Last Stand at Shanxi (Mass Effect AU)

[Vyrexuviel]

Shanxi was the Turians Okinawa, or perhaps one of the other small islands in WW2 for the US military was: It convinced their higher-ups that traditional storming-in tactics would result in disproportionate casualties, -unexceptable- casualties, should they try to go for a harder nut to crack, IE: Earth.

They might still have pressed forward, but they would have been -far- more cautious about it, and would -definitely- have used orbital bombardment to soften up "centers of resistance" (cities) prior to starving them out and finally going in with boots on the ground. Even so, I don't doubt that humanity would have thrown -EVERYTHING- at them to prevent them even reaching Earth Orbit, up to and including civilian asteroid miners throwing rocks at them and following up by ramming. And using several dozen meters of ablative armor (an asteroid) to shield the asteroid tug from point-defense fire until it's too late might be a viable method of attacking turian starships.

Not to mention that there's a -bloody reason- why most hard-SF books I've read use nukes in space: they might need to get relatively close to the target to deal damage, but the radiant energy output can literally vaporize the hull of a starship, which in ME is -really fucking bad news-, since 1) kinetic barriers do jack-all to stop that sort of weapon, short of keeping it from going off in contact with the hull, and 2) they tend to use KBs in place of redonkulously thick hull-armor, which you'd -need- to have the ship survive a nearby nuke going off and avoid getting mission-killed because the crew is now dead, due to either explosive decompression, flash-cooking, or extreme radiation poisoning causing rapid organ failure.

And even in the mid 22nd century, I have a feeling there's still a lot of nukes on Earth, especially with the turians spurring massive re-armament. Hell, there's thousands of nukes on earth -right now-, and hundreds of times more than enough to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, should Humanity decide to 'take the invaders with them'.

 

[Doghead13]

You're both right in different regards.

By the time the Asari intervened, the Turians had effectively won the invasion of Shanxi - the operation was well into the mopping-up phase with the remaining resistance well down into double figures and the defenders' position having been untenable for weeks. The planet was rendered effectively uncolonised during the course of the war. The population at the end of the war was down to a level far, far below what they'd have needed to sustain themselves without outside support, while the infrastructure already in place was largely destroyed: Humanity was indeed effectively starting over from scratch on Shanxi at the end of the war.

The ground invasion began due to the Turian commanders on the scene realising that this could not possibly be the Human homeworld - this conclusion was arrived at on orbit when they realised that the dearth of mass-effect systems their sensors had detected from the edge of the system did not indicate very recent acquisition of such technologies, with the primary proof the small and densely-concentrated population. It's not a big leap of reasoning to realise you're looking at someone's colony when a planet's infrastructure and population are focused around a single city on a single continent without any telltale signs that you're looking at a post-apocalyptic world: at that point the Turian priority became gaining an idea of what they were dealing with, and that meant boots on the ground and a search for intel - the intel they were looking for (anything that could guide them back to the newcomer's homeworld and/or give them a handle on the military strength they were looking at) was deliberately destroyed by General Williams' staff in the first few days of the invasion.

The war became a point of pride for the Turian command structure quite early on as they continued to underestimate human technological levels throughout the war, largely due to total failure to grasp the significant differences between Human and Turian society; it was considered politically unacceptable to let a bunch of primitive screw-heads who thought a pre-mass-effect rifle was a suitable home guard weapon drive Turian soldiers back into space, with the Turians not realising that the guns in use by the defenders had not been intended for what a Turian family would keep guns for until after the end of the war. In hindsight, this was probably the single worst decision made by Heirarchy top brass in centuries.

The battle of Shanxi was a costly tactical victory for the Heirarchy, at a very low actual military cost to the Alliance, but became a strategic defeat due to the Turian underestimate of Human military strength and the Asari intervention in the war. The Turian task force's ground compliment was effectively destroyed as a fighting force - their casualty rate pushed well over 200% with most Turians involved in the invasion having become casualties multiple times, with an eventual fatality rate of 45%. Bear in mind that 20% casualties - not fatalities, casualties full stop - is regarded by NATO as sufficient to render a force combat-ineffective for a very good reason. The task force's morale was almost completely destroyed with the majority of their survivors leaving the Turian military post-war and many of them leaving Heirarchy space entirely - morale among the Turian naval elements on the scene was impacted almost as badly, a great many Turians came back from Shanxi with an ingrained distrust of the Heirarchy itself, even amongst the naval personnel who'd never been dirtside.

The primary lesson brought home by Turian high command is indeed a good mirror of Okinawa for the Americans, particularly when coupled with their later research into extant Human guerilla fighting and insurgency methods. Suicide bombing in particular came as an immense shock to the Heirarchy, who prior to the war didn't even have a term for it - coupled to an FTL-capable spacecraft the concept is something that keeps Turian military planners awake at night, as is the common Heirarchy belief that actually winning any future war with the Alliance is going to involve rendering any planet the Humans have settled on, garden worlds included, effectively uninhabitable - and 'politically problematic' isn't a strong enough term there, burning garden worlds is the sort of carry-on that gets the Asari jumping into the war on the other side.

And yes, that was Saren who got more or less vaporised by that truck bomb, and Desolas who just -had to- straighten that -blasted- painting.

Meanwhile the Alliance were left with the bastard child of 9/11 and Stalingrad, and the lesson that limiting civilian-held weaponry on colonies to simple hunting firearms is a BAD IDEA. The common (and probably accurate, see for example canon) Alliance belief, largely taken from what they now know of standard Turian military doctrine, is that the war would not have turned into a meatgrinder if the colony had been armed to anything remotely approximating the level of a Turian colony; the Turians would've sat back in orbit and forced the colony to surrender via targeted bombardment with a resulting much higher survival rate amongst the colonists and far less damage to the planet's infrastructure.

Incidentally, that marks the point of divergence for this fic: pre-war Alliance colonial gun laws.

 

[Teiwaz]

Oh dear...
I bet the Americans back on that version of Earth felt very smug for years to come

 

[Navi-Hank]

Oh dear...
I bet the Americans back on that version of Earth felt very smug for years to come

Click to shrink...

You bet your ass we would

 

[Doghead13]

You bet your ass we would

Click to shrink...

Think about the Swiss reaction for a moment, they'd be throwing their hands up in the air and screaming something about having had the right idea all along.

 

[Navi-Hank]

Think about the Swiss reaction for a moment, they'd be throwing their hands up in the air and screaming something about having had the right idea all along.

Click to shrink...

Or Israel

 

[The Unicorn]

Or Israel

Click to shrink...

Not at all.

Israel gun laws are schizophrenic, cyclic, mostly based on the need to be SEEN to do something by the politicians and very much open to interpretation.
Your ability to get a private gun license very much depends on who you know and how much you're willing to pay.

Of course judging by the number and types of weapons returned to the IDF when they declare an Amnesty period for returning equipment, I'd guess most civilian firearms in Israel are illegal.

 

[ParanoidSchizo]

Oh dear...
I bet the Americans back on that version of Earth felt very smug for years to come

Click to shrink...

You bet your ass we would

Click to shrink...

SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!!!

 

[Doghead13]

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.

 

[SlickRCBD]

Oh dear...
I bet the Americans back on that version of Earth felt very smug for years to come

Click to shrink...

Not really, our current gun laws are kind of like what was described in the fic. Hunting weapons, but not modern military weapons.
It's easy to get your hands on hunting rifles and shotguns, but military grade weaponry is highly restricted. Even weaponry that is not quite military grade, but would have been in WWII, commonly called "assault weapons" is highly restricted. Semi-automatic rifles with high capacity magazines, especially ones that can be easily converted to fully automatic is regulated since the '90s.
So, there are a lot of restrictions on weapons since the late 1930's, and they were tightened in the early '80s and again in the mid '90s.
I'd explain further, but that would be getting too much into politics and talking about the anti-gun lobby, rather than just stating how things are.

 

[Silverwing15]

To the part about number four sounding like word DEATH.
Isnt that in japanese and not chinese?
Outside of that, nice wlrld building.

 

[Arc of the Conclave]

To the part about number four sounding like word DEATH.
Isnt that in japanese and not chinese?
Outside of that, nice wlrld building.

Click to shrink...

It's a thing in both.
The number 4 (四, pinyin: sì; Cantonese Yale: sei) is considered an unlucky number in Chinese because it is nearly homophonous to the word "death" (死 pinyin: sǐ; Cantonese Yale: séi).

 

[Doghead13]

To the part about number four sounding like word DEATH.
Isnt that in japanese and not chinese?
Outside of that, nice wlrld building.

Click to shrink...

Both, as a matter of fact - I understand the superstition originated in Chinese, in which it is as Arc of the Conclave described. Either way you'll find a lack of floor numbers including the number 4 in a lot of tall buildings all over southeast Asia.

I would have preferred to have had the invasion begin on the fourth day of the fourth month by the traditional Chinese calendar, but was unable to find a calendar converter that went past 2100 AD.