“This is insane, you know.”

Captain A’Sota’s voice was both dry and utterly done with all of her immediate bosses particular forms of insanity. Oriana couldn’t help but grin at the tone. Jenita had, by this point, been made the Captain of the Pheonix. It just hadn’t worked out to have Shepard filling that role. Even if she still went where Shepard directed her, Jenita commanded the ship in all other ways at this point, including in battle. Thankfully Asari had proved to be an extremely good choice, being far more mentally flexible than most Captain’s they could have found. That didn’t keep her from becoming increasingly exasperated at the unconventional tactics Oriana and Shepard came up with, though. She hated those plans most of all…because they worked. It’s also why she kept going along with them, despite their insanity. The older Asari had long since declared she was going to retire and start a farm once this was all over. Something simple. Where ‘rithel-shit crazy’ humans would never bother her again. Oriana didn’t believe it. She was quite sure the Captain secretly enjoyed the insanity.

“Of course it’s insane, Captain. That’s why it’s going to work!”

The Asari made an indescribable noise that mixed resignation, disbelief, and fear for one’s sanity. Really, the woman was quite expressive to get that all into one noise. Maybe Oriana would recommend she become an actor instead of a farmer. She’d be spectacular in that Elchor remake of Shakespeare’s Hamlet!

“Are the drones ready for deployment?”

Captain A’Sota grumbled, but confirmed they were. Oriana’s expression shifted into a vicious grin.

“Then, my dear Captain. It’s time to beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker! You may jump when ready!”

Captain Jenita A’Sota slumped, sighed, then slowly drew herself up. After this, Oriana thought rather overdramatic, display of gathering herself, the Captain activated her com. She gave the order to spin up their FTL drive with a hand gesture, even as she spoke on the mission-critical channel.

“This is the Captain. FTL jump to commence in 60-seconds. Remember, this is going to be a hot engagement. Brace for immediate combat as soon as we exit FTL. Special Ordinance Team, deploy the drones the instant you can, and don’t stop until we’re forced to retreat or you run out of drones. All teams, acknowledge.”

Acknowledgments came back rapidly, all teams reporting ready. Which was good, given that the drive was already spinning up. It had, of course, simply been a pro-forma check anyway. Everyone had already checked in twice, just to be sure. This was going to be a complicated operation and all the parts needed to go off at least semi-smoothly or the whole thing would be a massive waste. Right at the 60-second mark, the FTL drive of the Pheonix engaged, taking them all to lightspeed for several long seconds…

...

…

Which ending with them dropping out of FTL right between two Reaper Dreadnaughts. Those Dreadnaughts were clearly surprised, given that the Pheonix got off the first barrage…but Reapers were not limited to normal sentient reaction times. They rolled to bring their own guns to bare on the Pheonix with blinding speed…only to pause for long seconds as the Pheonix wildly jinked between them. Neither Reaper could fire without a serious risk of hitting their companion, and for all the Pheonix’s firepower, they weren’t doing enough damage to force the Reapers to risk the friendly fire. Particularly not when they only had to wait a bare handful of seconds for the cruiser to dart out from in between them. The instant it did, both Dreadnaughts opened fire, even if the cruiser’s evasive maneuvers made both ships miss their initial shots. Of course, they had already begun to accelerate, and there should have been no way the cruiser would escape intact as the dreadnaughts began to pepper space with their fire.

The maneuver should have been suicide.

But that didn’t count the Special Ordinance that an equally special team had started launching using the Phoenix’s missile tubes and every single docking point. The Ordinance wasn’t, strictly speaking, even weaponry. Which is, of course, why the Reapers ignored it. They shouldn’t have, but to them the  low-powered drones would barely look like space junk. And the missiles would scan as ECM platforms…mostly because that’s exactly what they were. Those ECM platforms, however, weren’t the frantic attempts to make the Pheonix harder to hit that the Reapers would think they were. Instead, their Counter Measures were covering the maneuvering and slow activation of those large pieces of ‘debris.’ Which, not at all by happenstance, were maneuvering to bracket the Reapers.

Those drones were the result of a failed project. An attempt to craft a mobile mass relay large enough to send ships through. The JumpGate project, as it had been termed, had run into one too many technical problems and proven too costly to keep going in light of other, more promising, efforts. Even on a war footing, the Citadel Alliance couldn’t pour money and resources into every project, and the JumpGate project had been one of many that had been abandoned along the way. Not because it hadn’t produced results, but because the results couldn’t be made viable within the span of years they had to work with.

Initial testing had managed to create a set of drones that could, in fact, create the massless corridor through space that a Relay produced. Two problems had deemed the project unfixable in the time they had. The first was simple range. The power requirements of a Mass Relay were enormous. Even splitting the requirements between dozens of heavy-duty drones, the best the JumpGate team had managed was a jump roughly the distance between Earth and Luna. Completely useless on a galactic scale, unless they radically upscaled the project at extreme cost. The second, just as important issue, was that balancing the corridor between so many point sources had been…problematic. Of the three dozen jumps the team had preformed, not a single one of their test vessels had come through as anything other than a tangled heap of scrap.

Even the slightest variance from their perfect formation had caused the corridor to do weird things to the mass inside. All of which actually just highlighted how little they understood about what actually happened when traveling that corridor. After all, the miniature Relays they were making, based on the Protean design from Ilos, really shouldn’t work. Not when they connected between two places that had physical matter between them. Like, say, deep underground in IIos and inside the Citadel Presidium. Clearly, mass inside the corridor was fundamentally not interacting with the rest of the galaxy. A revelation that had basically fucked every existing model of physics sideways with a corkscrew.

Ultimately, with their understanding of the physics involved not up to the task, the project had been canceled and the drones just left sitting around with no purpose. Until, that is, Oriana decided she had an insane plan to use them. She’d known about them, having consulted on the project. And getting them for use in her little plan had been an easy sell, given they were literally just sitting around collecting dust. If this actually worked, they could potentially kill two Reaper Dreadnaughts and destroy the primary Harvesting station on Parnack, a double whammy that the High Command was happy to stamp approval on.

Shepard had just quietly extracted her team from said planet, after they’d placed the homing beacon to target the other end of the mass-corridor on. Which is why Oriana was in command of the space-side of the operation. A side which seemed to be working nicely, as she noted the slowly forming mass corridor that the Pheonix was racing desperately to escape. A corridor which the Reapers, blinded by the ECM tuned to hide it, hadn’t realized they were inside of. The next three minutes of desperate dodging, until they were out of that corridor, was tense. Damage began to accrue as shields failed, even as the surprised, slower-to-accelerate Reaper Dreadnaughts fell behind. Alarms screamed, orders were shouted, but Oriana remained poised and laser-focused, watching as the outline of the corridor firmed up. Waiting for the Phoenix to slip past its limits. Then they were passed the invisible line, but she held off for another second, two, five. Only when the Reapers were at risk of reaching the line as well did her thumb press down viciously. A moment later…the universe seemed to jerk.

You were not supposed to be this close to a barely-stable zero-mass corridor when it activated. You were either supposed to be inside it, or else far, far away from it. Which is precisely why Oriana had waited until the last possible second. Space-time shuddered and heaved, twisted and screamed around them. The clocks all seemed to freeze for an instant…and then they shot out of the localized warping and smashing of space time, even as the phenomenon itself faded. No one, not even the Captain, could focus on their damages just yet as they all looked at Parnack…and the utter devastation that had once been a city.

It was nothing but a crater now, a crater several kilometers across and half of one deep. And, even as they watched, earthquakes shattered cities hundreds of kilometers away. One of the secondary harvesting centers even collapsed, as everyone held their breath. No one had been quite sure exactly what would happen when the mass of two Dreadnaughts suddenly became real again, already moving as insane speeds, right before hitting a planet. The only point of reference they’d had was a terrorist strike where someone had hit a planet with a shuttle moving at FTL speed, in the years before safety regulations had made the effectively impossible to repeat. Technically, the Dreadnaughts wouldn’t be moving nearly as fast. But they sure as hell massed a lot more…

Oriana breathed a sigh of relief, closing her eyes and offering up a prayer of thanks to whatever divine force might exist, when the planet didn’t crack in half. That had been…a non-zero percent predicted possibility. Seeing that the worst hadn’t happened, she braced herself and snapped orders.

“Captain! Assess our damages! Comms! Find the location of our ground team. We’ll need to pick them up before we hit the Relay!”

Captain A’Sota cursed as she realized she’d fallen down on her job and began barking orders. Oriana, meanwhile, closed her eyes and tried to forget what she’d just seen. Even if the planet hadn’t cracked, they’d likely just killed millions of unharvested Yang. Even if it was likely a less terrible fate that allowing them to actually be harvested, and even if the Yang weren’t exactly someone she wanted to give a hug to anytime soon, the decision still horrified some part of her. Even if that part was distressingly quiet these days…