Mindoir Defense Headquarters
2170
Private Joseph P. McDonald, nineteen-year-old native of Mindoir and one of the few people in the garrison who was both a native to Mindoir and wasn't particularly interested in leaving the quiet, boring post on one of Earth's quietest colonies, gazed at the readout of his sensor station with what could generously be called 'silent contemplation'. Mostly, he was staring sightlessly in it's general direction whilst asking himself for the thousandth time why the hell he had signed up for the military.
"Hey Joey! Another day hard at work, huh?" a chipper voice cheerfully chirped from behind him, and he looked over to see a beautiful, rosy-cheeked, green eyed brunette beaming at him, holding a pile of folders to her chest and filling her uniform out very nicely.
"A-ah, yeah! Gotta do my part and keep everyone safe, right?" he responded with a laugh that he had meant to have sound confident, but instead honestly just sounded nervous. Clearing his throat, he returned her smile. "A-and how are you, Elizabeth? You…uh, you look good!"
"Well thank you, Joey, you're looking fine yourself." Elizabeth Murphy, the most beautiful girl on Mindoir (as far as one Joseph P. McDonald was concerned) and the answer to his earlier question, responded, looking him up and down in approval. "And I'm doing very well indeed, going to give Colonel Tyler some paperwork. Oh, and he wanted to know if we've heard anything from the patrol group."
"Not yet, no." Private George Elliot, another Mindoir native that, unlike Joe, couldn't wait to get off of his homeworld, spoke up from where he was lounging (and there was no other word for it) over by the comms station. "But they aren't due to show up for another couple of hours anyway, so…"
Chiming from his station drew Joseph's eyes away from Elizabeth, and after taking a moment to study the readout he frowned slightly.
"Joey?" Elizabeth's voice asked from behind him, and a moment later she was standing beside his chair and peering down at the console curiously. "Joey, what is it?"
"I'm not sure. About thirty ships just came through the relay, but they aren't transmitting any IFF codes yet, and they're not responding to the automated identification requests. George?" he responded absently, fingers fiddling with his station's controls as he tried to refine the information being sent to him by the satellites orbiting the planet and the mass relay.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm on it." George grumbled, getting himself into a more professional position and putting on his headset. "Attention approaching ships, this is Mindoir Defense Command, heave to and identify yourselves. I repeat, stop your engines and identify yourselves immediately, over."
There was silence in the room for a moment, a long, long moment. More than enough time for the approaching ships to have received the message and halted.
"Beth, go get the Colonel. Fast." Joseph ordered, and it was an order for all that she was the same rank that he was, and arguably more important by dint of being the local garrison commander's aide. "George, keep hailing them."
"Fine, but I bet it's just the patrol fleet messing with us, testing our readiness or whatever." The other man sighed.
"I don't think so. The readings are all wrong, it's like looking at a mishmash of random, hodge-podge ships. The weirdest thing is…" Joe trailed off, before his eyes widened and he shot to his feet, darting over to the wall and slamming his hand down on the big red button that sat there. As alarms began to blare, he darted back to his seat and ignored George's spluttering demands as he returned to his console.
"The hell is going on, McDonald?!" Colonel Kermit Tyler bellowed as he stormed into the room, Elizabeth on his heels. "Who activated the general alarm?"
"I did, sir! Thirty unknown ships have exited the mass relay and are approaching the planet at top speed. They're ignoring all hails and have no IFF. Further more, while at least some of them read as warships, they're a mish-mash of multiple polities and classes, and there are at least five that read as large transports. But that's not the worst of it." Joe responded, glancing up at his commanding officer, his jaw so tight he was sure it would crack under the strain. "The largest three warships come up in the Citadel warbook as Dominion-class heavy cruisers. Batarians, sir."
"Pirates. It's a slave raid." Tyler voiced Joe's fear and, ignoring George's sudden silence and Elizabeth's horrified gasp, leaned forwards and keyed on the microphone on Joe's console. "Attention, red alert! An unknown fleet of thirty starships is approaching the planet, including multiple warships! We believe them to have hostile intent. All military personnel are to report to action stations and prepare for combat."
Clicking the microphone off, he glanced over at George.
"Elliot, activate the alert system, system wide. All civilians are to head for the closest shelter or their designated shelter-in-place. All militia are to report to their section armory and stand by for further orders. And send a Case Zulu!" he barked, and the white-faced man nodded, stabbing several buttons and speaking into his microphone. After a moment, he swore and looked back at Tyler. "Sir, jamming on all broadband and FTL frequencies, emanating from the approaching fleet."
"Send an Emergency Action Message on the low frequency then! Text, hieroglyphics, 21st century emoticons, I don't care!" he snarled, before pausing for a moment. "Send it to every relay in range, and use the encryption to talk to Citadel Fleet assets as well as standard Alliance encryptions. If there is a Turian patrol fleet out there somewhere, well, I'll take all the help I can get. Even if it comes from the platies."
"Aye-aye, sir." George acknowledged, and Joe glanced over at Elizabeth and tried to give her his most reassuring smile, even as he dreaded internally what was to come. An EAM could take hours to reach an allied, or even positive-neutral, fleet. And God only knew how much longer it would take for said fleet to arrive.
All he knew was, it would take far longer for help to arrive than the defense satellites and meagre ground-based defenses could possibly hope to hold off a fleet of this size, never mind the three heavy cruisers leading the charge.
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Entertainment District
Landing City
Mindoir
Attack Time T+1 hour, 55 minutes
Tamara V'malo, who was definitely not SPECTRE Senior Agent Tela Vasir thank you very much, swore in disbelief and outrage as she watched a pair of batarians finish their callous examination of a pair of human women (clearly a mother and daughter, given the resemblance at visible age difference) before one of the batarians nonchalantly put a bullet through the mother's forehead, his partner jabbing the daughter in the neck with an injector.
Goddess, she hated these four-eyed fucks. It wasn't enough to kidnap and enslave people, no, of course not. They had to gun down those that they didn't consider 'worth' enslaving in front of their families, just to drive home how powerful they were, how 'superior' they were.
She had a feeling the Hegemony would end up regretting it if they pissed off humanity, though. The rest of the galaxy might be inclined to restrain themselves and tolerate the 'Batarian cultural cornerstones' in an effort to avoid a galactic war from breaking out, but she doubted Humanity was. Oh, they didn't involve themselves too aggressively for the sake of diplomacy, but she had seen the (admittedly thin) reports from the (admittedly few) operatives that collected what information they could from within the thick walls of mankind's territory. Rumors of research into protecting themselves from the genophage, research that might just so happen to make a cure for the krogans possible someday, to very quiet talks about helping the Quarians resettle on unoccupied worlds and repairing their immune systems, to a deep and seething distaste for Batarian 'culture'. From what she had gathered, and overheard herself from several humans, for that matter, was that Humanity's response of the Batarian belief that raiding and enslaving the other races was their divine right amounted to (and she was quoting one particular Alliance marine speaking to a Batarian in a Zakera War bar, here) "Come and have a go if you think you're fucking hard enough, mate. Wouldn't be the first time we've rebuilt a culture from the ground up, see."
Honestly, she should have thought about that before she'd agreed to this little favour. Manipulating things to smooth things out with the turians was all well and good, hell she was a legitimate fan of the idea, if only because Humanity becoming more integrated with the wider galaxy would make them less likely to try and burn it down in pursuit of some righteous cause. But helping Batarian slavers instigate just that sort of crusade?
Maybe this had been a mistake? Perhaps…perhaps she was going too far…?
She shook her head firmly, banishing the thought from her mind with the ease of long practice. She had spent two centuries serving the galaxy, she had been fighting the monsters that lingered in the darkness between stars when humanity was celebrating having landed on their own damned moon for the first time! She wasn't a novice, naïve and innocent and full of dreams. She knew how stained one's hands had to get to really get things done. Heroism wasn't the shining, untarnished beauty of the vids. Heroism, genuine heroism, was dirty. It was blood and tears and pain and loss, it was nightmares and rage and suffering. It was polluting your own soul, tainting your own heart, to make sure that others didn't have to.
However many people died here, however many died during the Alliance's retributive attacks against pirates, it would still be a far lower number than a war between star nations if the galaxy remained as divided and bitterly distrustful as it now was. All she had to do was stay the course and everything would work out.
Everything would turn out for the best.
"How much further until we're at the rendezvous?" she barked at one of the Broker agents accompanying her on this particular endeavor, a drell that had enjoyed killing so much that even the Illuminated Primacy had decided that he needed to be dealt with, sending one of their best after him. He had escaped, and killed the other man's wife for good measure, but it had quite literally cost him an arm and a leg. Now he was one of the Shadow Broker's most favoured killers, someone he sent when failure wasn't to be tolerated.
"Another five minutes or so. The insider should have the targets secured nearby. Once we have them, our pickup should arrive within a handful of minutes." The drell responded, sounding far too relaxed and casual about the situation. He glanced at her with a smirk. "Relax, blue. An hour from now, we'll be well on our way to the drop-off point and going our separate ways."
"I'll relax when this is done. If we're still on the ground when Alliance reinforcements get here, this is going to go very, very badly for us." She growled, and was actually somewhat gratified to see the drell nod in agreement. Looking around at the rest of the agents, she glared and flexed her biotics, letting the electric purple-blue flicker across her body. "Remember, the girls can't be harmed under any circumstances. I don't care what they do to you, if there is so much as a single, solitary scratch on them I will personally turn you inside out before tripping you out the airlock without a suit on."
None of them seemed as if they particularly cared about her threat, and she supposed she couldn't blame them for their confidence. A couple of kids, even if T'soni wasn't much of a kid anymore and Shepard was on the cusp of what passed for adult-hood amongst humans, without weapons or armor wouldn't pose much of a threat to armored and shielded career mercenaries. Restraining them and getting them onto a shuttle shouldn't be complicated or time consuming. Especially since the insider was supposed to have tranquilized them already. Not enough to knock them out entirely or risk medical issues, but enough to keep them docile and listless.
They rounded the corner, expecting to find two semi-conscious kids and an anxious, greedy coward waiting for them. Instead, they found themselves looking at what looked to be the epicenter of a blast furnace. The ground was scorched, black soot burned into the ground in a starburst pattern that had to be a good fifty feet in diameter, with everything in the space made of a metallic or plastic warped (or even outright rendered into a puddle) by the intense heat of whatever had exploded here.
There were more than a few corpses as well, or at least the blackened, twisted remnants of what might have once been sentients. Nearly a dozen, as a matter of fact, but there were two individuals who were entirely untouched save for the very obvious and bloody wounds. One was a pirate, vorcha, while the other…the other Tela was pretty sure she recognized from the Shepard dossier.
"Goddess damnit!" she snarled, stomping over and crouching beside the elderly human man, swearing again as she confirmed his identity: Cathair Shepard, father of the fallen war hero Faolan Shepard, father-in-law to the Fox of Shanxi, and grandfather to one Cassandra Morrigan Shepard. "The stupid bastards must have started shooting! This was supposed to be clean!"
"Something obviously went wrong, just look at the blast damage. These other bodies are totally unidentifiable, it's just as likely that some of the local militia were helping with evacuations and a firefight broke out." The drell responded, examining one of the corpses clinically. "I have no idea what could have caused fire damage like this that wouldn't have also charcoaled the human and the vorcha. You can see that they were practically at the epicenter of the blast, but are totally untouched by it. You ever seen anything like this?"
"No, nothing." Tela shook her head, taking another look around and realizing that the drell was right, and she couldn't help but feel at a loss for a long moment before huffing in aggravation and shaking her head. "It doesn't matter right now. The girls are in the wind, we have no idea where they are!"
"Well, they can't have gotten far. The insider was in contact with us until not long ago, and the pirates are all over this area. Either one of the groups will find them and we'll take custody of them, or we'll catch up to them. And it's not like we'll confuse anyone else for them there aren't a lot of asari on this planet, especially not ones with red-haired humans." The drell pointed out reasonably, so reasonably it honestly kind of pissed her off, especially since he just so happened to be right.
"We have to move fast, then. There are shelters all over this city, and if they get inside one it's over. We'd never be able to gain access fast enough to retrieve them and escape before the Alliance fleets arrive. Fortunately, she's the only biotic on this damn planet. She won't be hard for me to track down if she uses them, and I expect that she will have to."
It was a fact not often talked about, not least of which because the vast majority of citizens were already fully aware, but any Asari could sense the dark energy fluctuations and pulses that came from biotics usage. An inborn trait from generations of evolution, a legacy of living on a world rich in element zero. According to common belief, it was a stubborn relic of ancient times, when their primitive ancestors had hunted and been hunted by creatures as in tune with biotics as the asari themselves were. A legacy of countless generations struggling to survive in a hostile paradise. A properly trained asari, amongst whose number Tela must assuredly was counted, could learn to track a specific individual's biotic fluctuations across certain distances. The precise values of which were kept very, very secret.
Holding their weapons at the ready, the group set off at brisk jog, armored boots strangely loud on the street against a backdrop of sirens, gunfire, screams, explosions, and aircraft. Five minutes and half-a-mile later, they found themselves crossing the path of another incendiary massacre, though this one was considerably smaller and the bodies were more intact. Not that it mattered, given the bodies were nothing more than a pack of a half-dozen varren and their handler. Part of the Blood Pack's contribution to the raid, more likely than not. They liked to use varren to terrify slaves into submission, finding hiding slaves, and chase down any that tried to flee. She didn't have much of a guess which act this particular group had been attempting, but she also didn't really care what they had been up to. What was important was that the blast that had killed them was very similar indeed to the one near the deceased Shepard patriarch.
"We're headed in the right direction, at least, but it's obvious that these blasts are being shaped somehow. The blast pattern and scorch marks are too consistent for them to be a collateral result of something else. It's not like any Tech attack or incendiary rounds I've ever heard of, though." Tela mused, prodding one of the varren with her armored toe, frowning in disgust at both the shape it was in and the stench of charred flesh and meat.
"It just as likely could have been some kind of grenade or portable artillery from some Alliance marines." The drell pointed out, but Tela scoffed and shook her head.
"Not likely. Maybe if this was the only scene we had seen so far you'd have a point, but don't forget what the first one looked like. The elder Shepard and the vorcha closest to him were untouched at the center of the blast, everything else at the perimeter was like this. If it was some sort of explosive device, grenade or artillery or whatever, it would be the other way around, with those farthest from the point of origin being the least damaged." She refuted, sounding nearly contemptuous as she gestured to the carnage. "So, either it's a device that somehow radiates an explosion from the outside in, or it's…something else."
"Like what?" it was the drell's turn to scoff, and despite how outlandish it sounded, Tela couldn't shake the feeling that she was right, that this wasn't some sort of strange grenade or modified ammo but was instead something else entirely.
"I don't know, but I stick by my evaluation." She said finally, shaking her head. "Move on, if whatever it is still poses a threat when we find the girls, we deal with it then. At worst, all I need to do is throw a Stasis on them until we can tranquilize them."
Move on they did, picking up their pace as the clock continued to run out, the inexorable march of time taking them closer and closer to the point that they would have to retreat in failure or risk being caught out by the Alliance battlefleet that was sure to be on it's way soon. A battlefleet that would be magnitudes more powerful than what was required to wipe the force attacking the colony from the face of the galaxy.
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SSV Einstein
Flagship
Alliance 8th Fleet
Patrol Route 117, Waypoint 7
Attican Traverse
Attack Time T+1 Hour, 15 Minutes
The battle-bridge of the SSV Einstein was, by all appearances, a place of calm, professional energy. Busy without being frantic, focused without being blind, controlled without being tyrannical. In other words, it was every inch emblematic of military skill and efficiency. A fact, a description, that had damn well better be accurate. As the flagship of humanity's premier battlefleet, formed from the best-performing ships of the ad-hoc fleet that had battled the Turian Hierarchy, the Einstein was in many ways the example to which the Alliance Navy aspired and the Citadel species respect.
Which is why there was no panic when the communications officer received an Emergency Action Message. Instead, she simply pulled it out of the printer dedicated solely to such low-frequency, high-priority messages and lifted her voice to loft her subsequent words towards the red-haired woman sitting in the command chair.
"Captain Shepard, ma'am! Emergency Action Message, on the low frequency receiver, ma'am!" she reported, prompting the famed Fox of Shanxi to get to her feet and cross the intervening distance. Taking the paper in her hands, her eyes skated across the page, widening with every word, before she spun around.
"Red alert! Action stations! Engineering, I need everything you can give me! Helm, flank speed for Mindoir! Tactical, all gunnery crews to their stations and pilots to their ships! Order the fleet to move out! Communications, Case Zulu alert, Mindoir is under attack!" she roared, sweeping back towards her command chair and sitting down, tapping several keys to bring up the channel dedicated to the flag bridge. As alarms began to blare and the Einstein shook under the force of her engines going from station-keeping to emergency military thrust, the face of Rear Admiral (Lower Half) Kahoku, the carrier's flag officer, popped into view. "Admiral Kahoku, sir, EAM from Mindoir. Unknown fleet, presumed hostile, thirty ships led by three Batarian heavy cruisers, sir."
"Captain, I…" Kahoku started, only to be cut off as the communications officer shouted again from her station.
"Captain! Another EAM coming in! Unknown fleet confirmed hostile, they've engaged Mindoir's orbital defenses! Mindoir Defense Command presumes it is a pirate raid, sir!"
"Helm, what's our ETA to Mindoir?" Hannah barked, temporarily ignoring her superior officer as she tried to get some manner of grasp on the whole situation.
"At best speed, an hour and a half, Captain! Another hour after that to get from the relay to the orbitals!" the helmsman responded, her fingers dancing across her control panel as she put every ounce of her effort, and the vast majority of her focus, into controlling several million tons of warship at speeds that it hadn't traveled since it's work-up trials.
"Are there any allied ships, or even a Citadel fleet, that's closer?" she ground out, and it was the admiral that answered.
"There's a mixed Turian-Asari battlegroup on manouvers in the Ismar Frontier, dealing with some particularly unpleasant members of the Blue Suns." He said, tapping a few keys, and a couple of minutes later the faces of an Asari and a Turian popped up on screen. Without giving them a chance to say anything, he addressed them politely but firmly. "This is Rear Admiral Kahoku of the Alliance 8th Fleet. Our colony of Mindoir is under attack by a fleet of thirty ships, and it's defenses are crumbling. I am underway at my best speed, but I am hereby requesting assistance. I understand that you are undergoing a mission of your own that cannot be abandoned, so I would like, at the very least, for you to intercept and search any unknown or suspicious vessels that enter your area of operations for captives."
"Thirty ships? For a, if you'll forgive the apparent callousness of the phrase, simple pirate raid?" the asari, a lavender-skinned beauty with burgundy freckle-like marks speckling her face, said with a frown as she considered his words. "That's unusual…"
"Highly unusual. There isn't a single group in the Terminus Systems, outside of perhaps Eclipse, that could dedicate so many craft to a single action, which would indicate that several groups are working in concert. That rarely happens, and only when something sufficiently lucrative is available to them. Admiral, I'm sorry to say, but I believe this is more than an opportunistic pirate raid. I believe that the slave markets have finally decided that humans are worth the risk of launching direct attacks, rather than the occasional kidnapping." the turian interjected, sounding far more detached than his asari compatriot, though the disgust he held towards slavery couldn't have been more blatant if he had tried. Hannah swallowed heavily, even as she absently recalled what she knew about Eclipse thanks to Benezia and Aethyta. An all-asari (though, supposedly, a few humans were starting to join their ranks) mercenary band that functioned in many ways like a private army than anything else. They were also, by dint of being asari, violently and ruthless opposed to any sort of slavery, which made their involvement in this attack profoundly unlikely at best.
"I have to agree with my colleague, and I speak for both of us when I say that I wish that we could intervene directly, but we're preparing to attack a Blue Suns stronghold responsible for launching several attacks on eezo mines, taking their stockpiles and a multitude of miners and other civilians hostage. It would be impossible for us to withdraw now." The asari returned, and Kahoku nodded tightly, even as Hannah opened her mouth to protest, only remaining silent because the alien woman kept speaking. "That being said, once we deal with the enemy force in orbit, we can detach all of our light escort units beyond those needed to provide orbital support to the infantry and deploy them to the local relays that can receive traffic from the Crescent Nebula."
"Agreed. Once our operations are complete here, we will be happy to assist you in securing your colony and providing aid to the survivors. Spirits be with you, Admiral." The turian agreed, before the signal cut out.
"It seems we're on our own for the time being then, Captain." Kahoku sighed, and Hannah nodded tightly, heart thrumming with fear for her child, for her parents-in-law, for Liara, and for everyone else on Mindoir that was dead or dying or being dragged into cages like animals while she sat in this chair and prayed… Kahoku's voice broke her out of her thoughts, gentle and reassuring but with a core of bared steel. "Hannah. It's going to be all right. There isn't a chance in hell that the girls were shoved into the first shelter they past by your in-laws. They're going to be okay, you're going to see them, and then we're going to make whatever stupid bastards thought they could get away with this suffer."