Last Stand at Shanxi (Mass Effect AU)

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.

 

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.

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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.

 

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.

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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.

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Not sure about this segment tbh. Does it work?

 

Conveniently, I'd already roughed this out when you gents posted your requests for an Asari POV. It took a bit of bashing into actual shape, but anyway,

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The Turian attack on Shanxi was the beginning of the end, and our response - my response - at the end of the day succeeded only in insuring that the end would, indeed, come.

It was in hindsight an unreasonably beautiful day when I learned that something unreasonably big and unreasonably bad was happening on the edge of the Attican Traverse - two relay jumps from Illum of all places, in the system containing the then-dormant Relay 314: the specific information handed to me was that somewhere in excess of three thousand Turian soldiers had been shipped back to Heirarchy space in body bags over the span of a little over three months - whatever they'd run into was killing them faster than anything we'd seen since the Krogan rebellion.

It should not come as any sort of surprise to anyone that I got moving immediately, and didn't skimp on the backup. A matron of my age and influence can call on a statistically significant portion of the Asari navy, and that is exactly what I did.

What I found was absolutely horrific and raised serious questions about the Turian suitability to remain the mainstay of military force in Council space, I know exactly what they thought they were doing and it wasn't 'enforcing council law', influential the Citadel may have been but they were not fool enough to think their laws extended to species who've never heard of them. There were nearly a dozen treaties needing signed before so much as one paragraph of interstellar law applies to a species and the Turians were and remain perfectly aware of that: what we all know they thought they were doing was snatching up the new kids on the block to make a useful client species of them, with that relay acting as a politically convenient excuse.

Getting the Turians to stop shooting took very direct throwing my weight around: to cut a long story short I was forced to declare that if the Turians didn't agree to an unconditional ceasefire immediately the Asari Republic would be forced to jump into the war on the newcomers' side - a declaration that I made in the full knowledge that it was endangering one of the key treaties on which the Citadel Council, and ultimately interstellar law, depends. I must confess that the idea that the newcomers would refuse to join the Council, thus causing the actual collapse of that treaty, never even occurred to me.

As a direct result I became the first non-human sapient to set foot on Shanxi post the Turian withdrawal, and even today I struggle to find the words to convey what I saw there.

The humans were burying their dead, of whom there were so many, so many, that they'd had to bring in a small army of construction workers and they still expected the job to take them months. There are now fields stretching for kilometers covered in identical little cross-shaped concrete markers, each painted white - and those are just the bodies they have been able to locate: a majority of their dead have no grave site, no known place where their body lies, and a great many did not leave any meaningful body at all.

The condition of the survivors - what few of them there were - was appalling. I saw one, a child who given their lifespan can't have been more than a few years old, little more than a baby, asleep jammed tightly into a corner with a battered, heavily-used, primitive firearm clutched for dear life in her hands. Each one of them was little more than skin and bones - I later learned that they had been forced to resort to cannibalism to survive, I could happily have murdered the Turian politicians and officers responsible for the decision to continue their war until that point by the time that I returned to my ship.

The following weeks were riddled with further failures. The Humans were, in all honesty understandably, not in the mood to make nice. They discarded the possibility of joining the Council out of hand, nor were they even momentarily willing to sign any actual peace treaty with the Turian Hierarchy - their lead negotiator privately told me that the idea was politically untenable in Human space, and that a popular lobby was calling for an escalation of the war. I was shown plans they had already drawn up for a black marble wall bearing a little over two million names, each and every one of which they described as a pressing argument against any such peace treaty.

The resolve of the Human diplomats was as one, backed up by their press and public opinion; for so long as the Turian officers and politicians responsible for the war still draw breath, there can be no peace. That responsibility lays at the very highest levels of the Turian power structure: the decision to invade, and to continue the war post its turning into a meatgrinder, involved their head of state.

(Relay 314 was opened fifteen days into the ceasefire, One of the Human diplomats admitted to me that it had become essentially politically impossible not to activate it. Thankfully, no Rachni-like threat lurked beyond it; I do not believe that the Humans have opened any further dormant relays at this time, though at the end of the day we do not actually know.)

In many ways as a result both of my failures and of the Turian's actions, the galaxy is a considerably more dangerous place now than it was then. The Turian-Human Cold War has as of today lasted fifteen years. The Humans and Turians have continuously engaged in brinkmanship, sabre-rattling, and clandestine operation against each other, the Batarians insistently continue their incredibly provocative actions against the Humans - not without injury on the Batarian side, mind, the Humans take great satisfaction in carrying through their assurances about the throwing of slavers out of airlocks and there are more than a few members of my species who owe their freedom to the Systems Alliance Navy - half a dozen assorted treaties have collapsed - largely as a direct result of my threat to bring the Asari into the war on the Human side - and the Council itself is facing total disintegration, the collapse of the mutual military support treaty caused by my failure to bring the Humans into that same treaty has seen to that; whether there will be a Citadel Council in just a few years time I could not say.

If circumstances between Human and Batarian do not deteriorate to the point of all-out war, the cold war between Turian and Human is going to go hot, and it is going to do so very soon. All it would take is the right flashpoint to begin the war that all three have spent the last fifteen years preparing for - and I can't help but fear that it will spark an inferno that will consume us all.

The lights are going out all over this galaxy, and we will not see them relit in our time.

 

Somewhere in between.

By the early 2170s - the timeframe all the existing segments are set in - Shanxi is a major naval base amounting to a fortified strong point on the frontier of human space, and the site of the General Graham D Williams Memorial Station orbital shipyard complex - one of the Systems Alliance's seven facilities suitable for the erection of capital-class warships. These yards run full tilt, night and day - a completed battleship is signed over to the navy every ten days, with smaller vehicles leaving on the hour, every hour, and usually as many as six to eight thousand vehicles under refit at any given time. During times of war, it would be the front-line repair yards for any thrust into Turian space.

The planet itself has been recolonised. The site of the old colony's capital city is now considered an Alliance war grave - there are roughly one point two million unaccounted-for human bodies somewhere in the rubble - and as such is patrolled night and day by dress-uniformed Systems Alliance soldiers in a manner directly and deliberately analogous to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It does, however, retain seventeen living residents: the adult survivors of the war all flat-out refused to leave, and all remain resident in the city, along with the families three of them have began since the war - one as a couple who met via surviving the war together, the other a woman who married a Systems Alliance Marine who then joined her as a resident in the place now known as the City of the Dead.

The new colony is on the same continent, but a couple of hundred miles to the north, directly next to where the Turians first set foot on the planet and grown up out of the camp that was set up for the temporary population of construction workers in the aftermath of the war; the location of the Turian basecamp is now a sewage works, and an open-air settlement pond stands where the Turian headquarters was once set up, very deliberately of course. The new colony was, while still a transient camp, named Douala by the leader of the team that broke ground in the building of it, after his hometown in Cameroon on Earth. He is now a resident, and has been joined by numerous fellow Cameroonians - the planet now hosts the largest concentration of persons born in Cameroon off of Earth.

As of the 2172 census Shanxi has a civilian population of a touch over twenty-six million, with a very high percentage of them naval shipwrights and support staff. The colony is quite ethnically diverse; that said there are over three and a half million ethnic Bantu and nearly three million each of ethnic Cambodians and ethnic Scandanavians on the planet, which has began to establish an interesting hybrid culture of its own.

There is a small but famed non-human minority on Shanxi; this group is made up of ex-slaves freed by personnel from the fleet elements who call the planet their home port. Nearly half a million non-humans now call Shanxi home, some ninety-five percent of them slave-caste Batarians, and the first Batarian officer was recruited into the Shanxi Colonial Police Department in April of 2170. Incidentally, this makes Shanxi the planet with the largest non-human population in Systems Alliance space. None of them are Turian, nor have any of the twenty-six Turians to legally enter Systems Alliance space since the war ever been granted permission to set foot upon Shanxi, and Turian civilian vessels are advised not to approach within several AU of Shanxi as they are liable to be shot down without warning - this has happened on four occasions.

The planet has a comprehensive gun culture; this can be considered typical for all modern human colonies post the invasion of Shanxi. Nearly ninety percent of adults on Shanxi own at least one firearm, local gun laws are extremely permissive with many military-grade weapons considered civvy-legal, 'invasion preppers' are very common, and over a third of the planet's adult population are members of the Shanxi Territorial Army Division. Violent crime is very low, however those crimes that do occur (some ninety percent of which can be classed as crimes of passion) inevitably result in gunshot injuries - as a result the murder rate is downright painful. The local police are easily as heavily armed and armoured as the Systems Alliance Marine Corps; they need to be.

In addition to the Territorials a division-scale professional military ground forces presence is maintained onworld at all times, stationed at Camp Graham roughly halfway between the old and new cities - at any given time two companies, one armour and the other motor infantry, will be stationed guarding the City of the Dead. Soldiers are never required to spend more than six weeks stationed at the City of the Dead as it's renowned for seriously impacting morale in units kept there much longer than that - there aren't many soldiers come back from duty there without believing in ghosts. During times of war, this presence would most likely be swelled to four to six full-scale army groups.

In space, representing the lion's share of the system's military presence, Shanxi Station is typically guarded by the First Attican Sector Fleet, Systems Alliance Navy, formed from six full-strength squadrons any one of which would be a match for the combined navies of the entirety of Mass Effect canon. At any given time two of these squadrons will be in orbit of the planet with the remaining four on patrol in the surrounding systems, chasing Batarian 'pirates', or rattling sabres at the Turians across the border. In addition the system is full of thousands upon thousands of manned defence platforms, each able to provide firepower equivalent to a cruiser - all in, out of the dozen most fortified systems in Human space, Shanxi is at place number seven.

It would be a tough nut to crack.

Edit: At the suggestion of Slayer Anderson, have threadmarked this post.

 

The pre-war population of the original colony was two million, and I take it you missed the bit in the Asari matron's segment about three thousand Turians going home in body bags. 29 mil is the figure from seventeen years post the war, when the planet has become a major fortified strong-point for the Alliance fleet.

Anyway, let's run the numbers.

At the start of the invasion, Shanxi had approximately two million residents, with roughly two to four hundred mass-effect weapons to share around between them by dint of the 'couple of hundred' actual military personnel noted by our Turian vet. The battle of Shanxi lasted 107 days, at the end of which Shanxi had 28 human residents. That means that an average of a touch over 18,691 humans died per day in the defence of Shanxi.

Eighteen thousand six hundred and ninety one a day. If Shanxi has a 24-hour day, which I don't know if it does but still, that means on average 12-13 humans died per minute in the planet's defence and they kept fighting.

Meanwhile, again at the word of our Turian vet, out of ten thousand Turians who landed on Shanxi, four and a half thousand died; going by our Asari matron's estimates three thousand of them went home in body bags, meaning there should be approximately 1500 Turian bodies somewhere in the ruins of the city. That's just over 42 dead Turians a day - a little short of two an hour, again assuming a 24-hour day.

Smackdown? The Turians lost near to half their invasion force killed at the hands of barely-armed civilians, and we know from our Turian vet that most of their casualties survived meaning that the actual casualty rate was far far higher, I'd say their casualty rate cannot possibly have been lower than 200%. Even disregarding non-fatal injuries that's an absolute meatgrinder by the standards of any military, anywhere, ever.

There's five and a half thousand Turians in the galaxy today who talk about Shanxi in the same sort of a way that a great many older Americans talk about Vietnam.

The Turians may have been in a winning position when the Asari intervention came - the defenders (functionally speaking) had nothing left to give and were most likely hours away from annihilation - but it was a Pyrrhic victory at best, Turian morale on the ground was as close to total collapse as the defenders were, and the entire galaxy knows it.

In the years since the war the galaxy's got to know humans a little better, got to know that they're often quite personable, but there's always that knowledge that making humans think that they're dead anyway is a REALLY BAD IDEA, because some of them will decide to take you with them.

 

You want to know what I think about the new kids on the block?

Humans ain't much to look at, but anyone who lets that make them underestimate humans is so dumb they make a varren look smart.

See, humans have this little mental switch in the backs of their minds, right, that if you throw it by making them think they're dead anyway? Maybe about four out of five will curl up and die, but that other one, and if they're the Council side of the border that's one of them, will decide to die with their boots on. And I respect that, I really do.

Turians found that one out the hard way on Shanxi. I've been to Shanxi, you know? Headed there soon as I heard about the war, wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Ha! The Turians needed that humbling. Maybe the Batarians are getting one next, there's only so much humans will take before that little switch goes and they stop caring if they live or die so long as they take the other guy with them.

That and... This human I met on Shanxi, one of the ones tough enough to survive what the Turians did to the place. Good kid, last I heard she was still living in that wreck of a city - wouldn't leave, not after what she'd put into keeping the place hers, and you've got to respect that. So we got talking, see, over a few drinks, I must've been about the third alien she'd ever actually talked to, must admit I liked the way she talked, and one thing turned to another and I said something about the genophage, and... that changed things. Never expected to meet a species whose reaction to that one would be universal horror.

Last I heard a couple of ours are working with their top docs, partly to see to it that the damn Salarians can't do something like that to them, partly to see if there's anything they can possibly do to help us. The human top brass I spoke to said they'd do it for anyone, called what the Salarians did to us pure evil. Way they're working with the Quarians puts the truth to that too. Spouted some high-flown philosophy about it, I don't care about that, the thing that threw me, the thing that really threw me, is that they don't ask for one single thing in return for giving my people hope for the first time in a very long time indeed.

Yeah, I like 'em.

 

Shanxi itself was colonised in 2153, only four years before the war. It was, as per most pre-war Human colonies, largely a commercial effort, funded by a major Beijing-based consortium, and was as a result named after a province of China, with the initial colonists - one hundred and fifty carefully-chosen families - reflecting this background, and the colony retaining this overwhelmingly Chinese background right up until the eve of the war.

As such, prior to 2157 the planet was almost ethnically homogeneous at 98% Chinese nationals, with the remaining 2% so diverse no real ethnic minorities can be established - pre-war Shanxi was very much a company planet. Majority language of pre-war Shanxi was Mandarin, with English very frequently spoken as a second language. Pre-war the company had considerable problems finding crop farmers willing to establish agriculture on Shanxi; they recruited widely, resulting in most of the non-Chinese presence on the planet at the time of the war.

The military presence on the planet - such as it was - was a very new thing at the time of the war; after a series of terrorist attacks (with responsibility claimed by a group whose stated motives were to prevent humanity ruining the ecologies of 'more worlds'; the perpetrators have never been found) on several colonies over the course of 2154 and 2155 the decision was made to station small detachments of Alliance military personnel on each colony, and in the case of Shanxi this consisted mostly of New Zealanders - mixed Pakeha and Maori - many of whom were accompanied by dependants. In one historically important case, an entire Maori extended family from Poverty Bay chose to up sticks and move to Shanxi; the nine-year-old sister of the soldier they had accompanied became one of two non-Chinese survivors of the war, having lost every known relative within four generations in the course of the war. The 'Kiwis' were led by the highest-ranked New Zealander in the Systems Alliance military, General Graham D Williams, an Auckland native, and there is believed to have been a fair bit of friction between the 'Kiwis' and the Chinese locals spurred by what was seen as unfair distribution of arable land to military relatives who were willing to move to Shanxi - this was originally done as an incentive to spur improvement of the planet's then-poor agricultural sector.

It is believed that the colony may have had as many as two thousand undocumented residents at the time of the war, mostly having jumped ship from any one of the nearly fifty colonial expeditions that stopped over at Shanxi during their initial journeys but including a few possible former stowaways aboard freighters. Only one of these - a Cambodian national who claims to have been eighteen at the time of the war but is believed to have in fact been younger - survived the war, and remains a resident of the City of the Dead as of 2172; he maintains a very personal form of the vigil stood by the Systems Alliance military, patrolling the ruined city on a daily basis still armed with the battered bolt-action hunting rifle he carried through most of the war and emerging only to accept rations and the occasional other supplies. His address of residence is not known but is believed to be somewhere near the ruins of the old capitol building; he has been successfully spoken with by only two individuals outside the tight-knit band of survivors still resident in the wreckage of the city, most notably by the Krogan mercenary Urdnot Wrex early in 2158. His given name remains unknown, though he has been recorded to answer when addressed by other survivors using a Chinese word roughly analogous to the English 'lad'.

Very few Chinese nationals have moved to Shanxi since the war, with the ethnic Chinese population of the planet standing at only 57 as of 2172; a great deal of urban legend has built up in China based around the fact that the invasion began on April 4th, 'the fourth day of the fourth month' - a particularly inauspicious date in Chinese numerology - and the fact that the planet had been colonised for four years when the invasion came - as combined with the fact that the Chinese for the number four sounds a great deal like a word meaning 'death', and as such 4 can be considered to the Chinese what 13 is to the English-speaking world, this has resulted in the commonly-held Chinese belief that the planet of Shanxi is cursed.