Huh, didn't have this story on the radar. Nethertheless, a pleasant surprise. Though I'm not entirely sure what's going on, it's been a while since I read this story. Need to do some rereading I guess.

Apart from that, good chapter. One could argue about biotics being included into a turian squad, since turians are quite suspicious of them and usually place them in separate units, called cabals.

But I digress, this is your story after all. Besides, if they're C-Sec or CDF, who knows what effect that has on squad composition and the background culture of its members.

For the moment, loves where this story is going.
Notices for the moment the hero has not slept with a badass woman. Is it going to change in the short-term future? A certain Specre looks like the prime candidate to me...

Really like this Saren, there's too few fics where he appears non-indoctrinated...

Okay,this has been bugging me for a while. They're called Mutons not Muttons. Mutton is a goddamn roasted sheep.

I don't think Hackett would be in charge of the fleet at this point in time. At best, he'd be a rear admiral at that point. More likely a senior captain or commodore.

So, a mix of Spacer and Colonist for Shepard's background?

Have you read Hotpoint's work? He has a pretty good xcom sg1 crossover. Also, captain chrysalid.

No one ever conceptualized fighter carrier ships before humans did, stunning everyone. Why

Why is it that the technologically advanced asari and salarians, the militaristic turians, even the ocean dwelling hanar or the quarians with their fleet based culture never ever come up with the idea of an aircraft carrier? Even the robotic geth don't conceptualize carriers once they gain their freedom from the quarians. A closer examination of each alien species reveals why.

The asari call their soldiers huntresses, with a few being designated as commandos. The huntresses were most likely derived from hunting parties that foraged for food before the Protheans taught them agriculture, and then once they stopped foraging, the huntresses were used as local militia to guard their food stores. They most likely saw very little actual conflict with other huntresses, since cooperation and diplomacy became the norm. They evolved into spec ops types, as an overtly diplomatic culture will need problem individuals like bellicose matriarchs or ardat yakshi quietly dispatched behind the scenes, rather than amassing armies and fighting conventional wars. Therefore, the asari most likely never even conceptualized a navy before they became spacefarers. When they built a navy, it was most likely just a basic space navy intended to protect their ships, and therefore lacking tactical depth. Having never fought a naval conflict, they never realized a need for carriers. Even after forming the Citadel council, they never had to fight a large scale naval conflict themselves. Their contact with the salarians, volus and elcor were peaceful, the krogan fought the rachni war for them, and the turians fought the krogan rebellions for them, and later on the humans did the lions share of Reaper fighting. They were therefore never in a position where they had to think of using carriers as an out of the box method to win a naval war.

The salarians have much the same issues as the asari. They too relied so much on spec ops, spies and scientists to influence the outcome of conflicts, with a large number of their wars "ending before it even started", that they too never had a history of naval conflict on which to base the need for a carrier. They too, like the asari had the krogan, then the turians and finally humans to do the conventional war fighting for them.

Although the quarians built a humongous fleet to sustain them while they wandered the stars, they actually had no need for carriers, because carriers are actually a long range power projector. Carriers that are kept close to shore, or close to the bulk of the fleet in the quarians' case are useless, as those fighters may as well be stationed at airfields, or any ships' shuttle bay in the quarians' case. Carriers are meant to operate far away from the home port or home fleet and strike targets with the full complement of an airfield, targets that would have otherwise not been reachable from that airfield. In the quarians' case, they aren't inclined to strike distant targets using a lone carrier, they instead stay out of such situations to preserve their numbers, or just take their entire fleet and strike. The geth are similar as in, they just want to protect their holdings in the veil and do not want to carry out the kind of long range offensive ops that carriers are best suited for.

The hanar are ocean dwellers and we know not if they had a history of intra-species warfare. But since the ocean is a natural habitat, their "naval" conflict would have been similar to a 3-D infantry engagement or an air war, since they can swim in all dimensions in the ocean. So, they never needed carriers, not when they themselves could get where they needed to go without neccesarily using vehicles.

The volus and elcor most likely never had enough warfare in their history to discover the need for carriers. Volus owing to their Proud Merchant Race culture, traded and bartered rather than contest resources, so they never had a naval conflict, while the uber-conservative Elcor who are so deliberate to even avoid falling, most likely never got into many conflicts either. Even if they did, that conservatism would prevent such radical ideas as a fighter carrier from being given any consideration.

The Turians if no one else, should have developed carriers. After all, they are a proud soldier race where a martial outlook permeates into everything. So, a long range power projector like a fighter carrier should have been conceptualized by someone right? Especially, as a dextro species, they are more likely to have garrisons on a few planets, and would need a navy to defend and resupply them. The reason they didn't, could be biological. Garrus reveals in the third game, that turians are horrible swimmers, and so avoid large water bodies. This is most likely from the metallic carapace they evolved to mitigate the high levels of star radiation on Palaven. So, their oceans might have been too much of an environmental hazard for them to operate navies. They would have instead, just built aircraft to traverse those oceans, and built land based airfields everywhere. Instead of projecting power over their oceans with a navy, they most likely kept their power projection limited over contiguous land. This also explains why the turians didn't embark on large scale colonization after winning the Krogan war - they want to keep their colonies close by in order to be better defensible. That is why Sparatus can't fathom why humans colonize planets so far away - he doesn't get the power projection capability of a navy.

Synthesis, you have AI first a child then equal then sage, but how long until the inefficient organics less than bacteria, you don't give nukes to cavemen, MAYBE Shepard' use popularity to only upgrade when there is a problem to solve

game is set up such that a Wide-Eyed Idealist who believes that there is a Golden Ending in which you save everyone is going to be in for a rude shock. A Pragmatic Hero on the other hand recognizes that some sacrifices have to be made and can actually win in the end

he/she is the The Hero/ The Chosen One of the story. His/her entire life was framed a stereotypical action Hero's Journey in a si-fi space opera. You were born to be special; had an impressive service record in the marines; Was chosen to become the first human Spectre; Saving or dooming entire planets and civilizations; Cheated death itself; Finding love and friendship despite the merciless fires of war; Uniting the galaxy to fight as one in the war to end all wars; And finally, you march off into the final battle with the hopes and dreams of those around you, fighting for the future of every mother, every son, and every unborn child…
Well, and then Reality Ensues and his/her story crumbles around you like a ton of bricks. Primarily because the will of a single men/women, no matter how strong or determined, can stop a super advance race of genocidal starships. The only option you have left at this point is to either summit to the will of an insane cosmic AI tyrant, betraying everything you fought for; Or stay true to your moral principles, refusing to let fear compromise who you are... at the cost of dooming everyone to die and the Vicious Cycle to continue.
You are just dust struggling against cosmic winds, after all

Could the races have prepared better for the invasion during the time Shepard bought them? Yes, they absolutely could have. How? The asari had a ''goddamned'' beacon in their ''goddamned'' temple with a goddamned VI program that knew everything there was to know about the goddamned Crucible. And notwithstanding Shepard, there may have been one asari who has the Cypher and is able to activate the Beacon. But the asari wasted this opportunity. There were Crucible plans in Mars - as well as data about the goddamned Thessia beacon. But we squandered it, as TIM so eloquently put it. Heck, there were even data files on Kahje pointing to Mars and possibly Thessia (we never know if Thessia was the deleted location, but it is possible that asari operatives found and deleted it to cover up their beacon), but nobody bothered to look. Had they found the Crucible plans a month after Sovereign's defeat, they could have built that thing unimpeded, then refined the design further to eliminate the Reapers while minimizing damage to the relays. But the Council and the Alliance demonstrated Head-in-the-Sand Management at its finest, even going so far as to shut up Councillor Anderson who was warning everyone about the Reapers.
Shepard *was* the Hero, and in the end, no matter the Commander's own fate, the galaxy stopped the Cycle

The saga is a brutal confrontation of an idealistic world from a space opera, to which we are introduced in ME 1, and a merciless one explored, from the end of ME 1 to the end of ME 3. While you begin as a shining badass drifting through space on an epic quest, the discovery of the Reapers changes the tone dramatically. They are unstoppable, unknowable, invincible. Even if you get a small victory at tremendous cost by the end of ME 1, you know that it is but next to nothing compared to the true might of the Reapers. And as explored above, you do not even know how to fight them, merely how to slow them down. By Mass Effect 3, the realisation of the futility of all the efforts so far come crashing down on the whole Galaxy, and you first. Every world falls, everyone you know dies despite your best efforts and you struggle to keep the Galaxy together while waiting for a miracle.
But what do we find in all that despair, all that pointless fighting, all those quests that goes nowhere and resolves nothing? Simple happiness.
It is always by the end, just before the most dangerous mission of all, that your loved one stops what s/he is doing and come share a moment with you, because they know they might not get the chance anymore. The loyalty quests in ME 2 have little impact in the long run, because whether they die or not during the suicide mission, Liara will still find the plans for the Crucible. But you help them find peace and meaning in their lives, and they'll be happy for it for the rest of their lives, long or short. Even the couple you help bring together, the Asari and the Krogan, ends tragically. But listen to his last words, their beauty shows how wonderful those last months have been for him. His death is inevitable, the quality of his life isn't and it may improve thanks to you.
A message that may be gathered throughout the saga is "Whatever your situation, no matter how great the danger, especially if it is great, you can, must and deserve to find your own happiness"
The most vibrant moment of this may be the Citadel DLC where, while on the brink of extinction, people take the time to sit back, and smile.

Despite Shepard being the Alliance's newest Spectre candidate, they weren't the first, so they are not really the Chosen One by any reasonable measure—much less the chosen one to deal with Saren's treason and an invasion of the Milky Way by technological horrors from beyond. In other words, in the first game, Shepard is firmly The Unchosen One—just a normal soldier who goes out of their way to save the world.
And that is where the story of The Unchosen One was supposed to end: the first thing we see in the sequel is Shepard being killed by the new enemy way beyond a normal soldier's ability to withstand. But Shepard's story does not end. Recognizing their new symbolic value, the shadowy genius of Cerberus transforms Shepard both metaphorically and physically. On the metaphoric level, they undergo a metamorphosis from The Unchosen One to The Chosen One. On the physical level, the entire "normal soldier" part goes by the wayside: the new, chosen Shepard is a cyborg, combining the best qualities of human character with the galaxy's most bleeding edge tech.
But as the third and final game shows, despite their transformation, Shepard still remains a fundamentally human being. When exposed to the immense burden of wearing a Messianic Archetype's shoes, their psyche starts creaking at the seams and puts them on an ultimately self-destructive path.

On a larger scale the trilogy is the story of the unchosen species pushed way past its limits. Humans were uplifted by no one not the Protheans who studied them, not the asari who could have lived long enough to undertake a conventional journey to Sol without the use of Mass Relays and not the Salarians who uplift species all the time. When they discovered mass effect tech and started to expand, their first contact with an alien race was in the form of near unrestricted warfare. After that, they were treated like the little kid trying to sit at the big boys table. Then barely ten years after that war a different species with slavery in their culture becomes openly hostile and starts fighting a proxy war. After a costly bloody victory, they are now fighting Omnicidal robots and are the only ones who must save the Citadel from those robots. Then insecticide cyborgs start kidnapping them on masse and are told by the powers that this is an internal matter to clean up themselves. The final icing is that a race of Eldritch Abominations consider them to be their prime target for assimilation, and thereby launch their entire force at humans first before attacking anybody else. Most species would have given up in despair and become isolationist Luddites after all the trauma humanity has been through in the time since they thawed the Charon relay. And to top it all off, they now have to take on the lion's share of responsibility for defeating the Reapers - because the more militaristic races are bogged down in hopeless conventional wars, the more technologically superior have chosen to turtle up and even the chosen species decided to abnegate that responsibility. The Turians need humans' help to evacuate their Primarch despite the fact that they know how to build stealth ships like the Normandy. The Krogan need humans' help to distribute the genophage cure, even the Quarians ask for human assistance in their war with the geth, instead of the asari whose hat is diplomacy. Finally even the asari asks for humans' help in getting the Reapers off Thessia. How much responsibility can one species shoulder like that?

Cerberus says when the going gets to tough the aliens will abandon humanity which is EXACTLY what happens

A cracking good read.

Great fic. Not sure what your update time is though but I'm excited for the next chapter.

Very Nice Fic...though from the comments and reviews, it seems your update time has slowed to a crawl to 1 per year

cool thou i don't think it's ethereal's they likely would want to avoid the capital of their worst enemy

i would like this op to be EXALT, it would have some depth to the collaboration between Human and Citadel

Wow playing beat cop sounds super boring both for the mc and the reader, hopefully it's not as bad as I fear but it's not looking good, might have to drop the story if it comes to that.