abs while pregnant, and they went a long way towards hiding her condition from the casual observer. Her MELD upgrades helped, too: got rid of most of the negative physical symptoms. Even with things like morning sickness no longer a factor, a lot of women in the military who wanted families didn't bother with the actual physical pregnancy anymore. They either had it done in a test-tube to start with, or they had the foetus extracted as soon as they discovered they were pregnant and had it grown at a specialized medical facility. She had insisted on experiencing a complete pregnancy. It had seemed reasonable at the time. Less so, now that her plans had been derailed by alien invasion.

The Einstein had been called in after the aliens attacked the research team at the Shanxi Gate, which wasn't actually in the Sanmenxia system at all, so the name was a little weird, but whatever; naming mysterious ancient alien artifacts that teleport ships halfway across the galaxy wasn't her job.

At the moment, her job was to get off this ship alive.

She took several slow, deliberate breaths, allowing her heart to calm, the adrenaline surge to pass. Fight or flight would not help her here. Then she took her blue duffel bag, slung it over her shoulder, and stepped out into the hallway, her face as terrible as a thundercloud, her presence radiating command, and the note of her psionic power ringing like a bell in the minds of everyone nearby. The act of doing so, the act of putting on that mask of command helped to banish her own fear; she would not allow any hint of it to contaminate the link.

The formerly gleaming surfaces of the hallway were blackened with smoke and soot. The nearby fire almost seemed to roar rather than crackle. Eyes fixed upon her. Many snapped to attention. She cast a baleful look about her, first pinging the awareness of the twenty or so crew who were nearby, then joining them all in an ad-hoc telepathic network. "Report."

"We're dead," came a man's telepathic voice, "We're all fucking dead."

"Belay that," she snapped, outloud and in the mindlink alike. He went silent.

"We're falling towards the planet, sir," another serviceman reported. "Estimated time of impact one hour, thirty one minutes. There are still people trapped in the next corridor. There's an electrical fire burning out of control in cabins 405, 407, and 409."

"Do you all understand your duties in this situation?" Hannah asked.

No one met her gaze. Silence. Shame. Confirmation. "Then do them, and then get to your lifeboat," she said into the link. "Salvage control. Phase one. Get to it, people." She released the link, and the turbulent background hum of living minds replaced their mental voices in her awareness. The telepathic conversation had taken about two and a half seconds.

The panic wasn't gone, but it was leashed. It subsided beneath duty and practiced action. An Ensign's telekinetic barrier suppressed the fire long enough for a group of enlisted men and women to put it out with C02 canisters. The ship's automated firefighting equipment had failed to engage, but the Alliance Navy believed very strongly in manual backups. With the fire put out, those who had been trapped by it were able to evacuate.

Those that could evacuate.

There were more problems to sort out. A woman she had seen in passing many times - Spacer Second Class Long Meixing - had been one of those trapped. She had suffered third degree burns to the majority of her body and and fourth degree burns to her legs. It looked horrific, and the smell was worse. Like charcoal and blood and burnt meat, and it was omnipresent, and seemed to seep into everything. But Meixing was alive, and she was trying to move.

"Stop," Hannah ordered. "Don't move. You're going to make it worse."

"I'm fine," Meixing said, and the contrast between her appearance and her bell-like voice seemed fundamentally wrong. "There's just something wrong with my eyes. I can walk."

Her eyes were cloudy. The flesh around them was burned badly. Hannah suppressed the urge to shudder. "You are badly injured, Spacer. Don't move. That's an order." Then she turned her head and let out a telepathic call of, "MEDIC!"

"How bad is it?" Meixing asked. She did the mental math. She couldn't see. Her arms hurt like hell. Her chest and back had multiple horrible burning spots, like someone had been welding above her bed and hadn't cared that molten metal was dripping down onto her. She couldn't feel her face or her legs. "... Oh God," she whispered.

A woman arrived at the entrance to the burned out quarters. She made a hissing intake of breath, and then was at Hannah's side, trauma kit in hand. "Damn," she said. Her uniform said, 'Chakwas.' She began to check Meixing's vitals as gently as she could.

"We're going to get you out of here," Hannah told Meixing. She looked to Chakwas. "Can we move her?"

"On a stretcher," the medic said. Hannah immediately went to work arranging for one. Distantly, she noted the telepathic calls indicating that phase one of salvage control had been completed, and she gathered up the threads of the telepathic network once more - it was easier this time, as she'd already connected to those minds once before. "BEGIN PHASE TWO."

"Am I going to die?" Meixing asked. There was a fear, a vulnerability in her voice that hadn't been there before.

"Did you receive your MELD upgrades?" the medic asked.

"Yes." Meixing's voice was barely a whisper now.

"Then no, as long as we get you out of here."

A pair of enlisted crewmen came in carrying a stretcher, then. They loaded Meixing onto it, strapped her down, lifted it up, and carried it off for the lifeboats, with the medic - Chakwas - riding herd. Hannah Shepard joined her, bringing the crew along as they completed their tasks.

It was a little dreamlike. The constant blaring of alarms. The haze of smoke. People rushing back and forth. It seemed like every time she took a step, there was another problem she had to address. Another emergency that nobody else could solve. She did her best. People died. It felt like it took hours, but when she checked her commlink she saw that only minutes had gone by. A secondary explosion nearly killed the whole group - would have if not for the quick thinking of an Ensign Michael Delacroix, who hit the lever to drop the blast door manually at the last possible moment, and suffered second and third degree burns to his hands and arms for his trouble.

After a subjective eternity, they finally reached the lifepods. The first shuttles were already launching. Dispelling the dreamlike filter that had settled over her perception with an act of psionic will which also served to mentally bolster those around her, Hannah boomed, "Let's move, people! Eight to a pod! Go, go!"

The lifepods quickly began to fill and to launch with a thud that could be heard through the deck beneath their feet. More and more evacuating crew arrived, and Hannah did her duty, intervening when they needed direction, helping the injured into their pods.

It seemed to take years. The psionic inspiration slowly faded as she worked. The dreamlike world returned. Then things grew quieter.

"Lieutenant-Commander!" Chakwas called suddenly.

Hanna blinked, and turned to look at the woman. "What are you still doing here? Why haven't you launched?"

"We're the last, sir," Chakwas said. "Get in. We're not leaving you behind."

Hanna looked both ways down the hallway just outside the life-pod launch station.

Silence. The faint crackle of the ship's comm attempting to activate and failing. The telepathic ping from officers in other sections of the ship that indicated that they were boarding their lifeboats.

"Right," she muttered, quickly crossed the space between her and the lifepod, stepped inside, sat down, and strapped herself in. "Thanks, Chakwas," she said.

The lifepod launched with a thud. There were no windows, but on the viewer she could see that Shanxi was far larger than it was supposed to be, and the wreck of the back three quarters of the Einstein was falling towards it at an alarming rate. The lifepods sped down into the atmosphere, their Vahlloy plating rapidly building up heat as they descended; they looked like falling embers. The Einstein, too, began to bloom with heat and flame as it fell. One of the two hanger pods ripped free of the superstructure, secondary plasma detonations rippling through it, a cloud of debris spinning out from it, following in the ship's wake. Then its form rapidly receded until it was nothing but a brightly glowing dot on the horizon.

"Karin," Chakwas corrected.

Hannah looked up. The lifepod wasn't full. It was her, Chakwas, Meixing, Delacroix, and a dark haired male lieutenant she didn't recognize with a thousand yard stare. "Hmm?"

Chakwas couldn't quite manage a smile, but she repeated herself: "My name is Karin."

Hannah Shepard turned to regard the medic. It was then that she fully took in the uniform and realized that Karin Chakwas was not a medic. She was a doctor. She was blonde, and her face was smudged with soot and blood, and she was maybe ten years older than Hannah was - mid-thirties instead of mid-twenties - but she seemed like good people. "Call me Hannah," Hannah said, and tried very hard to ignore how, now that the immediate crisis was over, her hands would not stop trembling.

The Turian fleet began its invasion of Shanxi with a demand for the planet's surrender. This was accompanied by a rebroadcast of the standard First Contact packets that had been sent out before things had gone wrong at Relay 314. The answer from the surface came in the form of surface-to-space missiles being fired at the fleet in orbit. They lost yet another cruiser and three frigates before their fighter screen got into position to intercept the rest.

Desolas did not give the aliens a second chance; the bombardment began then and there. They hit the more obvious military sites, first, including every location from which missiles had been launched. None of those sites were near obvious civilian concentrations: a small but real mercy. General Desolas never liked to order strikes on civilian targets. It was distasteful in the extreme. He would do it if he had to, and he had before, but it ate at him every time.

Three hours into the bombardment, they'd cleared away enough AA emplacements and other military targets of opportunity for the troop transports to begin their landings. From his position overlooking his ship's command center aboard the Turian dreadnought Invictus, General Desolas Arterius considered the image of the alien world hovering in the central holo-field.

Once they had reached orbit, it had become obvious that this couldn't be the aliens' homeworld. There just weren't enough settlements. The planet had a dozen major settlements and that was all. There were mining operations here and there elsewhere on the planet, each with its attendant town, but most of the wilderness was completely untouched. This was a colony world. That… bothered him. It bothered him almost as much as the fact that the aliens had used their unknown FTL drive freely and without restraint around Relay 314, but had never once engaged it here.

That wasn't the only peculiar thing about this situation. As much as it pleased him to win the day in space, the fact that it had come to this at all bothered him. What did they know about these aliens? Almost nothing. The reports of the Relay 314 incident were confused at best. What they did know was that the relay had gone active. A patrol had come to investigate. A new alien race had been discovered on the other side of it. And what should have been a run of the mill First Contact had rapidly degenerated into… this. Some said the aliens fired first. A few said that what had been intended as a warning shot accidentally hit one of the alien ships. He hoped it was the former, though his inner cynic thought the latter explanation more likely. However it had started, it was his duty to finish it. The whole situation had escalated beyond all reason before Desolas had ever been involved, and he didn't like it. He didn't like it one bit. "Too many unknowns," he murmured.

"Sir?" The voice was Consetana's. He glanced her way. Took in her body language. The tension in her stance. The doubt in her eyes. She didn't like it any more than he did.

Doubt must give way to duty. He gave the order. The invasion began.

"General," Consetana said after a few moments of silence, "Recommend we begin salvage and capture operations of the crippled enemy ships."

Desolas tapped his console, changing the holo-field to display the numerous alien wrecks. Wrecked frigates, wrecked cruisers. That second undersized dreadnought that had served as a fighter-base had come down in the wilderness of the northern continent, far from any populated zone. All of those ships had launched lifeboats, and he had let them. Most had landed on the planet. A few drifted in space waiting for collection. He would attend to them in due time.

Maybe it was just his imagination. Maybe he was just worried that his kid brother was a freshly minted Lieutenant in the landing force. Saren had only just turned 18. He'd been a soldier for two years with nothing but pirates to cut his teeth on. Like many foolish young soldiers, he wanted to prove himself in battle. He was worried about Saren. That definitely had the ring of truth. But that wasn't the whole story. Something about this situation was wrong. But a hunch, a gut instinct, a bad feeling wasn't reason enough not to follow established procedure. "Proceed," he ordered.

The lifeboat came down on the outskirts of Xin Tianjin. Shanxi was a primarily Chinese controlled world of the post-relay colonization wave, and had been one of the first planets settled. Colonization had begun 12 years prior. It had been carefully planned, with much of the infrastructure built by civilian SHIV models in advance of the arrival of colonists. Today, there were almost 20 million people on Shanxi, divided mostly between its six metropolitan areas and their surrounding lands. Xin Tianjin had been Shanxi's second city, and a marvel of technology and urban planning. It was still day when they landed, though the lights of the city had gone out. The landing wasn't pretty - they bounced off a rooftop, skidded down 20 meters of roadway, and then plowed through a storefront before coming to rest in a pile of broken glass and spilled booze. By the time they had gotten Meixing and Delacroix clear of the broken glass and cleared off a counter where they could give them some additional medical attention - the shell-shocked Lieutenant had only sat and stared blankly during the whole process - the bombardment of Shanxi had already begun.

It started with a sound that none of them had heard in person before, but each instantly recognized: a sound that set their teeth on edge, and so loud, so very loud that they could feel it buzzing in their bones: the wail of the air raid siren. It almost drowned out the sound of distant explosions. They began far away as the occasional distant crack, distant thud, or distant rumble; there were flashes of fire on the horizon. It drew slowly closer.

Chakwas prioritized treating Meixing, applying a second dose of regenerative nanites to continue to repair the damage the burns had done to her body. Meixing was unconscious; her nerves had begun to regenerate, and Chakwas had put her under with an off-button hypo spray once they'd realized why the poor woman had started screaming.

There had been a few other things to do; Delacroix had cut himself badly on the glass, and had required stitches. Hannah Shepard had never served as a nurse before, but after an hour of helping Chakwas to treat the injured, she regretted every time she had ever given a nurse a hard time.

"Okay," Hannah said at last, "I need to make contact with whoever's in charge on the ground. Are you all right, here?"

"For the time being," Karin replied, "Though I'd like to look you over as well when you have a moment."

"That's fine," Hannah said. "After I make contact." She focused her thoughts on her commlink, and the communications protocol spun open in her MELD-provided HUD. "This is Lieutenant-Commander Hannah Shepard of the Einstein to anyone receiving this message," she sent telepathically through the local hyperwave network. "Our lifepod has crashlanded in…" she gestured, calling up an Augmented Reality map of the local area and rattled off the lattitude and longitude. "We have wounded and need medical evac. Please respond."

A reply came almost immediately, and in Chinese, which was automatically translated for her into English. "Shepard, this is Captain Li of the 37th. Negative on medevac. We are under fire from orbital positions. Recommend you make your way to the nearest bombardment shelter ASAP."

A nearby explosion rattled the ruined storefront. Dust drifted down from above them. Outside, someone screamed. A few shouts followed.

Hannah checked her map. The nearest bombardment shelter was a full one and a half kilometers away. They had landed in a new section of the city, and the shelter wasn't finished. "That could be difficult, Captain," she said.

"Then heaven help you," Li replied. "Best I can do is recommend you shelter in the Underground until the bombardment is done. The stations are reinforced. It should protect you against anything that isn't a direct hit."

"Acknowledged," Hannah replied, and released the connection. "Shit," she said aloud.

"No luck?" Chakwas asked.

"Worse," Hannah replied. A warning message flashed on her HUD. She opened it. "Warning: structure unsound. Evacuate immediately."

The distinct grinding of tank treads could be heard on the street outside the store. Hannah ventured a glance; a dozen Chinese tanks rolled past the smashed liquor store, each mounting a heavy laser turret with rapid-fire plasma guns in the place a machine gun once would have gone on older tanks. They were lighter than the old tanks of Earth, their cydonium armor gleaming in the sunlight, and each surrounded by the distinctive flickering half-dome of a shield. The tanks were followed by a convoy of smaller vehicles.

As the convoy passed, Chakwas retrieved something from her kit, then began unfolding a portable stretcher.

Mass driver shots began to rain down on the city from orbit. The damage was not wanton; it was precise. The army base was their primary target, shot after shot after shot raining down in a rippling, thudding series of explosions that rattled the ribcage.

Something above them shifted. Cracks ran through the walls that hadn't been there before.

"Ensign," Shepard said.

Ensign Delacroix looked up. His arms were wrapped in bandages. Medical nanites had gone a long way toward repairing him, but he was still obviously in pain. "Sir?" he asked.

"Think you can hold a rifle?"

Delacroix looked down at his hands, then glanced towards Karin. At her nod, he nodded in turn. "Yeah. I think maybe I can do that."

"Fantastic," Hannah said, handing off her plasma rifle to the ensign. Then she turned her attention to the shell-shocked lieutenant. "Lieutenant," she said. No reaction. "Lieutenant Tilson," she said louder, and snapped her fingers.

His eyes fixed on her. They were intensely blue.

"I need you with us, Lieutenant. We can't stay here. This building isn't safe. Chakwas and I are going to carry Spacer Second Class Long, here, out on a stretcher. We have to get to a shelter, and we can't carry her and our supplies both. I need you to take my backpack and the doctor's backpack. Put one on and carry the other, okay?"

He did so.

They left the building with Ensign Delacroix leading the way. He was followed closely by Shepard and Chakwas, carrying Meixing on the stretcher between them. Lieutenant Tilman brought up the rear. It was slower going than Hannah would have liked. There was another extended, rolling series of explosions somewhere to the west.

All the signs were in Chinese, though that was translated easily enough. You could have an augmented reality overlay of the text in the language of your choice if you wanted as your commlink automatically detected and translated it. The journey to the shelter was long, and grueling, and even if MELD augmentations, Hannah and Karin, and Lieutenant Tilson were sweating before they were halfway there.

A subjective eternity later, they reached their destination: the entrance to a reinforced subway station about 100 meters down the road from where they had started. About a dozen civilians were already within, having been unable to reach a proper bombardment shelter before the attack had begun.

Hannah and Karin set down the stretcher as gently as they could manage. "Do you have wounded?" Hannah asked the group of civilians.

They exchanged glances, and then shook their heads. "Not so far," a woman among them said.

Karin immediately set about giving Long and Delacroix another dose of medical nanites; they were amazingly effective at treating wounds, but they died quickly outside of a shielded environment, and they had to be reapplied periodically.

"Okay," Hannah said. "Now we wait."

The skies of the alien world were blue. Not the proper steel blue of Palaven; it was a softer shade, here. Slightly different atmospheric composition. Slight differences in their respective stars. That blue had darkened as the Turian forces made their landing. The largest of the world's continents was in its southern hemisphere, and it was here that all six of the major alien cities could be found. The skies were blue. They were a deep blue, now, and slowly darkening towards indigo. The stars were coming out, and they brought with them the noises of an alien night. The terrain was wooded, covered in alien trees with unfamiliar leaves and bark patterns and strange-smelling sap. There were bugs. Nothing he recognized. Nothing his omni-tool flagged as immediately dangerous.

Saren Arterius' Cabal landed just north of the southernmost city as a support unit tied to the 26th Armiger Legion. His cabal had gone in first, had secured the landing zone. Truth be told, there hadn't been any securing to do. There'd been no sign of the enemy whatsoever. Three hours of bombardment from orbit, and the dropships had landed unopposed. Dug in opposed.

If he hadn't known better, he'd have thought the world had been abandoned.

The 1500 turian soldiers of the 26th Legion had made their base camps, fortified their positions, and now prepared to march on the city. Unopposed. It made his shoulder-blades itch. They always itched when he was being watched. And he was being watched. He could feel the unfriendly eyes on him. Cold. Calculating. Waiting.

"Saren."

He turned his head to consider the speaker. Tarquin Septimus. White facial markings. From the capital on Palaven. From a famous family. Saren had seen him already, in the corner of his eye, but he hadn't rated his full attention until he spoke. "Tarquin," he replied.

"You heard the latest from fleet intelligence?" Tarquin asked.

"Enlighten me," Saren said.

"Our linguists are starting to make progress with the aliens' written language."

"And?" Saren asked.

"And we're pretty sure we know what they're called." He paused for dramatic effect. There wasn't much dramatic about it, but points for effort. "Hoomans," he said. "They're called hoomans. The planet is Shane-shai."

"Humans," came a woman's voice from nearby. "Shanxi."

Tarquin shot an annoyed glance in the speaker's direction. "Nobody asked you, Kathon."

Kathon's mandibles twitched in amusement. "It's true," she said dryly. "I do what I do as a service to the public. I bring knowledge to ignorant turians everywhere I go, and I never ask for payment."

Saren laughed, turning to face the rest of his Cabal. He'd been with them three years now. Two more before his mandatory term of service with the military ended. "Humans," he said. "Shanxi. Do we know the name of this city, yet? Be nice to call it something besides XC-03."

Kathon shook her head. "No such luck. Give Tarquin a minute, though, and I'm sure he'll have something he's sure came straight from fleet intelligence."

"I hate all of you," Tarquin groused. The others laughed.

"I'm glad you're all having so much fun," their new commanding officer - the Kabalim - said. "I like a cheerful cabal. It's a nice change of pace from the poor mopey bastards I'm usually saddled with."

"Speaking as our resident mopey bastard," Tarquin said cheerfully, "I resent that remark."

"Duly noted," the Kabalim said faux-gravely. "We have an assignment, people."

A change went through every one of them with those words. All fifteen turians immediately straightened, standing at attention. Cabals were almost criminally underutilized. Saren had expected to do little more than play babysitter to the Legion. An assignment was good. Maybe they wouldn't be bored half to death this time. Not like the 26th's last campaign against that stupid Krogan who'd gotten it into his head to invade a frontier Asari colony with a mercenary army, where all they'd done was stand guard over artillery positions that were never actually attacked..

"Seems the boys upstairs found some kind of underground complex at the bottom of a bunker our fleet leveled about a dozen clicks west. We're to investigate. Questions?"

"Are there any enemy troops in the area?" Saren asked.

"Unknown. We have ourselves a mystery. I for one hate mysteries, but someone had to draw the short straw and have a look. I'm sure the rest of you are just as shocked as I am to see a Cabal drawing the short straw."

They chuckled at that. It was to be expected. Nobody outside the Cabals liked the Cabals much.

"There are some very strange energy readings coming from the site. We go in, we neutralize any defenders, we secure the site for our science teams. Standard expeditionary loadout. Any more questions?"

There were none. Not yet. They'd know more once they'd sent in a few recon drones.

"Then move out."

Their vehicle was an APC variant of the M-080. It was an old six-wheeled design: boxy, unglamorous, and reliable. The APC version was unarmed but well armored and equipped with powerful kinetic barriers and with space enough for twenty soldiers and their gear. A drone flock followed half a klick behind them and 50 meters up.

As the Cabal mounted up on the transport that would take them to their target, Saren's shoulderblades itched.

It was difficult to maneuver the APC through the trees for the first kilometer, though they were helped by the fact that the tall, purple-leaved trees grew almost straight up and had no branches lower than 10 meters. Things cleared a little after that. The dropships had landed at the forest's edge - close enough for the trees and the terrain to give the legion cover from the city. That didn't help the Cabal, whose mission required it to traverse three kilometers of woodland.

Presently, the woods opened up, and the APC emerged onto a dirt road that followed a riparian woodland along the the banks of the mighty river that made a slow curve around the city's western border. XC-03's spaceport could barely be seen in the distance, serving as port for both river and air traffic. East of the port, Saren could just make out the start of the city's skyline. No lights shone there; all was silent and dark before the gathering dusk. In places, fires still burned where the fleet in orbit had seen fit to remove an AA battery or other target with a well-placed orbital strike. The fires cast a slight haze of smoke over the woodland, though his helmet prevented him from tasting the ashes he knew were on the wind. Their destination was not yet in view.

The APC rumbled on, conversation occasionally starting up between the members of the Cabal. And the enemy was absent, and Saren's shoulders itched.

Nine klicks out, nothing.

Seven klicks out, nothing, though the dirt road ended and a paved road began.

Five klicks out, there was a brilliant green flash and an unfamiliar but extremely loud noise; it felt as though their APC had been kicked by an angry giant. The temperature in the cabin jumped instantly from comfortable to scorching, and Saren felt his stomach dropping as the APC was blasted violently into a pair of huge, gnarled trees with a scream of protesting metal. There was never a proximity warning. The subsurface scanner that was supposed to detect mines never flashed red.

The APC's safety systems engaged, mass effect fields preventing the passengers from being thrown about even as they crashed. There was another tilt of the world and another crunch as the APC came to rest upside down.

They came out of the vehicle assuming hostile presence. There were four hatches on an M-080 APC. One was still glowing with heat; they took the other three, pouring out of the vehicle with biotic barriers already flaring around them.

Saren was second out of the APC. The first Turian out - the one directly in front of him - took a full salvo of green energy blasts. His biotic barriers stopped more than a dozen hits. Nothing touched his skin, but it didn't need to. Saren felt the thermal bloom in his eyeballs, even through his helmet; there was a wave of impossible heat that he instinctually shut his eyes and turn away from. The turian who had been hit screamed in agony, briefly. When Saren looked back, the other Turian's armor was glowing a bright orange, and his entire head was on fire.

Those who hadn't been wearing one immediately deployed their helmets even as they poured out of the APC.

Saren made it out. His instincts screamed at him to get to cover; he dove behind a massive tree-branch that had been ripped off the tree they'd hit in the crash. An instant later, a much smaller salvo of that same green energy ripped through the space his head had been occupying a moment earlier.

His HUD showed nothing. More weapons fire. Two turians died horribly despite their biotic barriers as they took blast after blast of green plasma, cooked alive inside their armor as it overheated far, far beyond its ability to keep its wearer alive. Green plasma. A faint hum. His eye traced the path of the green projectiles back to six different points in the riparian woodland; nothing was there.

He placed a biotic singularity right on top of the first point. The dark sphere expanded into being, and … something shimmered in the air around it. "They have cloaking devices!" he hissed. "The bastards have working cloaking technology!"

They were all out of the APC, now, all of them in cover. Kathon's biotic throw detonated Saren's singularity; something went flying into the tree trunk next to where the singularity had been. There was a hard crunching noise, and he had a brief glimpse of a pair of humanoid figures in strange, purple and black armor, wreathed in a menacing purple light.

The whole Cabal opened fire even as the first of those figures gestured, phaeston rifles roaring into the evening as the sun's last gleaming faded from the horizon; their bullets met a shimmering, hazy purple barrier and… bent. Twisted. Went around the bodies of the two aliens. A wave of terror washed over Saren's mind as a voice whispered in his ear something thick with the promise of death.

He saw it. He saw his death. Useless and unimportant, here on this backwoods alien planet. He saw his Cabal, all dead because of his failure. He saw his brother Desolas moving on, forgetting he ever had such a failure for a brother as Saren Arterius. His parents removed his name from their family's register. They didn't mourn; they denied that he had ever existed.

"No… NO, NO!" Tarquin screamed from his position to Saren's left, "They're in my head! THEY'RE IN MY…" then he went slack for an instant, then shuddered.

Saren grit his teeth, sudden fury rising in his chest like fire. He gestured, and a biotic shockwave ripped its way through the earth between him and the two aliens. Both were sent tumbling backwards down the slope and into the river. The rest of the cabal was moving, now, and a dozen more biotic singularities bloomed into existence in the general area the shots had come from, each detonated a moment later. Trees shattered, and three purple and black armored figures, shimmering into existence even as they fell, went sprawling amongst the remains. Two of them did not rise.

Tarquin was moving. He saw the start of the movement in his peripheral vision. Pulling back to the rest of the squad, leaving himself and Kathon as the two outliers. Then he heard the distinct sound of four grenades being primed at the same time, somewhere behind him.

"Tarquin?" Kathon asked.

"What are you doing, soldier?" the Kabalim asked.

Tarquin replied in a liquid, strangely tonal alien tongue, his mouth flowing awkwardly through phonemes a Turian mouth had never been designed to produce.

"STOP HIM!"

Saren turned just in time to see Tarquin and the Kabalim struggling. Tarquin held two primed grenades in each tri-fingered hand. A grenade dropped.

He was just close enough that the ensuing explosion sent him sprawling instead of killing him. The aliens opened up once more with their damnable plasma blasts a moment later. By the time Saren regained his senses, he and Kathon were the only Turians left alive.

"...-ren! SAREN!"

He blinked up at her. Everything seemed hazy. His head hurt, and his ears were ringing. "What?"

"Let's GO!" Kathon shouted, pulling him to his feet. The world snapped back into focus. The aliens were shooting at them. Green plasma bolts splashed against the road, chewing greedily into its surface. Kathon was sprinting away from the engagement, and after a few staggering steps, he fell into stride beside her. It was un-Turian, running from an enemy instead of falling back in an orderly fashion. His blood burned with shame and rage, yet he ran all the same.

They were half a kilometer away from the ambush site before it occurred to Saren that he could have called in strikes from the drone flock that had been assigned as their air support and recon element. The thought brought with it fresh shame, fresh recrimination, fresh rage.

It didn't occur to him that no one else in the squad had thought of it, either, nor that it had happened so quickly that it would have been over by the time the drone flock began its attack run.

The city was built within a large bend in the Grey River. The river was 1.4 kilometers from one shore to the other, and a natural 12 meter cliff on the city-ward side provided a barrier against flooding. The far side of the river was flood plains and then extremely fertile farmland for a hundred miles before the land began to rise into foothills and then mountains. The city was also strategically valuable. It served as a hub for river traffic, and one of the world's two major spaceports was here. Orbital scans had also revealed eezo deposits in the mountains to the west, which made it attractive as a long term holding. The northern side - the forestward side - was the only side of the city not surrounded by water, and it was here that the Turians had chosen to make their attack.

Scouting parties and drone flights had done their job of locating what enemy positions had survived the orbital bombardment. There were losses in the process, but nothing outside of acceptable levels. The number of enemy positions which had survived was surprising to the Turian commander on the ground, but that was balanced by a certain relief to finally have an enemy to face. Battle had already been joined in the second of the two cities chosen as the focal points of the initial invasion. A second legion was to land shortly to reinforce the 26th Armiger Legion, but the 26th intended to capture the city before that happened.

The Battle of Xin Tianjin began with an artillery barrage. Dozens of M-080s outfitted for a missile artillery role as well as 50 heavier vehicles mounting full size artillery cannons opened fire, high explosive shells traveling in ballistic arcs rained down upon the human positions. Even as they drew near, odd, shimmering purple barriers sprung up around those fortifications. Some shells and missiles exploded as they struck the barriers. Some twisted and bent, altering course and striking in front of the barrier, or behind, or to the side. A very few went right through and detonated violently. The barrages continued as drone flocks and Turian infantry and armor advanced down the hill towards where the human forces were dug in at the outskirts of Xin Tianjin. The purple barriers seemed to work in cycles of about 30 seconds each. Every time they went down, it took about a second for them to go back up. A few salvos landed at precisely the moment when the barrier came down, but only a few.

Turian air support arrived next in the form of three full squadrons - one of 24 fighters, the other two of 24 interceptors each - each divided into four wings. The fighters swept in high above the city, firing disruptor torpedoes starting from 10 kilometers distant. These proved extremely effective against the full-sized human tanks, tearing through their grav shielding and rending them into pieces with rapid, asymmetrical mass changes. Each fighter fired two disruptor torpedoes; 23 tanks were destroyed as a result. Then the human fighter craft rose up to meet their turian counterparts, launching from underground, fortified hangers whose entrances only now revealed themselves. There were two models; one looked like some sort of bizarre flying disk; the other looked like someone had tried very hard to alter a flying disk design to look more like a traditional fighter. Only the second of these ships had an identifiable front or back. They moved strangely; they could make instant 90 degree turns, and could accelerate or decelerate with surprising speed. As they passed overhead, localized gravitic disruptions caused objects directly below them to grow ever so slightly lighter or heavier for the time it took them to pass.

The Turian interceptors swooped down to meet the human fighters, and battle began in the skies. The Turian ships had a maneuverability advantage, but the human fighters moved without regard to facing, and could literally spin in the air to bring their weapons to bear without changing the direction of their flight no matter what maneuvers the Turian ships attempted. To make matters worse, the human fighters didn't show up on the Turian non-visual sensors at all; if the Turian ships had not been equipped with VI-assisted 360 degree cameras to track and identify incoming threats, they would have had no chance at all. Pilots began to die. From the ground, all that could be seen were bright green flashes and the occasional explosion - a very few the distinct green of a downed human fighter, but most the brief orange flare of a downed Turian.

Sniper teams took up positions on the hill overlooking the approach to the city. Presently, the artillery barrage ceased; the infantry and armor were too close to the enemy, now. The infantry were deploying their portable kinetic barriers to provide cover against enemy fire. Infantry and armor alike opened fire and encountered those same purple barriers; the humans waited, letting the Turians approach. It defied logic that they would do so, but it was never Turian practice to ignore an enemy's strategic blunder. A few humans fell.

Then, all at once, the human lines opened fire; a veritable storm of green plasma bolts rose up to greet the Turian attackers. The Turians had learned from the Cabal's mistakes; they all wore helmets. But the infantry were not the target. The target was the drones and the armored vehicles. Drones began to fall from the sky, their systems overloaded and partially melted by the extreme heat of the human plasma weaponry. Secondary explosions as plasma met unfired ordinance - especially in the rocket drones - brought chaos to the battlefield. A dozen human armored walkers trundled forward and opened fire on the M-080's and the Jiris Infantry Fighting Vehicles that had accompanied the Turian infantry, letting loose with huge, devastating barrages of energy that had far, far more mass than plasma should have. An ominous purple glow swept across the human positions - one distinct from the barriers that protected them. And then the vanguard of the Turian army went mad.

Some simply collapsed, like puppets whose strings had been cut, their minds frayed into massive brain hemorrhages. Many began to shriek with terror, screaming about eyes in the dark, or nightmares coming to life. Of these, some would cower where they were, some would flee, some would fire their guns madly at whatever was closest to them. And then there were the traitors. Humans would point, and a Turian would betray his unit, his squad, his platoon, his species. He might struggle for a second, but he would then almost invariably turn and open fire on his fellows.

Then came the flying mechanical cephalopod drones, like some absurd and absurdly deadly cybernetic hanar, hundreds of them decloaking all at once, seizing their prey and crushing them, ripping into them, occasionally tearing off limbs and seemingly uncaring of the fact that those limbs were encased in armor. The sniper teams were silenced almost instantly. The battle became a slaughter. The Turians had not prepared for this. They killed many humans, yes, but the vanguard of the 26th Armiger Legion suffered 50% casualties in the first two minutes. By the time the hundred or so weirdly organic-seeming flying disks began to advance from the human positions, the Turian army was already retreating. For all the madness of the battlefield, the Turian retreat was an orderly one. They gave covering fire. They fell back in order. The humans had destroyed about half of their drones, but those that remained provided fire support. The artillery barrages started up again the instant the Turian forces were far enough away from the human lines to safely resume them.

That was when the cloaked fireteams hit the Turian artillery positions, each one opening the engagement by firing two incredibly maneuverable glowing green balls that detonated in massive flares of destructive energy. When the troops assigned to the artillery positions turned to fire on the human fireteams, still more of the cephalopod drones decloaked and incapacitated them from behind. One by one, the artillery fell silent. By the time the Turian command realized what was happening and sent reinforcements to the artillery positions, he'd lost a quarter of his heavy guns and all of his artillery-variant M-080s. Driving off the attackers cost still more lives, and they killed only a few in turn; although the humans possessed no kinetic barriers, many were able to create those damnable purple fields, and their powered armor was highly resistant to anything not modded to pierce armor; even then, they could take far more punishment than they had any right to.

It was a nightmare. It was utterly unlike anything the Turian army had prepared for, had ever fought before. The sheer lethality of the alien guns was almost without precedent. Kinetic barriers helped, but even they didn't stop the ridiculous heat of the plasma blasts. As they retreated from the human lines, the panic attacks, the random deaths of previously healthy Turians, and the random betrayals abruptly stopped; those abilities, it seemed, had a limited range. When the retreating troops exited that range, the bipedal walker vehicles began shelling them like artillery.

The gently sloped hill leading to a grassy field that slowly led into the outskirts of the city had become a no-man's land, blasted clean of life. In a very few places, what was left of the grass was still burning. Craters littered it. The bodies of the dead and the dying littered it, and their broken machines lay alongside them. 500 men - two full companies - had been part of the vanguard of the attack. Of those, 163 returned. Casualties had been much lighter with the subsequent troops who had moved forward; they had pulled back long before getting into range of whatever the humans had done to drive so much of the Vanguard mad.

But today was a bad day to be Turian.

Three hours passed in the subway station before the bombardment began to trail off. Some hits were closer than others. Some seemed as though they must have been right outside the subway station. Hannah found herself sleeping for part of the time. Microsleeps at first. Then she sat down with her back to the wall and dozed.

Hannah dreamed of being far away. Of being safe at home with her mom and dad. Of the tire swing on the tree in the 43rd floor park in the Olympus Mons arcology. It was an old oak tree that creaked when you swung back and forth on it. Her mom was a writer. Still used her maiden name for her books, though she was the only one in her four sisters who had taken her husband's name when she married. Claire Durand had married John Shepard forty years ago, and Hannah was their youngest. The tree was gone now - felled by a group of children ten years ago who had tried to build a fort that the tree couldn't support. But in her dream, the old swing was still there, and she swung back and forth on it, listening the tree creak.

She woke easily. It was a gentle transition from sleep to wakefulness. No starting awake, no slow crawl towards aware; a transition as easy as stepping through a door, like rising out of a shallow pool. She felt the baby moving inside her, and her left hand drifted down to to her lower abdomen.

"How far along are you?" Karin asked gently.

Hannah looked up at Doctor Chakwas, her cheeks coloring slightly. "28 weeks," she said, keeping her voice soft.

Karin raised an eyebrow. "Really? I'd have guessed less. You're barely showing at all."

The corners of Hannah's lips quirked ever so slightly in a nascent smile that never fully took farm. "I work out," she said mildly.

Karin nodded. "So I see."

The conversation halted, then; Karin needed to check on the wounded again. Meixing was still unconscious, but she looked better. Her face was no longer a ruin of burns; healthy tissue could be seen once more, and her eyes were unclouded when Karin opened them to check. Her legs would still need a lot of work. Probably more than Karin could give her with the two canisters of medical nanites she'd brought from the ship. Ensign Delacroix, on the other hand, was completely recovered, his burns completely gone. There was no scarring - no one really scarred, anymore - and the bandages came off his hands and arms.

"All right, Karin," Hannah said as the other woman sat back down. "Where you be and what would you be doing right now if all this weren't going on?"

Karin looked distant. "I had no plans to leave the Einstein any time soon," she said. "She was a good ship, and with good people. I'm sorry to see her go."

That had been a stupid question, and Hannah felt like an insensitive fool for asking it. "Me too," she managed.

"What about you, then?" Karin asked, looking her way. "Did you have other plans that this invasion derailed?"

"... Yeah," Hannah admitted.

"Don't leave it there," Karin said.

There was a pause as Hannah gathered her thoughts. "I was supposed on leave," she said. "I was going to catch a transport from Shanxi to Mars. I had a month of vacation planned. My parents were going to meet me there, and we…" she trailed off. "They don't know about the baby, yet."

"Does the father know?" Karin asked.

Hannah's expression darkened, and she didn't answer. Karin didn't press the issue.

Hannah went on. "After the vacation, I had two months of training for anti-piracy techniques. I figure at some point I'd take my maternity leave. They probably wouldn't deploy me before that, but a short deployment could work. You get six months for postpartum recovery. Then I'd probably PCS out for another stint as a squadron leader on another carrier."

"You're a pilot?" Chakwas asked.

That brought thoughts of flying. The feeling of her fighter beneath her, of woman and machine moving as one in an intricate dance of death in the blackness of space. The savage joy of shooting down an enemy - usually a pirate - ship. Hannah couldn't keep the grin off her face this time. "Yeah," she said. The grin faded at the thought that she would never see many of her pilots again. At the thought of the burning wreck of the Einstein falling through the atmosphere. "Guess the aliens didn't check with me first when they attack the Shanxi Gate to see if their invasion would be inconvenient to my vacation plans," she said dryly.

"Damned inconsiderate of them," Karin said, and laughed. Laughter was a strange sound in that subway station. The civilians all looked up at the sound. So did Ensign Delacroix. Lieutenant Tillman just kept staring up the stairs into the night. But the laugh was contagious, at least for Hannah, and a moment later she joined in.

It felt good.

The background chatter on their commlinks picked up, then. The Turians had begun their invasion. Battle would be joined, soon. After listening to a few updates on the commlink, Karin Chakwas frowned. "An invasion," she muttered. "I don't pretend to understand military strategy, but why are they invading Shanxi at all? Couldn't these Turians just destroy all our fortifications from orbit? Couldn't they similarly destroy whole formations of tanks and entire companies of infantry just as easily?"

Hannah looked up towards the stairway leading up to the city. Outside, fires raged uncontrolled in a dozen different skyscrapers, and it gave light to the darkness. She pressed her lips together as she formulated her answer. Then she said, "They've been hitting our bases from orbit. Our airfields. Our tank depots. But they are invading, yes. Maybe the Turians have relearned what every army seems to forget around the time they develop the atom bomb. Maybe they never forgot it in the first place."

"Oh?"

Hannah's voice took on a slightly different tone, as if she were quoting something, "You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life - but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud."

"Then the fact that they are invading tells us something about them: about their goals, about the sort of people they are," Karin mused.

"That it does," Hannah agreed. She would have said more, but their conversation was interrupted by a frantic communication from Captain Li.

"Shepard," he said, "Shepard, are you still alive?"

Hannah sat up and tapped her commlink. "This is Shepard," she said.

"Lieutenant-Commander, we have a situation, here." There was the sound of an explosion on Li's side of the transmission.

"I'm all ears, Captain."

"We've got Turian commandos - possibly powerful telekinetics - headed straight for a sensitive facility."

Hannah frowned. "What happened to the guards?"

"Dead. The place got shelled from orbit. We need you to intercept."

Hannah glanced down at her abdomen, not at all relishing the thought of putting herself and her baby in even more danger. "Is there anyone else you can send?" she asked.

"We sent them. It was 15 Turians. Now it's 2. The team we sent took multiple casualties and are not combat-effective at present. It is vital that we not allow the Turains access to this facility. There is no one else. We can't spare the men, and nobody else is close enough to make the intercept."

Hannah let out a breath. She glanced at the others. Took in their condition. "I only have one other combat-effective soldier with me," she said.

"That's two more than we could send otherwise," Captain Li replied.

She tried one more time. "I only have one plasma rifle, and I don't have any armor."

Captain Li let out an annoyed breath. "Then you better get your ass in gear, Shepard, and get there before the Turians. There should be an armory on site in the lower levels that would have survived the bombing. There's a couple of Seekers and a Cyberdisk there as well. I'm forwarding you the location, now."

"... Shit," Hannah muttered. "This is completely FUBAR."

"No fucking kidding," Captain Li replied. "Good luck, Shepard. You're going to need it."

Hannah rose to her feet, then, and as she did, she steeled herself, taking up command once more, pushing away her fear. She looked over her team once more. "Okay," she said. "I've got a mission. Delacroix, you're with me. We have to stop a pair of Turian commandos from poking their noses in a place they don't belong. Tillson, stay with the doctor."

Tillson nodded, and Delacroix scrambled to his feet.

"Good luck, Hannah," Karin called.

Hannah favored the doctor with a cocky grin. "I'm a Shepard," she said. "We make our own luck."

They had to continue the mission. That was just all there was to it. Ambushed, all but two of their 15-Turian cabal butchered by the aliens, Saren and Kathon were all that was left. By all rights, they should have gone back in defeat, but they were Turian; they had their pride. Not pressing on simply was not an option. They had drawn down from their full sprint but still made good time across the terrain, keeping the road to their right. They passed the remains of a half dozen human vehicles that might have been artillery before they had been ripped apart by disruption torpedoes; they were just mangled metal, now. Their drone flock spread out to cover their surroundings, every camera and every sensor trained on the world around them, alert for the merest flicker of heat or of distorted air that might give away the passage of a cloaked enemy.

There was nothing.

Neither spoke. Saren and Kathon made their way through green fields thick with thorns and stickers and flowers of every kind that would have been a major inconvenience to them had they not been wearing armor. Then the field gave way to a narrow band of trees.

The human military base lay beyond; the terrain suddenly and dramatically gave way to pavement and orderly rows of ruined buildings. It was all smashed flat. Craters littered the grounds. Scorch marks. A few fires still burned here and there. And there were bodies, most of them half-buried in the rubble, all of them mangled and burned by the violence visited upon this place by the orbiting fleet. There were bloodstains, usually near bodies.

Human blood was red.

The bunker had been a massive thing, and built into the hillside at the far end of the base. It lay in ruins, now, little more than a vast, jagged hole in the ground where a hill used to be, multiple levels all collapsed and torn and burned with only twisted metal and shattered concrete left behind. Except a hatch lay at the center of the ruin. It was blasted open and bent and deformed and the entrance to the lower levels was far larger than it had ever been designed to be.

Their target was in there.

Saren and Kathon exchanged glances. Then they ordered half a dozen recon drones into the hole to explore their find. Saren watched the progress of the recon drones on his omni-tool, observing through their camera feeds as Kathon stood guard, vigilant for any sign of human presence.

The complex below was mostly undamaged. It was abandoned, though, and the evacuation had clearly happened quickly. What surprised Saren most was probably how boring the bunker was. Everything was concrete. Everything was grey, and standardized with long concrete hallways connecting everything. Occasional yellow and black stripe patterns could be seen on archways. Sometimes there were colored stripes on the floor that lead from one location inside the bunker to another, probably used for navigation. And there were 9 seemingly identical concrete levels. The drones split up, each taking a different floor, and his mapsoft filled in the layout of the place, though the drones couldn't open doors, and most of those were shut.

A door on the second floor was open. The drone flew in and immediately came camera-to-face with a live human.

Saren stared at the image being projected by his omnitool. The human was dressed in a form-fitting black bodysuit. A pile of clothing was discarded on the floor; a locker was open next to her. She was in the middle of putting on a suit of purple and black armor identical to the ones his cabal had faced on the road here, and she was almost identical to an Asari: How closely she resembled one made his flesh crawl. The face was identical. The build was identical. Five fingers. Two hands. Two arms. Two feet. Two legs. Her build, the proportions, the ratio of arm length to body, even the set of her shoulders would not have looked out of place on any particularly fit maiden or matron. The way she moved, the way she stood made even her body language a match. Spirits, she even had those funny bumps on her chest that Asari always seemed to obsess over. But there were differences as well: she had red fur on her head instead of a crest; what he could see of her skin was smooth, and its tone was an inasari light pinkish tan. But everything else was the same.

Her eyes were very green, and as she saw the drone, they went wide in a distinctly Asari expression of surprise. A terrible suspicion went through his mind: perhaps these humans actually were Asari. Perhaps they were some long-lost splinter colony from before the Citadel. Perhaps the differences between the two species could be explained with divergent evolution in a new and different environment combined with some kind of genetic engineering.

He set the drone to attack mode, and it immediately opened fire. The human dove out of the way with an effortless display of athleticism, rolled on impact, came up on her feet with her rifle in her hands, and fired.

There was a flash of green before the drone's camera feed ended.

"Ensign Delacroix!" Hannah sent telepathically even as she swept the room to make sure another drone hadn't gotten in, "We have hostile drones on site!"

Mateo Delacroix immediately came out of a side room with a plasma rifle in hand plus a bag full of clips. "Shit," he said. "You okay, sir?" He hadn't changed yet. He'd been busy acquiring a weapon and ammunition for both his gun and Hannah's.

"I'm fine," Hannah said. She indicated the remains of the drone. "But if there's one, there's probably more. She had only just barely finished putting on the undergarment for her powered armor when the drone had come through the door. The open door.

God damn it.

A gesture and a mild application of telekinesis shut the door. They wouldn't be able to hear people coming down the hall with it shut, but if there were enemy drones on site, it was too dangerous to have it open.

Delacroix went to a locker, set down his weapon and the ammo, immediately stripped out of his clothes, and began to put on the black undergarment he had found within. His fit reasonably well; Hannah's was a little too small for her - enough to be annoying without seriously impeding her movement.

Hannah stepped up to the armor station across from the locker, then, where her suit of black and purple powered armor awaited. The armor was open - she had just been about to get into it when the drone had come through the door - and there was a small ramp that took her up to where she could climb into it comfortably. She did. Putting on a suit of powered armor took time. You could rush it to a certain extent, but the bare minimum required was five minutes. Ten was ideal. Average human height had gone up a good 10 centimeters since the Ethereal War, but even then, at 183 cm, Hannah was a tall woman, and the woman this armor had been assigned to was not; it was far too small at first, but after a few seconds, the armor automatically adjusted, expanding to allow Hannah's larger frame to fit it. The pain vanished. Armored plates slid into place, and a whole host of startup items streamed across her HUD.

Synthetic muscles… online.
Psionic amplifiers… online.
Archangel module… online.
Ghost module… not installed.
Neural interface… online.

That last was an important one, allowing a human to operate a suit of powered armor literally as if it were an extension of his or her body. The first models had controls for the hands and fingers that you actually needed to operate. Today, when you were wearing a suit of powered armor, moving its arm didn't feel like manipulating machinery; it felt like moving your arm. Pain was different. You didn't feel pain when your armor was damaged, but you still registered the damage.

All systems online.

"And we're good," Hannah said. "You're up, Ensign. I'm taking the Cyberdisc with me. You're on Seeker duty."

"Got it," Delacroix said as he began the process of putting on his own suit of powered armor.

As Hannah collected a pair of grenades and a few extra clips to clip into her armor's storage space, she brought up the cyberdisc's control panel in her augmented reality view and set it to defend her. "Sparky," she said, "You're with me." A quick check of the security cameras in the hallway show no hostiles, so she opened the door and stepped out.

The cyberdisc rose from the rack it had rested upon in the corner of the room and hovered after her like a faithful dog.

Her scanners were all in active mode, all feeding information into her field of view. She didn't need any scanner to show her the UV spectrum, but she had options for thermographic vision, vision enhancement, vision magnification, audio enhancement, motion detector, and an ultrasound sensor capable of switching between active and passive sonar with a thought.

Something was coming. Movement. Range was 20 meters. She took cover where one corridor joined the next and a red and green line intersected. The cyberdisc floated upwards to just above an open blast door about three meters further down the corridor such that it could not be seen by anyone approaching on foot.

17 meters. In the silence she could hear the soft hum of thrusters, but it was too loud for it to be just one drone. They were in the hall, but she couldn't stick her head out to look without exposing herself to fire.

15 meters. The faint hum grew louder.

'Just a little closer,' she thought to herself, producing a plasma grenade and signalling the cyberdisc to wait.

14 meters. 13. 12.

'Now,' she subvocalized.

The cyberdisc dipped down into view, unfolding into its floating spider-like form as it did so. It spun vertically, and then launched a plasma grenade down the hall at the approaching drones; Hannah activated hers and flung it simultaneously. There was the sound of multiple simultaneous rockets being fired. Hannah's eyes widened behind her all-concealing helmet, and she started to run even before the grenades landed.

Most of the shots missed. Explosions ripped through the concrete hall, sending dust and concrete chunks flying. Hannah felt as though she had been kicked in the chest. The next thing she knew, she was picking herself up off the floor, undamaged but shaken. The whirring noise had stopped.

The cyberdisc was still up. Barely. Pieces of its armored shell were missing. It had been perforated with shrapnel, and what armor remained to it was blackened. It listed badly to the side, but it had escaped being directly hit by the rocket barrage.

She risked a glance down the corridor, and while she wasn't sure exactly how many drones they'd caught with their twin plasma grenades, it was more than a few if the wreckage said anything about it.

A helmeted Turian in silver armor rounded the corner. Hannah raised her rifle, thankfully undamaged by the blasts, and immediately opened fire, squeezing off a burst of three quick shots. She began to duck back behind cover. The Turian did… something. A brilliant blue aura sprang up around him, and he somehow turned into light. It happened so fast that if she had blinked, she would have missed it. The light flickered forward, crossing the distance instantly, passing directly through her plasma bolts and leaving a trail of blue light that stretched back to where he had begun whatever it was he had done as he became a Turian in silver armor again. One instant he was at the end of the hallway, the next instant, he hit her hard enough to stagger her - it would have blown her off her feet if she hadn't been wearing her armor - and he was there, firing his alien rifle into her at point blank range. It bit into her armor, seeking the vulnerable flesh beneath but not yet finding it.

A spike of adrenaline went through her head, and the universe seemed to slow. She had all the time in the world. "No," she said, and pushed into his thoughts to take control of his body away. He fought her. His will was like steel, but his gunfire ceased, his trigger finger going slack. She stared into his transparent helmet, looking directly into his eyes for all that he could not see hers, pushing as hard as she could. She was gaining ground. Just a little more... "Don't fight," she whispered. "... just let it happen."

Almost there. She pushed. She felt him give. He dropped his gun. Then he brought up his other fist with an angry snarl and shoved a crackling ball of blue and purple light into her face.

It threw her backwards into the far wall, and it hurt like hell. She hit the ground. She could feel her helmet shifting and twisting, strips of it being peeled away. It was holding for now, but she would not want to take another one of those to the face. By the time she had a chance to recover, he had already flung another one at her. She rolled out of the way, and it hit the concrete floor. A blue light rippled across the point of impact, and cracks spider-webbed across the floor.

Hannah brought up her weapon and rolled to evade another attack; it hit the floor as well, which continued to crack with an ominous grinding noise. She shot him, and he took all three shots of her burst on a barrier that sprung into existence in front of his left arm. Heat blossomed in the air. Her vision went dark as the aftereffects of the warp continued to chew through her helmet, and in the time it took her to take it off and fling it aside, he had launched yet another dark sphere of energy at her.

This one expanded into a whirling vortex. She felt herself lose her connection to gravity as she began to rotate around the heart of some kind of singularity. Thinking quickly, she immediately activated her archangel module and rocketed forward into the Turian; he had been halfway through another of his strange attacks, and the impact knocked him prone and disrupted whatever he had been about to do. He said something that she couldn't understand, but by his tone it was something uncomplimentary.

With Hannah finally out of its firing line, the cyberdisc opened fire on the Turian's prone body, its cyberdisc cannon sending out a stream of yellow bolts that began to impact against his shields. He tried to roll out of the way, but the cyberdisc had his number, and Hannah felt a thrill of victory rush through her body.

Then a second Turian - this one slightly shorter and lacking the head fringe of the first on its helmet - stepped around the corner and fired a goddamn rocket launcher at the cyberdisc. The rocket took it full in the side, and the explosion send it flying, parts and debris raining off of it as it landed in a heap on the concrete between Hannah and the first Turian.

He twisted and flung another of his attacks at her even as he rolled to get out of her line of fire. Parts of his armor were glowing with heat, but it wasn't stopping him.

She didn't have time to dodge.

In sheer desperation, Hannah threw her meager telekinetic talents - though greatly amplified by her armor - out to stop the incoming ball of crackling dark power. It was grabbing at an oncoming wave. Her power wanted to slip into it, not oppose it. Her eyes shone with purple light as she fed more and more of her will into the effort, but she just couldn't get a grip on it. The biotic warpflew straight and true, and it would have struck her solidly but for one detail both combatants had neglected in their focus on each other: the fallen cyberdisc, destroyed by the Turian's crestless partner only moments before.

The cyberdisc exploded.

The world went briefly white, and Hannah fell. The damage to the floor from repeated impacts of the Turian's strange, dark energy fueled attacks had gone deeper than she had suspected, had broken the concrete all the way through. The cyberdisc's exposion ripped it all open, and they fell through to some sort of science lab below. Hannah stopped her descent at the last second with the archangel pod's influence over gravity and flew a few centimeters above the floor until she had cleared the Turian's line of fire. Then she turned off the pod, rolled a few times to bleed off momentum, and then spun herself up to her feet, weapon in hand, waiting for the Turian to fire at her.

But he didn't fire, and Hannah suddenly realized why; they had not landed in just any science lab as she had assumed.

They had landed in alien containment. And it was filled with dissected Turians.

The Turian stared at his people sliced open and neatly catalogued, some missing crucial internal organs, some splayed open like frogs, all with mind-probe contact points inserted into their exposed brains.

Oh, God.

One of the seemingly dead bodies turned its head and looked at her before fixing its gaze upon her Turian foe. It whispered something. An alien phrase she did not understand but could guess; there is only one thing she would have asked for if she had been in the Turian's place, vivisected upon a stainless steel table in an alien lab and unexpectedly found by another human.

Her Turian foe's eyes flashed with utter contempt, with endless hatred. He was not merely angry at her; he despised her. And though they had no common language, when he spoke she understood him perfectly. With that combination of hate, disgust, righteous wrath, and a tone of judgment ringing in his voice like an echo of absolute truth, the Turian could only have said, "You… Monsters."

She pulled the trigger on her plasma rifle.

Nothing happened. It wasn't out of ammo, but it didn't fire.

No problem. She had another weapon: a nightmare she had been crafting for a while now. A really nasty one that should leave just about anyone catatonic, locked in a delusion of complete physical infirmity. She opened a telepathic connection between her mind and his and slammed the nightmare home as she whispered into his thoughts, "All your teeth are falling out."

He went completely beserk.

"Oh, crap," she said.

Then The Turian seemingly teleported across the room to smash into her. The force of the impact would have staggered her again if she hadn't been half expecting it. She caught his arm before he could fire his gun into her exposed face. He twisted, driven mad with rage and fear, his flesh and blood straining with impossible strength against the might of her powered armor.

From an outside perspective it had never been doubt, but for her in that moment, she had been sure he was about to win that contest. Her powered armor was more than enough to stop him; there was a sick crack as his arm broke, but that only seemed to enrage him more. He howled his fury, his body flaring with blue-purple light. Weapons fire sounded above them, but it was a distant thing. An unimportant thing.

The light snapped out from him in an aura three meters across, ripping into everything around him. Into the lab tables. Into the Turians. Into her armor. Into her exposed face. She screamed in pain. There was more weapons fire from above. It burned. It burned like fire, like acid.

Hannah Shepard grit her teeth, clenched her fist around the Turian's broken but still armored arm, and she heaved, natural and synthetic muscles working as one. She tore it clean off with a wet ripping noise and the sound of protesting metal. There was a splatter of dark blue blood, and the field of blue energy faltered and faded away. He stared at her in shock and said something that could only have meant, "What?"

"I have had ENOUGH of you," she snarled. Her anger and her frustration reached a breaking point. And she proceeded to beat him unconscious with his own severed arm.

It felt amazing.

Afterwards, still panting for breath, it occurred to her to check on Delacroix. "Ensign," she sent telepathically. "You still with us?"

Silence. Emptiness. There was no awareness to connect to. It might mean he was unconscious, but she doubted it. All at once, her victory felt hollow.

The other Turian dropped down the hole. He? She? The Turian looked like hell. The armor around its left hand had been cracked, and the bones looked broken pretty badly. It had taken a bunch of plasma shots, too. But she wasn't much better off. Whatever that field had done to her, she felt like hell. Her face hurt. Her everything hurt. Her rifle was broken, but she leveled it at the Turian just the same.

The Turian gestured, and her now armless enemy was surrounded by a blue glow. He levitated into the air. Hannah made a disapproving noise and started forward. The Turian leveled her weapon at her exposed head.

"Damn it," Hannah muttered. She took a step back. The weapon was lowered.

Then the second Turian surrounded herself with a similar glow; both of them levitated back up through the hole.

Hannah followed. She kept her distance, but she followed until they had left the base entirely.

Delacroix was dead. His armor was ripped up and his body was still giving off static shocks. His rifle worked, so she took that and his dog tags before she went about setting the charges that would destroy the base, preventing any future Turian operation from taking it. She took the base computer's memory core and stored in a special secure compartment in her powered armor, and she left. She found three seekers had been torn tentacle-from-tentacle about ten meters further up the corridor from Delacroix's body on her way out.

When the charges finally went off and collapsed the bunker, she was a kilometer away, and though she had accomplished her mission objective, it didn't feel like a victory.

And now, after the danger was passed, her hands would not stop shaking.

The ground invasion of Shanxi was over by morning. It had ended in utter failure; by the time reinforcements had begun to land, the 26th Armiger Legion had taken 80% casualties, with the majority of those being KIAs. The legion which had landed thinking to support their fellows instead became an evacuation force. It had not gone any better at the other landing site.

Desolas had been fine even with that until he had seen Saren on the list of the wounded. He had known it was a risk, but seeing his brother's extensive injuries described in such clinical detail took some of the wind out of his sails. He was angry, but he wouldn't let that affect his judgment.

Bombardment of the planet commenced immediately. The battles at both of the targeted cities had revealed underground and fortified hangers. He now targeted each of them, not stopping until the underground hangers were completely destroyed. Then he began sending additional Turian fighters and interceptors to make attacks on military targets across the planet for the sole purpose of attempting to draw out the location of more such hidden hangers. They found a few more before the humans stopped launching fighters.

They still had the advantage. They controlled the orbit of this world. If they exploited that, if they used it for all it was worth, then another landing - concentrated on one location - might just be able to succeed where the first two had failed. Plans began to take shape within his thoughts. Counterstrategies to the revealed abilities of the human ground forces. Yes. He could do this.

"Sir," Consetana Gavdas began.

He held a hand. "I think I know how to win the ground war," he said.

"Sir, you need to see this," Gavdas insisted. Putting it on your display now.

He looked up.

At the edges of the solar system, a human fleet had arrived within range of one of the sensor buoys his fleet had deployed to detect incoming enemy ships. And it was a fleet which made the force that had defended this world look like tiny in comparison. Hundreds of ships. 37 of the undersized dreadnoughts, 20 of the fighter-carriers. 111 of their cruiser sized vessels. A full 200 frigates. If he wanted to, he could make their lives miserable. He could harass them for weeks. He could try to pick apart their forces. But he knew that he would ultimately lose. He'd make them work for it, but he would lose. He felt as though a great pit were yawning open beneath his feet, and the ledge that stood between him and certain doom was quickly crumbling away

His heart sank. "ETA?" he asked.

"Four hours," Gavdas said.

He thought about it. "We don't have the necessary resources to win this. I don't think this is going to be a minor skirmish, Consetana." He waited a beat. "I think this is going to be worse than that."

Gavdas nodded. "It seems so, sir."

They needed more. The Turian Hierarchy needed to mobilize. And they needed to deny the humans the ability to use the shipyards in orbit, and the resources of the planet. "Four hours. Plenty of time. Destroy the human shipyards. Clear the orbit of everything but escape pods and civilian transports. Then I want every star port and every military base on the planet that we can detect destroyed. I want us gone before they are anywhere near in weapons range."

He took a breath, the weight of the moment settling onto him. He hadn't started this, hadn't escalated it; by the time he'd become involved, things had already escalated to… no. No sense whining. He would probably be scapegoated for this, and his career was probably over, but Desolas Arterius was Turian. "Then we need to send a message to Palaven as soon as we're in comms range of a buoy."

"What message?"

Desolas looked up. He looked tired, but his voice was clear: "We are at war," he said.

Codex: The Systems Alliance and the Citadel, First Contact

Humanity had been a star-faring race for almost 120 years, its sphere of influence spanning nearly a hundred and fifty light years across with 23 major colony worlds before the discovery of an anomalous gravitational influence in orbit of a red giant star some 36 light years from Earth in a system that otherwise had little to recommend it to human interest. That gravitational influence proved to be the result of the presence of the Arcturus Mass Relay in the system, and although the Systems Alliance was initially cautious of this artifact, after ten years of careful study, the Alliance government concluded that benefits of its use seemed to outweigh any potential downsides. This led to a period of rapid - some said too rapid - expansion through the Mass Relay network in which the worlds of Eden Prime, Terra Nova, Tyr, Elysium, and Shanxi were added to the existing Alliance colony worlds. By 2157, 13 years after the discovery of the Mass Relays - 133 years since humanity had become a star-faring race - a science team was granted permission to attempt to activate a dormant Mass Relay in a solar system a few light years away from Shanxi.

They were noticed.

A Turian patrol came through the now active relay and, instead of negotiating as they should have, opened fire. Although this initial incident was later found to have been an accident - an improperly calibrated targeting computer turning what was intended as a warning shot across the bow of a human science vessel, admittedly an overly aggressive move by the Turian patrol commander, into a killing blow - it could not be taken back. The Alliance detail devoted to the protection of the expedition responded in kind. The situation escalated into a series of confused, bloody skirmishes in the region of space around the Mass Relay, ultimately ending in a human retreat. The surviving Turians sent for reinforcements, and the conflict the humans called the Second Contact War began. The battles of that war became well known to military historians across the galaxy: First Shanxi, Second Shanxi, Relay 314, First, Second, and Third Taetrus, First and Second Elysium, and a dozen other lesser skirmishes. Humanity's relationship with the Citadel Races was a rocky and bitter one at first. Theirs was a race which had born the burden of unprovoked alien aggression before, and their memories were long.