Spurred off by a discussion on the Caer Azkaban Yahoo group positing the idea, what if the...
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Last Stand at Shanxi (Mass Effect AU)
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01 - Child Soldier
Doghead13
Grumpy Old Scottish Biker
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Spurred off by a discussion on the Caer Azkaban Yahoo group positing the idea, what if the Turian invasion of Shanxi had gone the approximate way the German invasion of Stalingrad went. Posted here at the request of CA user Shalon Wood, who wanted it made easier to link people to.
May contain traces of either Humanity Fuck Yeah or maybe that should be Humanity Calm The Fuck Down.
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The Turians came out of nowhere.
They never made an attempt to communicate - just came in shooting, shot down anything they could find in orbit - the picket ships, weather satellites, communications satellites, everything - then landed north of the capital just after midnight, not far from my family's farm. We were long gone by then - we'd taken our hunting rifles and piled into Dad's pickup and were in one of the deep-level bomb shelters in the capital by the time they got boots on the ground. We didn't even know who they were then - we just called them xenos. Means alien enemies. I still call them xenos.
We don't know what actually happened the morning they hit the city. Couple of years ago I spoke to one of them who was there that day - he said according to the comms logs his team found in the days afterwards the entire thing was a mistake. A team went in to take what they thought was a fortified strong point that'd got cut off by their advance, and only realised it was a school's bomb shelter after they'd thrown frags through every door they could find. I don't know whether I believe him. Say what you like about Turians, the xeno bastards are operators. They don't make a habit of screwing up like that.
My eldest brother was with the unit in the push-back that caught them, I don't know what he thought but I can guess. Four, five minutes after his platoon had wiped that xeno assault team and found a shelter full of dead kids xeno airmobile infantry were sent in, in reaction to our push. Our lads fought like mad dogs but the xenos overwhelmed them. One guy from my brother's platoon made it out and back to our lines before he died, and lived long enough to say something about the xenos having killed everyone in that shelter, and after that any idea that anyone was going to be taken alive just... went. It was fight or die. We were in a last stand, all of us.
There wasn't any such thing as a non-combatant after that, if you could hold a gun you held a gun and if you weren't big enough to do that you planted bombs or even just reloaded magazines for the people who were big enough to hold a gun. We knew we couldn't win - if we drove them back into space they'd blast the planet until nothing could live there - but we were okay with that. Shanxi is a human world. We all knew we were going to die there, even the littlest of us knew, and the goal became to stop the xenos making it their world after they'd killed us.
If we couldn't have Shanxi, nobody was going to.
The first suicide bomber was a miner whose kids had been in that shelter. He'd hidden a huge amount of blasting supplies after the xenos started shooting satellites down but before the xenos landed. He filled a Bergen with ANFO - ammonium nitrate fuel oil - blasting compound and nails, rigged it to a deadman switch, spent half a day crawling through sewers until he was well behind enemy lines, then express-mailed himself to God in the densest concentration of them he could find. I later learned it had been a field medic's station, I laughed when I heard that. Look on the face of the ugly bitch xeno who told me it was amazing.
I'd been shooting for fun for two years before the war and I shot my first xeno four days into the invasion. Didn't kill him though, not that time - their ballistic shields are pretty good at stopping hunting rifle bullets. I adapted - I learned to work my rifle's bolt faster. Needed to score four hits in as many seconds to down one. Three rounds spaced that tight would knock the xeno's shield down, then the fourth one into his brain. Done. It's as much luck as skill. Got my first one like that on day fifteen.
We planted bombs. Victim-operated devices, command-detonated devices, timed charges, anything we could make. I was small enough to crawl through tighter passages than adults, or the xenos - I can't even remember how many bags of home-made explosives I dragged through tiny vents, there's a lot of places you can get through when you're nine nobody's going to expect you to get through. Don't know how many I got doing that, don't care. Really, it was Dad got them, he was making the bombs and teaching people to make bombs, he knew better than a lot of people, he used to be an EOD specialist in the Marines before he retired to take up farming on Shanxi. He died twenty-seven days into the invasion. Stonk of mortar bombs got him, got Mum too. After that, I was the only member of the family still alive. I don't know how I survived the war. As much luck as anything else.
I kept planting bombs, and trying to shoot xenos wherever, whenever, I could.
They killed us in droves, but we made them bleed for every foot of ground they took. A truck bomb killed the enemy commander's kid brother on day thirty-seven. I wasn't involved in that one. Truck-mixer full of ANFO, with steel and concrete armour round the cab and engine and the tyres stuffed with foam so they wouldn't go flat when the xenos riddled it with bullets. That was the last truck bomb - we hadn't any trucks after that. Five days later a booby trap got the xenos commander. Picture left squint on a wall, straightening it sets the bomb off, right? The only person who's going to be OCD enough to straighten it is an officer and we got the biggest officer of the lot. I wasn't involved in that one either, mind. Just heard we'd got the bastard like that years later. The food ran out on day sixty-two, we ended up eating anything we could, first stuff like rats and boiled moss, then we ended up having to eat our casualties.
We never knew when the relief fleet came, or when the Asari brokered a ceasefire. There weren't any comms on the ground in Shanxi by then. We just knew the xenos started pulling back to leave the planet on the one hundred and seventh day of the war. Weren't many of us left by then - dozens, that was all. I got my third actual kill, with my rifle, when they were pulling back out of the city.
We kept on them, kept the pressure up, kept bleeding them right the way back up the damn ramps of the ships they were taking back to space. I got the last kill of the war. Three bullets into the back of him to take his shields down, fourth into the back of his head. It blew his entire face off. Last thing I saw as the ramp closed was the expression on the xeno who ended up wearing most of his brain. What a beautiful sight.
I don't know when exactly we realised the ships we saw coming in to land a couple hours after that were ours. I can just remember one of the men - I still struggle to remember names, we were dying so fast towards the end it just wasn't worth remembering who anyone was, you weren't going to know them for more than a couple of hours - started shouting 'It's the Navy. The Navy's here,' and we all started to realise the truth: that we had, in the end, won.
Before the war, there were nearly two million people called Shanxi home; after, there were just twenty-eight of us left alive. Three men, nine women, five boys, and eleven girls, couldn't call even the youngest of us a child any more by then. The youngest was seven. Couldn't use a rifle but he could plant a bomb like a pro. He got six of them dropping a grenade out of a window on day ninety-two and crawled out of there alive as they shot the building to rubble around him. Lucky little maniac. There's never been an actual peace treaty, technically the System's Alliance is still at war with the Turian Heirarchy, there's just been a ceasefire that's now lasted fifteen years, that's all. The Council tried to get the System's Alliance to join them, the reaction was literally 'you've got to be joking', those exact words. I cheered when I heard that, we all did. We can't ever join the Council, not while the Turians are part of it. Some of the other aliens might be our friends one day, but not the Turians. Never the Turians. Not after Shanxi.
After the war I was sent back to Earth, all of us kids were, as 'unattached minors' we were never given a choice in the matter. They never let me keep my gun either, the bastards. I went from one foster home to another for a few years, nobody ever knew how to connect with a little girl who was already an experienced sniper, nobody ever seemed to care I couldn't sleep right without a gun in my hands. I didn't even try to stay in touch with any of the others, I still don't know their names. Just wanted to forget but I never could. We - the Systems Alliance - have been preparing for the next go-around ever since - it'll come and I don't think there's anyone in the galaxy doesn't know it - and me?
When I turned eighteen I headed across the border to Council space and took up mercenary work so I'd get the chance to keep hurting the enemy and I'm not going to stop until they get me. Got seventy-six of the Turian xeno fucks in my kill book today. Four from Shanxi, seventy-two from after.
What can I say.
I have better guns now.
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Not much to say here beyond, the lack of any tagging is due to me having absolutely no idea how the tag system works here.
Cheers,
Cal.
May contain traces of either Humanity Fuck Yeah or maybe that should be Humanity Calm The Fuck Down.
-/-/-/-/-/-
The Turians came out of nowhere.
They never made an attempt to communicate - just came in shooting, shot down anything they could find in orbit - the picket ships, weather satellites, communications satellites, everything - then landed north of the capital just after midnight, not far from my family's farm. We were long gone by then - we'd taken our hunting rifles and piled into Dad's pickup and were in one of the deep-level bomb shelters in the capital by the time they got boots on the ground. We didn't even know who they were then - we just called them xenos. Means alien enemies. I still call them xenos.
We don't know what actually happened the morning they hit the city. Couple of years ago I spoke to one of them who was there that day - he said according to the comms logs his team found in the days afterwards the entire thing was a mistake. A team went in to take what they thought was a fortified strong point that'd got cut off by their advance, and only realised it was a school's bomb shelter after they'd thrown frags through every door they could find. I don't know whether I believe him. Say what you like about Turians, the xeno bastards are operators. They don't make a habit of screwing up like that.
My eldest brother was with the unit in the push-back that caught them, I don't know what he thought but I can guess. Four, five minutes after his platoon had wiped that xeno assault team and found a shelter full of dead kids xeno airmobile infantry were sent in, in reaction to our push. Our lads fought like mad dogs but the xenos overwhelmed them. One guy from my brother's platoon made it out and back to our lines before he died, and lived long enough to say something about the xenos having killed everyone in that shelter, and after that any idea that anyone was going to be taken alive just... went. It was fight or die. We were in a last stand, all of us.
There wasn't any such thing as a non-combatant after that, if you could hold a gun you held a gun and if you weren't big enough to do that you planted bombs or even just reloaded magazines for the people who were big enough to hold a gun. We knew we couldn't win - if we drove them back into space they'd blast the planet until nothing could live there - but we were okay with that. Shanxi is a human world. We all knew we were going to die there, even the littlest of us knew, and the goal became to stop the xenos making it their world after they'd killed us.
If we couldn't have Shanxi, nobody was going to.
The first suicide bomber was a miner whose kids had been in that shelter. He'd hidden a huge amount of blasting supplies after the xenos started shooting satellites down but before the xenos landed. He filled a Bergen with ANFO - ammonium nitrate fuel oil - blasting compound and nails, rigged it to a deadman switch, spent half a day crawling through sewers until he was well behind enemy lines, then express-mailed himself to God in the densest concentration of them he could find. I later learned it had been a field medic's station, I laughed when I heard that. Look on the face of the ugly bitch xeno who told me it was amazing.
I'd been shooting for fun for two years before the war and I shot my first xeno four days into the invasion. Didn't kill him though, not that time - their ballistic shields are pretty good at stopping hunting rifle bullets. I adapted - I learned to work my rifle's bolt faster. Needed to score four hits in as many seconds to down one. Three rounds spaced that tight would knock the xeno's shield down, then the fourth one into his brain. Done. It's as much luck as skill. Got my first one like that on day fifteen.
We planted bombs. Victim-operated devices, command-detonated devices, timed charges, anything we could make. I was small enough to crawl through tighter passages than adults, or the xenos - I can't even remember how many bags of home-made explosives I dragged through tiny vents, there's a lot of places you can get through when you're nine nobody's going to expect you to get through. Don't know how many I got doing that, don't care. Really, it was Dad got them, he was making the bombs and teaching people to make bombs, he knew better than a lot of people, he used to be an EOD specialist in the Marines before he retired to take up farming on Shanxi. He died twenty-seven days into the invasion. Stonk of mortar bombs got him, got Mum too. After that, I was the only member of the family still alive. I don't know how I survived the war. As much luck as anything else.
I kept planting bombs, and trying to shoot xenos wherever, whenever, I could.
They killed us in droves, but we made them bleed for every foot of ground they took. A truck bomb killed the enemy commander's kid brother on day thirty-seven. I wasn't involved in that one. Truck-mixer full of ANFO, with steel and concrete armour round the cab and engine and the tyres stuffed with foam so they wouldn't go flat when the xenos riddled it with bullets. That was the last truck bomb - we hadn't any trucks after that. Five days later a booby trap got the xenos commander. Picture left squint on a wall, straightening it sets the bomb off, right? The only person who's going to be OCD enough to straighten it is an officer and we got the biggest officer of the lot. I wasn't involved in that one either, mind. Just heard we'd got the bastard like that years later. The food ran out on day sixty-two, we ended up eating anything we could, first stuff like rats and boiled moss, then we ended up having to eat our casualties.
We never knew when the relief fleet came, or when the Asari brokered a ceasefire. There weren't any comms on the ground in Shanxi by then. We just knew the xenos started pulling back to leave the planet on the one hundred and seventh day of the war. Weren't many of us left by then - dozens, that was all. I got my third actual kill, with my rifle, when they were pulling back out of the city.
We kept on them, kept the pressure up, kept bleeding them right the way back up the damn ramps of the ships they were taking back to space. I got the last kill of the war. Three bullets into the back of him to take his shields down, fourth into the back of his head. It blew his entire face off. Last thing I saw as the ramp closed was the expression on the xeno who ended up wearing most of his brain. What a beautiful sight.
I don't know when exactly we realised the ships we saw coming in to land a couple hours after that were ours. I can just remember one of the men - I still struggle to remember names, we were dying so fast towards the end it just wasn't worth remembering who anyone was, you weren't going to know them for more than a couple of hours - started shouting 'It's the Navy. The Navy's here,' and we all started to realise the truth: that we had, in the end, won.
Before the war, there were nearly two million people called Shanxi home; after, there were just twenty-eight of us left alive. Three men, nine women, five boys, and eleven girls, couldn't call even the youngest of us a child any more by then. The youngest was seven. Couldn't use a rifle but he could plant a bomb like a pro. He got six of them dropping a grenade out of a window on day ninety-two and crawled out of there alive as they shot the building to rubble around him. Lucky little maniac. There's never been an actual peace treaty, technically the System's Alliance is still at war with the Turian Heirarchy, there's just been a ceasefire that's now lasted fifteen years, that's all. The Council tried to get the System's Alliance to join them, the reaction was literally 'you've got to be joking', those exact words. I cheered when I heard that, we all did. We can't ever join the Council, not while the Turians are part of it. Some of the other aliens might be our friends one day, but not the Turians. Never the Turians. Not after Shanxi.
After the war I was sent back to Earth, all of us kids were, as 'unattached minors' we were never given a choice in the matter. They never let me keep my gun either, the bastards. I went from one foster home to another for a few years, nobody ever knew how to connect with a little girl who was already an experienced sniper, nobody ever seemed to care I couldn't sleep right without a gun in my hands. I didn't even try to stay in touch with any of the others, I still don't know their names. Just wanted to forget but I never could. We - the Systems Alliance - have been preparing for the next go-around ever since - it'll come and I don't think there's anyone in the galaxy doesn't know it - and me?
When I turned eighteen I headed across the border to Council space and took up mercenary work so I'd get the chance to keep hurting the enemy and I'm not going to stop until they get me. Got seventy-six of the Turian xeno fucks in my kill book today. Four from Shanxi, seventy-two from after.
What can I say.
I have better guns now.
-/-/-/-/-/-
Not much to say here beyond, the lack of any tagging is due to me having absolutely no idea how the tag system works here.
Cheers,
Cal.
Jonn Wolfe
(Verified Sarcastic) (Not a Wolf)
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Oh, good. Glad this can get out further, because it's awesome! 
Doghead13
Grumpy Old Scottish Biker
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I'm really not sure if it will go anywhere, honestly. I wrote it as an omake on one of Rorschach's Blot's ideas threads over on Caer Azkaban and posted it here at the request of a friend who wanted to be able to link people to it - hard to do so to a Yahoo group post.
Vyrexuviel
Know what you're doing yet?
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That was awesome the first time I read it, and it's even more awesome now. Would you invite omakes / snippets by other authors in this same thread? I might be able to find the energy to write a little in here from time to time, in between my other projects.
Doghead13
Grumpy Old Scottish Biker
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Go for it - that'd be more than welcome in my books.
02 - Demobbed Veteran.
Doghead13
Grumpy Old Scottish Biker
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To my faint surprise I haven't been able to get this AU out of my head, resulting in me sitting down last night and typing out another personal account from the other side of the bloodbath;
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Finding a new species presents opportunities your average politician finds it hard to pass up - the brass immediately jumped to the conclusion we were looking at a species just taking it's first faltering steps past the light barrier, specially when long-range sensors picked up barely-defended orbitals and little in the way of mass effect technology dirtside. Don't believe that whole 'breaking council law' line of crap, it's politician for 'looked weak while presenting an excuse to be made the Turian Hierarchy's next client species'. Anyone tells you that's not how client species happen, either they're lying or they're hopelessly naive. You don't become a galactic superpower by being nice.
I guess if anyone had been thinking the sparsity of their satellite constellations would've clued us in, name a species whose low orbits weren't a stinking rat-hole at the stage in their development we thought they were at and I'll name a species that's lying about low-orbit messes, I guess the brass must have figured they'd been even messier than normal and had to dedicate their early efforts to cleaning it up. The lack of lights on the planet's nightside didn't do it either, it got everyone thinking about bunker complexes, that was all. Weren't many people in the Hierarchy any good at backtracking their trains of thought back then, and when all is said and done there still aren't, my entire species is stubborn beyond the point of rationality and all too prone to jumping to a conclusion then sticking to it far past the point where it stops even slightly making sense.
We didn't start wondering until we were in low orbit and started realising that the planet really was that empty. Just one major settlement in the temperate zone of the planet's southern hemisphere, surrounded by a few hundred kloms of outlaying settlements and farms. I think we found maybe a dozen humans on the entire rest of the damn planet. They'd all pulled back to that one city too - taken everything that wasn't nailed down and gone to ground.
There was talk about besieging them, just rocking anything that came out of underground, but command was actually starting to think and wanting to know where to go next. So we got boots on the ground a couple of hours north of that forsaken damn city.
It all seemed like plain sailing at first. We had better guns, better armour, better everything - by twenty-seven minutes in we had air supremacy too, that was when we downed their last aircraft. They just kept falling back, giving us ground, until shortly after we'd reached the city - that was when the resistance abruptly stiffened up - and maybe eight, nine hours of house-to-house fighting later all hell broke loose.
I don't know why, not for hundred percent. One version I heard is they turned into madmen when we started lapping past one of their bomb shelters, that the adults fought like they were possessed then fragged the kids with their last gasp to stop us taking them. I half believe it, and I half believe the other version, that one of our assault teams fragged those kids in that shelter whether by mistake or something worse then the humans found them in a push-back and went nuts. I don't know what to think. All I know is there's not a damn thing I'd put past a human. Not one damn thing. Whatever actually happened in that bunker, it left a bunch of dead human kids and turned that entire planet into a slaughterhouse.
The following day a human ran into a field medic station screaming like a lost soul and exploded. He'd got a backpack stuffed full of primitive mining explosives and nails, rigged to a dead-man's handle. We never learned how he got past our lines. I was one of the lucky ones, I was right at the very edge of the blast - that was where I got this scar on my cheek, fast-moving five-inch carpenter's nail. I was out of commission for two days getting my face sewn back together, felt like I'd gone three rounds with a backhoe, and came back to the absolute worst shit-show in modern history
We hadn't, it turned out, come in to quickly annex a bunch of primitive screwheads. We'd done the diplomacy equivalent of wandering into the roughest bar in the Terminus Systems, finding the biggest and ugliest krogan in the room, and kicking him in the quad.
They were utterly outmatched in all ways but numbers. I later heard that there were around two million humans on the planet at the start of hostilities, only a couple hundred of them actual military, versus ten thousand Turian soldiers kitted out with the best hardware in Council space. They bled us using nothing more advanced than home-made bombs, pre-mass-effect hunting rifles, and any sharp stick they could grub up. Our armour's only about a quarter of the reason the death rate was so heavily skewed against the humans - most of why is the hospital ships we had sitting in orbit, an injured Turian was almost certain to be back in action in a few days while any real injury picked up by a human meant they were going to die. For every one of ours they brought down hundreds of them died - they were out-gunned, out-armoured, out-everythinged but the one thing they had buckets more of than we did, and I'm not ashamed to say this, is grit.
Get this straight: a human can, and will if push comes to shove, turn anything whatsoever into a weapon. If they're not making it explode, or collapse on you, or fall out of under you, they are picking it up and trying to stab you or bludgeon you to death with it and when their blood is up they simply will. Not. Stop. I lost count of the number of time I saw fatally injured humans kill the guys who'd killed them, and one of ours picked up a serious head injury from a human armed with nothing more than a tightly-rolled wad of paper. No shit, they call it a 'Millwall brick' though what that means I still don't know. They're either the bravest people I have ever seen in my life or they're completely, utterly, out of their minds and I don't think I'll ever be able to say which. Maybe it's a bit of both, they're not mutually exclusive.
That hellhole planet turned into an absolute, relentless, bloodbath. The humans didn't seem to care whether they lived or died so long as they bled us in the process. They bombed us, they sniped us, they sneaked into our camps and slit every throat they could get to, they expended their remaining surface vehicles by cladding them in homebrewed armour, stuffing them full of explosives, and driving them at us, anything you touched could kill you - they got the general with a booby-trap, bomb rigged to a painting left hanging on a wall and he had to straighten it, didn't he? How they got back there and planted that device I'll never know, but that's neither here nor there. Every living soul on that planet fought us, you haven't seen war until you've had to shoot an alien kid barely big enough to get the pin out of a grenade to stop the kid blowing you sky-high. Ain't war hell?
Hundred and seven days and four and a half thousand dead Turians into that bloodbath the thing we'd been half expecting from zero hour happened and a human relief fleet dropped insystem. What would've happened from there if that hadn't been when the Asari came pouring in from the other direction I don't know. I guess the humans on the surface never got the message - they kept fighting tooth and nail right up until the ramp in the last evac kite out was closing when one of their snipers decorated the interior with some poor bastard's brains.
Technically, we're still at war. The human negotiators the Asari managed to cajole to the table said their boys found just twenty-eight living humans left on that tomb of a planet after we pulled out. They laughed themselves sick at the very idea of joining the Council, and turned the idea of an actual peace treaty with the Hierarchy flat. Technically speaking we're still at war. There's just been a long ceasefire - that's all.
What? Hate them? No! Shit! Get this through your thick skull, there's a few Turians who were there who hate humans, but those guys are idiots! After the war, years after the war, I finally actually got to know a human, there's a human expat works as a dancer in this joint - sweetest, gentlest, little thing you're ever going to meet in your life and by the way, you lay a finger on her for being human I'll be contractually obliged to break every bone in your body but anyway here's the thing that'll really keep you awake at night: they ain't like the krogan, they ain't a warrior culture, most of them have never held a weapon in their lives, most of those people who went down fighting like rabid maniacs against us had never held a weapon in their lives until we managed to make them think they could chose to die on their feet or on their knees.
No, I certainly do not hate them, I respect them, almost all of us did by the end of the battle for Shanxi, a threat to galactic stability the humans may be but when all is said and done we are unlikely to ever find a more worthy enemy - and anyway you've got to have some regard for any polity that reacts to finding out about the Batarians by turning round and declaring that blowing slavers out of airlocks is a vitally important part of their culture.
-/-/-/-/-/-
NB - there's a non-zero chance that dancer's either a fugitive or a Systems Alliance intelligence operative. There aren't a great many expats who're neither.
I'm honestly unsure what if anything will happen to this AU next, either way now I gotta go and work out how to threadmarks, I've never used one of those setups before.
Cheers,
Cal.
-/-/-/-/-/-
Finding a new species presents opportunities your average politician finds it hard to pass up - the brass immediately jumped to the conclusion we were looking at a species just taking it's first faltering steps past the light barrier, specially when long-range sensors picked up barely-defended orbitals and little in the way of mass effect technology dirtside. Don't believe that whole 'breaking council law' line of crap, it's politician for 'looked weak while presenting an excuse to be made the Turian Hierarchy's next client species'. Anyone tells you that's not how client species happen, either they're lying or they're hopelessly naive. You don't become a galactic superpower by being nice.
I guess if anyone had been thinking the sparsity of their satellite constellations would've clued us in, name a species whose low orbits weren't a stinking rat-hole at the stage in their development we thought they were at and I'll name a species that's lying about low-orbit messes, I guess the brass must have figured they'd been even messier than normal and had to dedicate their early efforts to cleaning it up. The lack of lights on the planet's nightside didn't do it either, it got everyone thinking about bunker complexes, that was all. Weren't many people in the Hierarchy any good at backtracking their trains of thought back then, and when all is said and done there still aren't, my entire species is stubborn beyond the point of rationality and all too prone to jumping to a conclusion then sticking to it far past the point where it stops even slightly making sense.
We didn't start wondering until we were in low orbit and started realising that the planet really was that empty. Just one major settlement in the temperate zone of the planet's southern hemisphere, surrounded by a few hundred kloms of outlaying settlements and farms. I think we found maybe a dozen humans on the entire rest of the damn planet. They'd all pulled back to that one city too - taken everything that wasn't nailed down and gone to ground.
There was talk about besieging them, just rocking anything that came out of underground, but command was actually starting to think and wanting to know where to go next. So we got boots on the ground a couple of hours north of that forsaken damn city.
It all seemed like plain sailing at first. We had better guns, better armour, better everything - by twenty-seven minutes in we had air supremacy too, that was when we downed their last aircraft. They just kept falling back, giving us ground, until shortly after we'd reached the city - that was when the resistance abruptly stiffened up - and maybe eight, nine hours of house-to-house fighting later all hell broke loose.
I don't know why, not for hundred percent. One version I heard is they turned into madmen when we started lapping past one of their bomb shelters, that the adults fought like they were possessed then fragged the kids with their last gasp to stop us taking them. I half believe it, and I half believe the other version, that one of our assault teams fragged those kids in that shelter whether by mistake or something worse then the humans found them in a push-back and went nuts. I don't know what to think. All I know is there's not a damn thing I'd put past a human. Not one damn thing. Whatever actually happened in that bunker, it left a bunch of dead human kids and turned that entire planet into a slaughterhouse.
The following day a human ran into a field medic station screaming like a lost soul and exploded. He'd got a backpack stuffed full of primitive mining explosives and nails, rigged to a dead-man's handle. We never learned how he got past our lines. I was one of the lucky ones, I was right at the very edge of the blast - that was where I got this scar on my cheek, fast-moving five-inch carpenter's nail. I was out of commission for two days getting my face sewn back together, felt like I'd gone three rounds with a backhoe, and came back to the absolute worst shit-show in modern history
We hadn't, it turned out, come in to quickly annex a bunch of primitive screwheads. We'd done the diplomacy equivalent of wandering into the roughest bar in the Terminus Systems, finding the biggest and ugliest krogan in the room, and kicking him in the quad.
They were utterly outmatched in all ways but numbers. I later heard that there were around two million humans on the planet at the start of hostilities, only a couple hundred of them actual military, versus ten thousand Turian soldiers kitted out with the best hardware in Council space. They bled us using nothing more advanced than home-made bombs, pre-mass-effect hunting rifles, and any sharp stick they could grub up. Our armour's only about a quarter of the reason the death rate was so heavily skewed against the humans - most of why is the hospital ships we had sitting in orbit, an injured Turian was almost certain to be back in action in a few days while any real injury picked up by a human meant they were going to die. For every one of ours they brought down hundreds of them died - they were out-gunned, out-armoured, out-everythinged but the one thing they had buckets more of than we did, and I'm not ashamed to say this, is grit.
Get this straight: a human can, and will if push comes to shove, turn anything whatsoever into a weapon. If they're not making it explode, or collapse on you, or fall out of under you, they are picking it up and trying to stab you or bludgeon you to death with it and when their blood is up they simply will. Not. Stop. I lost count of the number of time I saw fatally injured humans kill the guys who'd killed them, and one of ours picked up a serious head injury from a human armed with nothing more than a tightly-rolled wad of paper. No shit, they call it a 'Millwall brick' though what that means I still don't know. They're either the bravest people I have ever seen in my life or they're completely, utterly, out of their minds and I don't think I'll ever be able to say which. Maybe it's a bit of both, they're not mutually exclusive.
That hellhole planet turned into an absolute, relentless, bloodbath. The humans didn't seem to care whether they lived or died so long as they bled us in the process. They bombed us, they sniped us, they sneaked into our camps and slit every throat they could get to, they expended their remaining surface vehicles by cladding them in homebrewed armour, stuffing them full of explosives, and driving them at us, anything you touched could kill you - they got the general with a booby-trap, bomb rigged to a painting left hanging on a wall and he had to straighten it, didn't he? How they got back there and planted that device I'll never know, but that's neither here nor there. Every living soul on that planet fought us, you haven't seen war until you've had to shoot an alien kid barely big enough to get the pin out of a grenade to stop the kid blowing you sky-high. Ain't war hell?
Hundred and seven days and four and a half thousand dead Turians into that bloodbath the thing we'd been half expecting from zero hour happened and a human relief fleet dropped insystem. What would've happened from there if that hadn't been when the Asari came pouring in from the other direction I don't know. I guess the humans on the surface never got the message - they kept fighting tooth and nail right up until the ramp in the last evac kite out was closing when one of their snipers decorated the interior with some poor bastard's brains.
Technically, we're still at war. The human negotiators the Asari managed to cajole to the table said their boys found just twenty-eight living humans left on that tomb of a planet after we pulled out. They laughed themselves sick at the very idea of joining the Council, and turned the idea of an actual peace treaty with the Hierarchy flat. Technically speaking we're still at war. There's just been a long ceasefire - that's all.
What? Hate them? No! Shit! Get this through your thick skull, there's a few Turians who were there who hate humans, but those guys are idiots! After the war, years after the war, I finally actually got to know a human, there's a human expat works as a dancer in this joint - sweetest, gentlest, little thing you're ever going to meet in your life and by the way, you lay a finger on her for being human I'll be contractually obliged to break every bone in your body but anyway here's the thing that'll really keep you awake at night: they ain't like the krogan, they ain't a warrior culture, most of them have never held a weapon in their lives, most of those people who went down fighting like rabid maniacs against us had never held a weapon in their lives until we managed to make them think they could chose to die on their feet or on their knees.
No, I certainly do not hate them, I respect them, almost all of us did by the end of the battle for Shanxi, a threat to galactic stability the humans may be but when all is said and done we are unlikely to ever find a more worthy enemy - and anyway you've got to have some regard for any polity that reacts to finding out about the Batarians by turning round and declaring that blowing slavers out of airlocks is a vitally important part of their culture.
-/-/-/-/-/-
NB - there's a non-zero chance that dancer's either a fugitive or a Systems Alliance intelligence operative. There aren't a great many expats who're neither.
I'm honestly unsure what if anything will happen to this AU next, either way now I gotta go and work out how to threadmarks, I've never used one of those setups before.
Cheers,
Cal.
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Doghead13
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Thanks for the heads-up. Had a scan through and found I'd misspelt 'hierarchy' twice in there, was that the one?
Prince Charon
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As expected, you're very good at this. Yeah, even if the turians hadn't used the book on First Contacts as toilet paper, humanity's likely reaction to the batarians would not be pleasant, unless we suddenly went in a totally different direction, culturally. It's just that this version of the SA aren't part of the Council, and thus aren't obliged to to tolerate the slavers.
Jonn Wolfe
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What a nice way to describe a Space Crusade. Hah!
Sorry Dog, Teiwaz's version is funnier.
03 - Marine With Surfeit Of Eyes
Doghead13
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Tough call.
The existing scenes hinge on the idea that on the ground, both sides were made up of decent people placed in bad or outright impossible situations. I decided to write them in such a way as to make the narrators as sympathetic as possible, despite or possible due to also being as broken as you'd expect given what they went through.
Both have severe PTSD, untreated in both cases. The girl's separated from total psychosis only by a very targeted form of xenophobia and is utterly unable to function outside contexts relating to combat, the Turian's got a severe case of survivor's guilt and self-hatred - he blames himself for failing to stop the invasion ever happening, despite having been far too low-placed to actually have any influence over it.
Pulling off the same trick with a Batarian narrator isn't the easiest - sympathetic and slaving mooks don't often go in the same paragraph. In reaction to your request I've been experimenting with the POV of an absolute-rock-bottom-caste Batarian-expat ex-slave who was on Torfan.
This borrows heavily from Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morporkian street language. Hopefully the speaker comes across as totally uneducated but not an idiot.
-/-/-/-/-/-
There was whispers.
Course, nothing anywhere Them could hear it I mean, you'd be fucked if Them heard it, wouldn't you, I mean proper fucked, but y'know, there were whispers, see even when you're a slave like, there's, you know, quiet places.
I was, I was on Torfan when I heard the whispers. Being a good boy like, doing what I was told, you know. Wasn't the worst really, Them didn't, you know, beat me too often if I did what I was told proper like, wasn't like being, you know, on the homeworld. That was bad.
See what I heard, what them whispers were, were that the Turians had found some new species and the new species had proper kicked them inna quad like and were making noises about it being important to their culture to kill slavers, I mean at that point I wasn't too worried about that or nothing, I mean what was it to me really, but that changed proper fast when the first of 'em showed up on Torfan cause it turns out humans get proper excited when Them decide they want some human slaves, see, and there were human Marines weren't far behind see?
I think Them thought us slaves might be gonna, you know, fight for Them when they realised they were proper fucked like, but we ain't thick like, not having any book learning ain't the same as being thick, and it didn't take any time at all for the human Marines to, you know, to figure what was what out. Specially not when this bird stuck a pickaxe in a guard's back when he was shooting at them and was still sticking the pickaxe in the guard's back over and over when they cottoned onto why he wasn't shooting at them no more, I think that's when the humans really started to realise most of everyone what's got four eyes in this galaxy ain't had a good time of it.
After that they started taking prisoners, like. Some of Them tried to pretend they were some of us. We, uh, pretty much made those ones dead any way we could, didn't we, one of the human Marines asked what that were about right early on when we were dealing with one of Them what liked to, to have fun with slave kids like, and I swear he got ten years older in as many seconds when we told him, didn't he. Guy just stood there and watched us kick the bugger to death without saying a word then when his boss yelled at him he shook his head and said the bugger needed killing.
Well, Torfan. It was Torfan, right, ain't all so much to say about it beyond that like. There was lots and lots of shooting and when there weren't nothing left needing shooting the human Marines took everyone they figured weren't needing shooting and got outta there.
Life got a whole lot better once Torfan were an expanding cloud of bits of smashed-up rock. I, uh, honestly I can't never stop being surprised they never just shot everything what had four eyes like. Would've been easier and I dunno I'd have blamed them, not really. Them already gave humans lots of reasons to think Batarians are enemies near bad as the Turians by then. Guess that bird with the pickaxe gave the humans reasons to think something other.
That's how a bunch of Batarian ex-slaves most never woulda trusted to shine boots became the first actual proper big group of aliens what were let move to human space to stay, I mean there was a few single people before us but not all that many, like. Me, I were already asking about what it took to join up before we were ten hours out of Torfan soon as I figured how good the Navy grub is, I, uh, honestly I didn't really expect they'd want me, but I were wrong. Boot were pretty tough, but it weren't so bad as being a slave on the homeworld, not nearly.
Some guys don't much like anything with four eyes and ain't afraid to tell me about it like, but I can handle a few guys not much liking me. Besides, grub's really good here, I dunno why so many guys moan on about rat-packs, them things is proper good like, and the bunks is just amazing, and when we're on anti-piracy patrol like, when we catch a slaver like, when Them realise they're being thrown out an airlock by 'slave-caste trash', that's proper beautiful.
-/-/-/-/-/-
Not sure about this segment tbh. Does it work?
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Sidvious
Not too sore, are you?
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I like it. In game the batarians that you see are either mooks or slightly more important mooks. Batarians basically live under the regime of an even more restrictive version precolonial india. We never see that in game at all before they get rekt by the squid machine gods. We never really see any culture before that happens tbh. Only told about it. Seeing some rescued slave's perspective once he gets a taste of life outside the hegemony is "proper beautiful"
Navi-Hank
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The one I saw you use sneaked, not snuck for either the general or the medic.
Jonn Wolfe
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Oh, yeah it works. That was perfect.
Lurker Scum
Getting some practice in, huh?
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You went from spelling Torfan to suddenly calling it Thorfan.
Doghead13
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'Snuck' is US English. Look left of this sentence, you've got three guesses what language I'm writing in and the first two don't count.
'Sneaked' is UK English with identical usage and meaning; 'Snuck' gets a red underscore in a spellchecker set to British. Don't ask me why or how that particular difference appeared, I haven't an earthlies.
Whoops! Too much writing things involving Norse gods methinks. Thanks, I'll go back and edit that.
Prince Charon
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So it seems. To be fair, given how the First Contact War went, and how that poor fellow describes Them, it's a pretty fitting reaction.
Navi-Hank
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Like Death Star boom?
Doghead13
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With apologies to the Mythbusters, Doghead want big boom.
Not sure whether they'll have initiated nukes at structural weak points (for all your earth-shattering-kaboom needs) or just smacked it with an asteroid or somesuch - I'll make up my mind if I ever write something from the human aspect of the Torfan equation - but yeah, our nameless Batarian ex-slave wasn't joking about an expanding cloud of rubble. It'll have been done as a statement on the part of Systems Alliance high command - it's a very pointed way to tell the entire Hegemony 'go ahead and play these games with us, we're not playing'.
ryune
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Strictly speaking, depending on just how much they had built into the asteroid it could probably have just been a single nuke. It is surprisingly easy when you have a prebuilt network of air filled tunnels that can become high pressure plasma.
Jonn Wolfe
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RedX
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This is really very good. I very much would like to see more!
I was about to ask about any other work you might have done, then I actually read the username. Nice to see you operating outside of Caer Azkaban- I always had the worst trouble finding stuff in that list, but it's full of gems.
I was about to ask about any other work you might have done, then I actually read the username. Nice to see you operating outside of Caer Azkaban- I always had the worst trouble finding stuff in that list, but it's full of gems.
Prince Charon
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They do have a lot of stuff in the Files section of their webpage, but yeah, even then it isn't always easy to find what you're looking for.