Akuze Massacre
From FABT
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 Shepard at the site of the massacre, an hour after the May 4th massacre.
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3 May - 4 May 2177 CE | ||||||||||||||||
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Alliance colony and military forces slaughtered
Cerberus scientific victory
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Akuze abandoned and sealed off as an exclusion zone | ||||||||||||||||
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- "It wasn't even a fight. Nobody was fighting. There were screams, the sound of acid peeling away flesh and bone...oh god, I can still smell it. Shepard didn't even know what to do! One moment I was sitting down to enjoy a live game of Canadian football on my omni-tool, and the next...the ground shook. I thought it was an earthquake, but then there was this deafening roar...it was so loud I couldn't even think...and then screaming. Whenever they descended, they look friends of mine with them. Any battle we tried to give them was futile, because everyone knows fighting thresher maws on foot is suicide: our bullets were useless against their skin. The last thing I remember was Shepard giving the order to retreat...and then I woke up, far from the site, with everybody gone. A shuttle came to pick me up...I was so dehydrated that I thought it was Alliance. But it wasn't. One hell ended, a new one began. Cerberus lured us into that bloodbath...led us like cattle to the massacre. When I woke up, the scientists were glad. Now they had someone to run tests on."
- — Jasper Toombs recounting his survival of the massacre to his SIA interrogators.
The Akuze Massacre, also known as the Massacres at Akuze, took place on 3 May 2177 CE when the Akuzan colony of Xihe was attacked and devoured by thresher maws, and later on 4 May when the Alliance marine force sent to investigate also suffered the same fate. Cerberus was ultimately responsible for the massacre, although they never claimed responsibility for the slaughter, and the Alliance would not be apprised of their involvement until 2183 CE after the recovery of the lost second survivor of the massacre in an SIA raid on Barbarossa Station and other Cerberus facilities, six years after the massacre took place. At the time, Cerberus had commisioned Project Mordancy, the purpose of which was to experiment with thresher maw physiology in an effort to develop advanced weapons and armor systems for Cerberus Skunkworks, with thresher maw acid specifically targetted for its use as a future bio-weapon. It was eventually determined that a field test, plus a control group, would be needed to gauge the thresher maw's performance. Acquiring a dozen or so spores, Cerberus operatives placed them underneath the Xihe colony, a mining colony assigned to a nearby palladium mining facility, and retreated to a nearby observation facility in the mountains to observe the result.
What occurred next was one of the most infamous and bloody butcheries in human colonial history. Due to thresher maw lifespans, they very quickly grew to full size, and when they felt the vibrations of the colonists above, they burrowed their way to the surface and tore the colony apart, dozens of thresher maws feeding upon and devouring all of the 300+ inhabitants: scientists can only theorize as to how long the nightmare lasted, but with the age of the thresher maws taken into account and their usual ferociousness factored in as well, it is estimated it lasted mere minutes, with no survivors. The colony suffered severe, irrevocable damage, with much of the soil beneath it left unstable from all the tunnelling underneath. Cerberus then deployed a distress beacon from orbit in order to lure in more victims, with the hope of capturing at least one survivor for further tests. The distress call was picked up by the heavy cruiser SSV New Delhi of the Sixth Fleet, which arrived at Akuze the next day. After numerous attempts to contact the colony, New Delhi deployed its marine contingent, the 55th Force Recon Platoon under the command of recent war hero Commander Shepard, to the surface to investigate. Shepard's unit found the remains of the colony, but Captain Dick Eisennhorn of the New Delhi was determined to find survivors, so the platoon made camp at the colony with the intent of expanding the search perimeter the next day after the New Delhi ran scans of the surface. Most of the unit had been preparing to go to sleep when the thresher maws struck again. Shepard, who had insisted on taking the first shift, quickly ordered a counterattack, but with his men being slaughtered from all sides, he realized any attempt to fight back would be in futility and ordered a tactical withdrawal. Half the platoon was slaughtered within a minute, and Shepard's orderly retreat collapsed into a panicked rout as he lost control of his unit. In just five minutes, it was over, with the 55th Recon Platoon practically wiped out.
The Akuze Massacre has an infamous legacy within Alliance, and later Coalition, military doctrine. While the Alliance was fully aware of thresher maws and the threat they posed, Akuze was the first time humans had encountered them in such magnitude, and to such disastrous consequences. The destruction of an entire platoon of men to the subterranean worms had horrified Captain Eisennhorn, who testified at his hearing that, had he been made properly aware of the threat's existence, he would never have sent men down in the first place. Eisennhorn and Shepard both testified to this, and were both absolved of wrongdoing, with emphasis placed on the Alliance military's failure to properly train their field units on how to deal with thresher maws: this lack of training led to a collapse of cohesion and order within Shepard's unit, which couldn't be saved. The event led to significant changes, most famous among them being the Tucker Doctrine, which dictated that any Alliance marine unit found to be engaging a thresher maw should immediately retreat unless in possession of vehicle-mounted ordinance, in which case they should terminate the maw with "extreme mobility and prejudice". The Alliance's attempt to have Akuze's thresher maw population eradicated by way of neutron purge was denied by the CIFFS, forcing them to abandon the planet entirely and impose a planetary exclusion zone. Only two survivors remained of the slaughter: Commander Shepard, who managed to withdraw successfully to an exfil site, and Jasper Toombs, who had wandered the planet for two days until his capture by Cerberus. The official report labelled Shepard as the only survivor, although this would be amended six years later when Toombs was rescued from Cerberus custody, and he gave his amended testimony to SIA officials in 2183 CE.
For Cerberus, the massacre proved immensely successful. They had extracted enormous amounts of observational data from the two attacks, and with their capture of Toombs, were able to begin conducting horrific tests on a live guinea pig. Toombs was held at Barbarossa Station for six years, the Cerberus personnel performing tests that ranged from being exposed to different types of radiation to injecting thresher maw acid directly into his veins. Project Mordancy ultimately helped to deliver enough data to develop the biochemical weapon known as Agent Bliss, which would be used by Cerberus troops during their invasion of Aite during the Reaper War, and again by Prometheus during the Post-Apocalyptic War and Dominion Civil War. A modified, enhanced and much more virulent variant known as Agent Dandylion would be used extensively against the extragalactic reptilian Beremundian invaders during the First Triangulum, Second Triangulum and Third Triangulum wars, and again by Greater Andromedan Pact forces against the Phussa Triumvirate during the Second Milko-Triumvirate War.