Legend Of The Jokers Wild Revised

by CSS Stravag

Set 1 of the Jokers Wild tale. A derelict patrol ship of an interdimensional Star Empire suffers a problem when jumping between dimensions, and lands in the L4 area of Cosmic Era Earth. How can one dysfunctional warship and its motley crew change the history of genocide in the lands of the SEEDs? (This Set of the Jokers Wild is completed, working on Set 2 now.)

10. Determination

(Legend of the Jokers Wild, Section 1, Chapter 10: Determination)

(10 September CE 71, 0900 PLANT Standard Time)

(Prior to the nuclear attack on Boaz)

(ZAFT Military Station, Command Center area)

"Chairman, I have mercenary Commander Gai Murakumo to speak to you."

"Send them in," Patrick replies gruffly. If it was possible for anyone to remain pissed off about his family's actions (namely his son's), he was. That Athrun was not supporting the cause of Coordinators over the rest of the Earth Sphere was infuriating him, especially if he was with this rumored massive starship that itself was larger than some colonies...

"Gai Murakumo reporting for briefing on our findings in trying to track down the rogue warship Absinthe, Chairman Zala."

"Please deliver your report," he says at least civilly.

"On or about 1 September, we tracked the Absinthe and a sister ship to a location outside the normal bounds of the lagrange points around the planet. We do not have information on the sister ship as to what its hull number or designation is, however I have visually confirmed there is a second ship matching the Absinthe, in both configuration and veterancy of the crew." That was an extrapolation on his part, but something safe to say he figured. Given how badass these Magi were purported to be by the crew of the RE H.O.M.E., the only way that ship would go would be better.

"I was able to capture a part of an enemy mobile suit in combat against escorting forces, a part which contained a personal effects storage container and therein an identification flashcard for the Flame Eater-class warships, of which the Absinthe is one of them. The flashcard itself contains a basic rundown of the ship's stats and arsenal. The remaining contents of the pod were...less than useful in military matters."

"We will need a manifest of materials found in the pod for psychological evaluation," Chairman Zala replied. Someone's leftover junk or personal effects could itself be a telling sign of what that person was like.

"I will have it written up and delivered to you by tomorrow morning," Gai replies. He could have Loretta write up the contents of her foot-locker to give them the impression it had been a female pilot Gai had partially defeated. "Before I could appropriately close on the Absinthe I was engaged and subsequently driven off by four enemy Mobile Armor units from the same unit as the Absinthe. The battle ended in a stalemate I had to retreat from due to the threat of more forces approaching the field of battle. In the engagement, my wingman's customized GINN unit was damaged severely by a single missile from the first enemy Mobile Armor to engage us, and, at this time, is still in overhaul to restore it back into service."

"If you have need of parts, forward your requests to the quartermaster here. I will have them released to you immediately," Patrick comments. If nothing else, the Chairman of ZAFT was not going to be shown to be ungrateful to hired help, since the mercenary units usually had capabilities well beyond those of even his best Special Forces.

"Thank you," Gai replies immediately, intent on doing so. "Regardless, we were able to get this information and confirm most of it against your records from the engagement at Mendel. The Absinthe, for all intents and purposes, is a heavy gun Warship without any mobile forces compliment of its own. Arguably, it does not need them, given that most of its arsenal is dedicated to anti-MS weapons."

"Wait a moment, if what you are saying is correct, then how does the ship expect to defend itself against a concentrated mobile suit attack?" Chairman Zala asks in clear confusion. It was apparent to Gai the Chairman did not realize warships could be more of a threat to a Mobile Suit than the other way around.

"It does so by way of having hundreds of independent small-scale weapons, equivalent to the armaments of a fighter, MS or mobile armor. These are apparently married to an impressive targeting and tracking array the battle at Mendel demonstrated capable of reliably tracking, targeting and eliminating even the latest ZAFT models. The prevalence of ballistic cannons and small missile weapons suggests these Warships share practically nothing in common with Earth Alliance ships, of which they are far larger than the Drake-, Nelson- or Agamemnon-class ships. For the record, the longest Earth Alliance ship is the Archangel-class at 420 meters, the Absinthe is 660 meters, larger and far more powerful offensively than the Archangel in terms of sustained fire."

"Did the intel you came across include information on defensive staying power?" Zala asks after a moment.

"Yes, the ship is apparently armored in two thousand, two hundred tons of something called Lamellor-Carbide multi-threat laminated armor, on top of a 96,000-ton hardened and reinforced internal structure. By our estimates, it would take a fleet of five Nazca-class ships approximately an hour of sustained fire to breech the armor and cause enough damage to the inside of the Absinthe to constitute a kill, barring you hit something critical such as an ammo bunker or the engines." The unstated, but nonetheless true, implication was his estimate was based on ZAFT naval gunnery being 'uneven' at best, and far more likely to miss than hit when at their worst. The obvious rejoinder to such a comment was the Absinthe may give said ZAFT fleet ten minutes to live under the best circumstances, definitely not the hour Gai thought would be necessary.

"So you estimate the threat posed by these ships to be drastic enough that they could, theoretically, pose a grave, sustained hazard to the ZAFT fleet and home defense?"

"If they are so inclined, yes. Given where we found them, how we tracked them, and how hard it was to pursue, it is fairly reasonable to say they want precisely nothing to do with ZAFT or the Earth Alliance at all."

"How are they being supplied?" he asks.

"They are likely operating off internal stores. The intel we picked up indicates the Absinthe has 4000 tons internal storage for parts and material for the ship, 375 tons provisions food and water for the crew of the ship, and 1500 tons general-purpose cargo space. Assuming no extra foodstuffs carried, the ship should be able to operate for no less than 200 days on a full supply, and assuming their general-purpose cargo is dedicated to provisions for the crew, as many as 1000 days. Whether the ship can hold orbit for that long, I do not know." One thing Gai was not going to do was implicate the Junk Guild in supporting the fleet. Gai had recorded a partial glimpse of their main ship from his battle recorder's records—it scared the living piss out of him, given that at scale to the other Flame Eater-class docked with it, the ship in question had to be over five kilometers long bow to stern and studded with more than four times the gun ports minimum.

There was only one way a direct confrontation with the fleet that the Absinthe would go, and that was straight to hell for the offending party. Apparently, even the Admiral of the fleet was an extremely accomplished pilot of a customized Gundam, capable of taking out the Freedom and Justice in close quarters, according to Lowe's more detailed description of the fleet after the RE H.O.M.E. had finished its resupply run. Anyone with that kind of skill and hardware was themselves beyond just plain good and could turn ZAFT into mulch without much in the way of effort. Gai knew he had to play it straight and narrow here, or it would be him on the chopping block next.

"Is there anything else you would like to add, Commander?"

"Only one thing. I included the radar specifications I tracked from their units in the report. If what I received is any indication, there are two things ZAFT has to worry about. One, the faster a targeted unit moves, the more likely the ship and mobile forces are to score hits. Speed does not equate to armor, never has and never will, and these guys can prove it—did prove it against me. I did best to dodge their shots at slow movement rates, but the faster I moved the more times they got within touching distance to me. Second, the power of their sensors is such they will burn through Neutron Jammers. I was not able to get a clear cut to their radios, but they were coordinating somehow—and coordinating very well."

"Understood. Thank you for the assistance, Commander Murakumo. We will be in touch."

Seconds later, Gai was outside the office and heading back toward the dock and his ship. Elijah joined up, walking behind and slightly to Gai's right. A hall later, he asks the burning question: "Will they try?"

"Not likely," Gai replies immediately. "The Earth Alliance is operating, moving forces and material in large quantities. And, as our own encounters demonstrate, that fleet is not something you can fight in a conventional manner, unless you don't want your fleet to exist after the shooting is done."

There was silence in walking for several minutes, both contemplating the battle past and the likely battles to come. Whatever Elijah thought of as possible, Gai thought of the same and three ways it could be worse, though neither knew they were coming to the same or similar conclusions. "Now that we have a clear idea what we were up against, I am glad that Mobile Armor stopped us at a distance. I don't think either of us would have survived getting close to the ship."

"Sad to say, but you are correct," Gai replies. The footage of the battle against ZAFT showed that even the Absinthe's laser anti-missile systems, primarily defensive armaments to intercept missiles, had scratched a GuAIZ MS. If a purely defensive measure on one of their ships was that god-awful powerful, the real net effect of their offensive measures would be less than pretty to whomever their sights crossed.

-x-x-x-

(24 September CE 71, 0605 hours UTC)

To the Star Admiral, the sound of combat boots on the decks behind him were nothing new. This was a warship, after all, and the Quartermaster did not stock tennis shoes for duty uniforms. Thus, he disregarded the sound as he continued working on contingencies with Gerald, Calamira, and Waltfeld, building a set of possible scenarios that could be used to bring the navies of both sides to a screeching halt before more civilians died.

"Star Admiral, looks like you have visitors," Commander Ward declares. If anyone would see to arrivals first it would be him, as Wayne was not Conn and the current command officer of the ship saw to such things.

"Keep it running, guys," Wayne says as he stands to speak to the arrivals. "What goes, Marines?" Wayne asks as he steps off the command platform to face the two Marines who had come forward.

"Sir, we've got an issue we need hashed out by a higher," the Point Commander of the two says. "I say this guy's full of it, but he's claiming half the Marine Galaxy is in with him. I gots no way to prove him right or wrong, so..."

"Well, you measured the quandary in precise terms, yet have not told me the tale of the woe. Speak, man, I don't eat Enlisted for breakfast."

"He wants to modify the Tradition of Music. Rather significantly."

Commander Ward whistled low, in apparent surprise. "That's a damn big and loud stick to wave at the rest of the crew, Marine."

"I am aware of this, Commander," the Marine Point Officer in question (a lady of maybe 18, as far as Wayne could tell) replies.

"Justify it," Wayne replies simply, with a completely neutral inflection.

"Sir, I bring two points to this argument. First, I do not speak of eliminating the use of the Tradition, nor magnifying it, I speak only to change the flexibility of certain ritualistic songs we can do just as well with other songs in addition to the standard. Second, as we are likely going to be here for over a decade, maybe permanently, we need to look to the fact that we shall become our own entity, raised by the Empire but separate from it. Contrary to some dunderheads' belief, we will not simply be able to walk away from that, or those who will inevitably be left behind will be eaten alive by the hive of scum and villainy in our wake."

Wayne cracked a crooked, almost evil smile at her comments. "You are saying that because we shall be a separate entity for so long, we should act like it?" Wayne was referring to an oddity called a Descendant Empire, a principal of Magi law allowing a group of persons to move away from Core Magi territory and influence to set up their own government based on the Magi model, with modifications made by their group. Some Descendant Empires worked, some such Empires collapsed in a spectacular self-destruction.

"Aff, Star Admiral," the Point Officer replies.

"Very well, your arguments should boil down to 'it is tradition for a reason' and 'we will return home, therefore we play by Magi rules UFN,' am I correct?" the Star Admiral asks of the Point Commander.

"Aff, Star Admiral, this is so," he replies immediately.

"You present me a hellish quandary. You both have valid arguments, and given this is such a hotbed traditionalist issue, I cannot simply take sides and expect to live through the ensuing Trials of Refusal. Therefore, the only way to solve this issue is in the thoroughly Magi way: the Trial of Possession. Yet, we do this with a twist," the Star Admiral had resumed his evil grin, which worried everyone up to and including the Commander.

"Ship's Jester reporting, all quiet in the toilet stalls, and for good reason. That is all." Wayne glanced at the Maintenance Controllers, but said nothing as she shrugged. A ration of bad chicken had been found the hard way, after a dozen crew or so had it for a meal and came down with a light case of food poisoning. It had led to some horridly rank toilet rooms for a while, and they probably still were. Wayne only needed one whiff to lose any urge to use the shitcan in the near future.

"Attention all hands, this is Wayne Centara." He took a short pause for the room he was in to quiet down, which was the loudest of the ship's groups by far. "Listen and listen well, for we have an issue of tradition to hash out today, and, by extension, how it will be applied in two days hence. Normally I would disregard something like this in the face of nuclear war, but since this is such a divisive matter and we do not have room to spare in our minds over such matters, we will do this in the Trial of Possession and let combat be thy judge of conviction. The issue at hand is there are parties, not fully declared at this time, who wish to make changes to the songs used in the Tradition of Music." He could hear the massive combination of cheer and jeer echo throughout the hull, but it was short lived—ten seconds later, it was quiet except for the sound of the engines. "Now, there are limits allowed for change under normal Magi guideline, but some are set in stone. I need not tell you which, we have all heard them used. This Trial settles the eternal question as to whether or not we are allowed to modify those areas considered but never really legally declared 'Exempt' for a long time."

Wayne takes another pause before continuing; "I have no position on this matter myself. I personally revel in the spirit of the Tradition, the defiance of our foes and the horror of combat, not necessarily in the fact that it is tradition or that certain groups are favored by the tradition. Therefore, I am not participant of this battle, nor shall be any of the senior command staff Century Commander and up. I require two or more Galaxy Commanders or Ship Captains who have an opinion on the matter to report to the bridge ASAP. Additionally, all non-essential personnel who believe this is worth fighting for shall within the next 60 minutes register to take part in a ship-wide Trial of Possession."

Again, Wayne paused for the cheering to subside. "The term of the Trial is as follows: two teams, offense and defense, will be segregated and prepared for battle. Defense is required to eliminate all offensive personnel. Offense is required to storm the Bridge successfully, meaning that more than five persons must enter the bridge from the Offense team. The mode of combat is simple: Quartermasters will break out and issue appropriate quantities of paintball ammo for all participants, and the battle will be conducted by way of Combat Training and Simulation gear for all personnel. The Trial begins in 90 minutes. Register, draw weapons, draw marker ammo, and stand for your beliefs. Any questions can be forwarded to the AI entity, who will sort out any technicalities or forward them to me. The clock is ticking; for those persons not able or unwilling to go through a match of paintball, you may vote your choice and it will be counted for or against the end score of the battle. That is all."

"Star Admiral?" the AI prompts.

"Yes, Ai?" Wayne replies.

"Five thousand participants, and the number is going up by the second."

"This is going to be a sight to see," Andrew Waltfeld says with something of a smile. A friendly game of paintball was something he had no objections to. "Which way to the coffee?"

"No battle is proper without coffee," Commander Ward affirms before picking up a growler phone and dialing a number from memory. "Three pitchers of your best coffee for the command staff. Charge back to my account;" pause as the guy on the other end of the logical connection said something back; "Roger that." He hangs up; "Five minutes. May not be a match for what you were serving on the Eternal, but it is close."

Waltfeld had no idea what Magi defined as 'paintball' and how it was used in Trial.

-x-

"Attention all personnel, the Trial of Position will begin in two minutes. A warning bell will sound at that time. Two rules of engagement updates: there will be no combat in line of sight to the dock collars leading to non-Magi vessels or inside those vessels, and there will be no combat actions taken inside or shooting from cover inside any of the clubs, restaurants, or the casino. Anything else is expected. All personnel are cautioned to avoid taking shots at ship's crew not wearing CTS gear, and all uninvolved staff are cautioned to remain in quarters or at your duty stations until further notice. May combat be thy judge, victory thy jury, and history the recorder of these events."

"Lock and load!" Elisa orders. Magazines were inserted, breech open markers were removed, and bolts were dropped to chamber marker rounds. "Confirm all energy weapons down to training standards or all heavy energy weapons are rigged with training designators."

"All set, boss lady," Diane replies.

"Missiles verify type as paint marker only," Elisa finishes up her prep orders.

"Ready!" Helga replies.

"This is going to get messy," Victoria declares as hers was the last bolt in the point to slam forward. A moment later, the same Marine activated the barrel motor on her 10mm Gattling (A minigun rechambered to a 10mm heavy cartridge).

"We all shall have to scrub down our armor after all is said and done, but it will be worth it," Helga notes with an evil intonation.

The sound of a very loud school-bell echoes throughout the ship, issuing warning that the Trial was to commence. Cheering could be heard from both sides of the ship, the stern of the ship where the Red Team had started (the offensive) and the bow where the defensive team was at. "Advance to contact. You have point, Helga."

Helga led off the advance for her Point, shield set forward and her Panzersturmgewehr (armor assault rifle) poking around the side of the shield. Given they were starting in a secondary corridor, definitely not the main corridor of the ship (sniper bait that would be), combat in brutal close-quarters fashion was to be expected and very shortly. As she filed out of the barracks, the others followed close behind and dispersed, their shields also set forward to make sure the two inches of woven Gundanium and diamond took the damage first, not their personal armor sets.

As more of the 'red' team moved forward, it was inevitable that some of the defensive force would take exception to their presence. A burst of M4 assault rifle raked the front of her shield, and it was always considered bad form to take hits from even assault rifles since freak accidents could happen. So, she continued the shield advance form while using the camera sight on her MAR-22C to sight up the offending engine mechanic and fire a short burst at him. Helga did not get so lucky as to put her first burst on target, but the second salvo did hit him square in the arm and right side of the chest. The CTS pack he was wearing registered the hits as valid and immediately sounded the tone indicating he was down, which also disabled his ammo from causing 'damage' to other personnel after four seconds, the theoretical maximum it would take someone to die under average battlefield conditions.

"Good game, Marine," the Mechanic declares as she continues walking forward. Helga nods her acknowledgement of the accolade but does not slow down during her march forward.

It was another fifty meters before any of the defenders got adventurous. "Tango call! Red Marines at one hundred, Corridor Charlie-3-Alpha, engaging and requesting assistance!" a defending Marine puts out on the radio, but also made the mistake of putting it out on her loudspeaker. Helga had just barely enough time to duck down C-3-A-4, a side access to crew bunks, before a pair of 100mm marker rounds impacted on the bulkhead she was nearby. It was severely discouraged for Marines to stand around and take fire from anything larger than 90mm even with the shield, since APFSDS (1) rounds in large caliber could theoretically crack the shield plate in as little as one shot, though this was tested to be very unlikely. Such a weapon almost assuredly would bust the main armor a Marine wore in few shots, which would make it a bad day for them, so...

"Elisa, a little covering fire?" Helga asks, before the distinct sound of her sniper rifle barked the response needed. The 20mm Armor Sniper Rifle was a venerable Magi mainstay, and one very adept at silencing Armored Infantry in one to three shots with very high velocity armor-penetrating rounds (when using real ammo). In this case, the bark of three shots is all it took before that Marine was out of action, along with the 100mm short-charge autocannon that was giving the point hell.

"That was fun," Victoria says sarcastically; her shield had taken significant damage from the enemy Marine's shooting spree (four hits).

"At least nothing notable came of it," Karen grumps, really meaning that she wanted something to come of it.

It took thirty seconds of wary shield marching before anyone replied: "Oh, something came of it all right," Diane bemoans while moving to take refuge in a bathroom from the suddenly vehement reaction of the enemy to their advance. "Damn traditionalists, no respect for the feelings of the rest of us."

"Cuts both ways, Diane," Helga replies crassly. A series of training marker rockets zoom down the hallway, two of which struck in the doorframe of the cargo area she was in, splattering paint all over the place. "Damn, they are counting that as damage? Bullshit, it never even struck me!"

"How are they stacked?" Victoria asks.

"Oh, not as well as you," Elisa replies; even with an advanced targeting system, she could still somewhat safely poke her head around a corner and observe, or, as she was now, simply use the gunsight camera on her monster rifle to rattle off rounds.

"Can we keep my bust size out of the conversation, please?" Victoria asks in almost a whine.

"Certainly not, we need something to distract ourselves with while being shot at," Diane notes almost sweetly. Victoria's bust was the second-largest in the unit, defeated only by Helga, though the latter was only given a pass on the subject due to the fact that she was well over the two meter mark and massed more than half the guys on the ship. Helga could rewrite the book on the word 'Amazon' and even with working out as she did, she still retained a pair that drew attention anywhere she went out of armor. And it did make Diane kind of jealous in the end, but not enough to do anything about it.

"Less talk, more action, people," Elisa orders. "Blue team ain't going to die of the dumbs, we have to push them over."

"All personnel, cease fire in C-3-A for medical emergency, repeat, all personnel cease fire in C-3-A until further notice."

"That's us, people, check fire!" Elisa shouts, lowering her sniper rifle and beginning the process of changing magazines out. It took five seconds, but prior to her finishing up all fire stopped in the corridor, to the point whereby the Marines strayed out from their places of cover and looked back and forth through the corridor to take stock of how hotly-contested it was. The presence of at least five dozen marines and twice that in non-Armored personnel gave enough evidence, and C-3-A was not a primary access corridor at that.

The charging of the medical personnel toward where Elisa stood caused her whole point to come to attention, awaiting them passing by; this also gave them the best field of run toward the area where the injured was.

"Hey, Reds, why you messin' with the Tradition?" one of the opposition Marines asks.

"Why? Because we're going to be here for a decade, at least, no sense fucking around about it," Diane replies. "We might as well start acting like our own group, and Nightwish is getting old, like real old," she continues after a moment.

"So?"

"After a decade of smacking ZAFT and the Earth Alliance around, like we will definitely have to in coming years, you think you can just walk away from that? Walk away from the lands you have held, people you have defended?" There was no answer from the Blue Team. "As I thought. We will be Magi, but we will be far more than the sum what we brought along. Best we plan ahead for it."

"Then what would you use, say, as replacement for Tenth Man Down?"

"Listen, soon you will know," Diane replies, queuing up the song she favored for the said purpose. One could easily say her intention was arrogant incarnate, especially when wagered against the general dwindling of Religion in the Empire from being the main focus in everyday life, but the same could be said of the uses Tenth Man Down was put to.

"Just so long as it ain't no wussy thing," the defender let the threat hang unstated thereafter.

"AaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! COME BACK HERE YOU PINKO BITCH!" The voice, despite the unusual insult, was definitely that of a very pissed-off Haro. Said Haro came into the corridor from one of the shower rooms nearby, chasing a smaller, pink, and bouncing Haro with a three-pound sledgehammer held high. "YOU PINK POP-SMOOCHING MAGGOT! DIE ALREADY!" CLANG, CLANG, two solid misses with the hammer, but they were close enough to hold the hope that one would contact.

"Dude! What the fuck?" the Point Commander for the Blue Marines asks.

"It's kinda cute. Where do I get one?" Helga asks.

"You don't want one," the third trooper from the opposing Blue Point says immediately thereafter. "I heard about how this thing annoys the fuck out of the Marines and our Haros. Apparently, it got away last time, but not this time..."

"I call a combat challenge," Elisa says immediately. "When open fire is called, and when it comes back into the hall, we unload on it, trying to push it toward the other side. First to get it past the opposing side's bathroom wins, and the loser point stands down. Sound fair?"

"Works for me, if it works for my point," the point Commander says, followed by a cacophony of 'I'm in' from the remainder.

"AI acknowledges challenge. I will administer," the AI declares over the radio.

The Medtechs charged back through, this time with a gunner on a stretcher. The location where he had taken the hit—his neck—did not look very good.

"Wait for it," Elisa orders.

"Resume fire in Corridor C-3-A, repeat, resume fire in Corridor C-3-A."

"Wait for it," and everyone's sensors could see the two Haros coming back from the storage area and into the path of ten waiting Marines. "Wait for it," she orders unnecessarily.

"DAMN YOU PINK FUCK-BALL CHUT-CHODE—" Elisa figured it was real bad if the ship's Haro was stringing nonsensical words together as something attempting to be an insult.

"GO!" The Ship's AI orders.

The Pink Haro never made it past the halfway mark between the starboard and port sides of the hallway, as the fire began immediately from ten Marines and very little of it missed, even such a small target. It was trapped between two walls of paint rounds knocking it fore and aft violently, jockeying it toward the two ends of the halls in both support of the shipboard Haro and in contest to prove which team was the better marksmen. For a few moments it appeared to be leaning toward Elisa, but as two of the enemy stopped to reload, Elena struck like the trained Armor Sniper she really was, two well-placed shots knocking it well past the opposing line as well as caving part of its metal frame in.

"Challenge completed, victor is Red Team."

CLANG, and the ship's Haro finished what Elisa started, hammering it flat and into several pieces with the sledgehammer. As was his duty, he swept the debris out of the walking path before Elisa's point walked past, shoveling the remnants into a debris vacuum that led to an incinerator and nanotech material reprocessor. "Who da man, bitch? Who da man?" it asks the vacuum port, or more likely the Haro it just flattened.

Helga had resumed point for the team, pushing the 'Red' lines forward in the corridor and also varying the percentage of the ship held by 'Red' with practically each step (though be it by fractions of a percent per step, it still counted). Diane had turned on her radio retransmit for the Tradition of Music, only rather than Nightwish as the tradition required, she had Iced Earth playing.

-x-

"'Descending from Heaven, The Angel swore to bring them down, The Hunter, the thunder, the wrath of Heaven's coming down,'" Gerald Lightbringer echoes what he heard of the song now echoing up and down the corridors of the Mjolnr.

"That's not on the level, in my opinion. Religion is dead, why are we—" the Flight Controller in question immediately silenced herself with the look from the Star Admiral.

"No, Controller, Religion is not dead, and it will never die completely so long as sentience exists. There shall always be a reverence for powers beyond the known mortal coil, and even our own faiths, or lack thereof, include reverence for such mundane, confirmable pursuits as wizardry and Executors, which in other lands are religions themselves. Besides, I don't here you griping about religious reference in Nightwish music, what gives you the right to complain about—what is that music, anyway?"

"Iced Earth, sir," the Maintenance Controller, who doubled as the Jester, replied. "Song's name is The Hunter."

"Where is religion referenced in Nightwish?" the Flight Controller asks staunchly.

"Pick a song. Almost any song has hints of it, many of them directly reference religious concepts, such as the ancient Greek mythos in The Siren, the river Styx in Planet Hell, the end of days legends in The Islander, need I go on?" Gerald Lightbringer replies.

"Dark Passion Play is discontinuity, I'm not counting it and I'm counting your argument spurious on invoking it," she replies weakly. She lost, she knew it, and she knew everyone else on the bridge knew it. Besides, such subjects were not something one normally argued with an officer that outranked her by five places and expected to win.

"Fangirl syndrome," Gerald replies in kind.

"I like this theme," Star Admiral Centara notes as Gerald approaches the holotank to review the force status. "The Hunter...it may sound condescending, more so than some of the traditional Nightwish themes, but I think that when combined with our tactical and technological superiority, it may just be enough to break their morale."

"And breaking morale is easier than breaking bodies or machines," Gerald completes the thought. "Probably a lot less bloody, as well."

"This is a good theory you pose," Wayne says. "Talk to me, Gerald. I am not much of a metal-head when you count coup. Who else would be a good option?

"Oh, plenty, plenty," Gerald replies with an evil smile. "I can assemble you a true symphony of destruction ranging from Black Sabbath all the way to Within Temptation, hit every high point in between such as this new one in Iced Earth, classic Magi scare tactics from Nightwish, and music so powerful it should be illegal in Dragon Force. Shall I go on?" he asks for added effect.

Wayne smiled serenely for a moment. "Do it."

"You daring me to do it?" Gerald asks in response.

"Dare, order, invocation of apocalyptic evil, whatever you want to call it. I just want results."

"Well, apocalyptic evil is out, Satan and I are not on speaking terms. Every time we get together, he ends up accusing me of stealing his beer, I punch him out; it goes back and forth." The problem with Gerald saying such things is he always spoke in such a fashion that it held the patina of legitimacy, since in most cases it was impossible to distinguish what he said was real from his bending of the truth. And with his Codex being almost completely classified, there was really no telling whether or not he was lying about this or other matters.. "On the other hand, I think I can assemble an orchestra of death, that it may be lost on them this time around, but if we have to go to guns with them at a later time, the sound of the music will make them shit their pants."

"Fine by me," Wayne replies. "I expect all necessary paperwork filed and lists readied within the next six hours."

"Aff, Star Admiral." Gerald gestures to the holotank. "Oh, look, our maestro of the Marine Resistance is doing helluva good job. This may come to grips outside the doors here, and very shortly at that."

-x-

For Elisa, things were far from as clear-cut as Century Commander Lightbringer would have them believe. The fighting had moved out of C-3-A into C-3, a short port-to-starboard maintenance corridor that was surprisingly easy to clean out (just three defensive infantry, no armor), and into corridor C, one of the main access corridors of the ship and where the true fighting was being done.

"For what it's worth, it appears we now hold the aft 80 percent of the ship," Victoria notes, preparing for a final push into corridor C and likely eventual defeat.

Karen put voice to her fears: "It's going to be this last 20 percent that kills us. We are building a pressurized defensive scenario for the Blue team, which will probably triple their effectiveness." It was the classic Magi concern writ in one description. Magi did well enough on the offensive, but put the same soldiers in a defensive battle and their effectiveness doubled. Put more pressure on them in the defense and effectiveness increased further. Put them in a 'Final Protective Fire' scenario and it tripled or quadrupled. It was one of the reasons why the Negaverse had the saying 'Enough troops is never enough when storming Magi fortifications'.

"Then we make their lives living hell, and hopefully give the enemy a breach that our comrades can exploit," Victoria replies immediately. "Victory or death! What do you want to do with your life?"

"I dunno, live long enough to find a great guy and have some wildly athletic sex would be nice," Diane replies.

"You probably will never know how many hearts you just broke," Helga comments.

"Oh well," Diane replies immediately. She cared not a whit for the bisexual or lesbian ethos, and clearly showed it.

"Unit, jumpoff, three, two, one, now," Elisa forestalls the degenerating conversation with her orders.

Helga was the first around the corner, using the classic Magi aggressive shield advance technique to move forward into the corridor they had cleared. Her shield took some 20mm rounds, but she gave as well as she received in addition to Diane firing a beam heavy machine gun around her right side to add to the fire headed down the hall toward the enemy. Hand grenades from Elisa and Victoria joined the direct fire from the front two, detonating in close proximity to the enemy Armored Marines and the not-so-armored defensive personnel. The main flank guard was dropped by a round from Elisa's armor sniper rifle, paving the way for the unit to jump forward and clean house.

Corridor C-3 was short, only fifteen meters long, and the Marines took seconds to cross it. Out in C Corridor main, they walked into a gap between the Blue front line and the troops coming up behind it. Immediately Diane and Karen reoriented right to guard against the reinforcements, Helga and Victoria guarded left and began shooting up the backs of the enemy Marines with their support weapons. Faced with fire from Red marines on both sides, the Blue line only took five seconds to collapse, though not without casualties: Karen took a simulated Portable Ion Cannon blast in the back and was, theoretically, killed when her jump jet fuel cooked off. In response, she took a knee to acknowledge she was dead.

"Move!" Helga shouts. "Move it up!" She suits actions to words, shield set forward and stomping down the walkway, her right arm back to deploy the pilebunker, an armor-penetrating weapon designed expressly to kill Elementals and Armored Infantry by ramming a long spike through them.

"Charge!" Elisa shouts, cranking her external speakers to the max, to haunt the enemy they were charging down with Primo Victoria by Sabaton. Particularly egregious and demoralizing were the lines 'We've been here before, used this kind of war, as crossfire grinds through the sand; our orders were easy, it's kill or be killed; blood on both sides will be spilled!' as the four remaining charged forward to take advantage of defensive disarray while the remainder of the red force closed up on their rear.

Helga was the first in, followed closely by Diane and Victoria, with Elisa a pace behind. Helga led off by slamming into one of the front-rank Marines to drive his shield aside and slam in with a simulated pilebunker strike. His battle computer acknowledged he would have received almost a meter of steel penetrator rod through the heart for his lack of bracing properly, a kill in real-world terms, before Helga backed off and braced her shield again to stave off any point-blank 20mm or autocannon fire. Diane had the real shocktrooper kills of the engagement, as she charged the enemy she ejected her shield, fired jump-jets to blast clear over the Marines in the front, and landed in among the second-rank Marines who were not really expecting anything remotely that suicidal. Her simulated beam saber work was both deadly and incredibly graceful, claiming six Marines before a simulated AT4-Block-16 would have blown her left leg off and not left her much in the way of options. Still, with the Marines down, the unarmored infantry was easy pickings for the Marines on the Red side, as Elisa knocked off the last remaining forward-line Marine, Victoria moved forward and used her shield-mounted Gattling to spray the mechanics-turned-defenders down mercilessly with paint rounds. The sight and hits from their 5.56mm rifles, effective against personnel, were useless against Marines armored in five tons of ultra-dense armor plate.

"Sniper fifteen reporting Charlie corridor is cleared, bring it on up!" She had technically lost two of her point in the fighting, which for a simulated shipboard battle was slightly better than par; in a real engagement against real opponents (such as Negaverse or Dynasty heavy infantry), Elisa figured it would be her and Victoria remaining, maybe not even that.

"Someone snitched!" Victoria shouts, firing a L110 Infantry Support Laser (simulated) down the hall toward corridor C-1, the main cross-access to Alpha Corridor (the latter being the backbone of the ship's corridors that ran the whole length of the ship).

"Shit!" Elisa replies, since she was picking ammo for her armor sniper rifle off a sniper that had been downed by Diane's wild antics in close quarters. Her rifle came up, but before she could even sight an enemy in, a 120mm marker round tagged the frame of the gun, which her battle computer registered as critical damage to her sniper rifle. She dropped it aside immediately and picked up a stray 80mm long-charge grenade launcher to continue fighting, taking care to set a non-critical waypoint on her tactical map so she could come back and reclaim her favorite rifle after the shooting. One, two, three grenades went downrange before Victoria's shield ejected of its own accord, too damaged in simulation to provide her reasonable protection (such would not happen in a real battle).

"Get behind me!" Helga shouts, moving forward to assist Victoria by shielding the diminutive but stacked Marine with her shield. Simulated missiles flew down the hallway and into the enemy ranks from the approaching Red troops behind the lead.

"Move it up! Take these surats down!" a Star Captain shouts as he jumps over several of the blue team that were laying down to simulate casualties. Just after he came flat and braced, the bottom edge of his shield came up, revealing a pair of 120mm short-charge autocannons on the inside face linked to the shield block trigger. Two squeezes let loose a hellish amount of red paint, liberally coating one of the defenders with paint splotches that took him down in simulation; in his right hand a M4 assault rifle delivered red paint death to several mechanics that were prior covering behind the Marines.

"Hey, Elise, finish up with my rifle," the sniper nearby where she lost her rifle declares.

"Thanks, Tina, I'll be back with it shortly," Elisa replies, realizing who the sniper was Diane had downed. With the rifle and several more magazines of ammo, she was on her way toward the front again.

"Sniper, hot shooting so far. You think you can thin the herd in the Charlie-one corridor?"

"Aff, Star Captain," Elisa replies immediately. "Cover forward! Sniper at work!"

"Cover forward, aff ma'am!" a larger guy shouts in reply as he side-steps out into the hallway with his shield forward. "Work fast, I can't hold forever!"

Elisa was ahead of his request, as he braced down on the ground she braced around the right side of his shield, and began firing aimed shots at the enemy who were being distracted by the other Marines firing over the height of his shield. Her efforts were lost in the din of the fire trading hands, which is what she wanted. With each shot, another Marine was injured or downed, and by the time the first magazine dropped out of her rifle the enemy realized that someone far more precise than just a Marine was at work here. They never zeroed in on her fast enough, though, before her rifle silenced the last of the main opposition in the short tunnel. "Clear forward! Move out!" the Star Captain shouts, suiting actions to words as he moved forward in a shield charge that itself was almost reckless. His team followed close, however, which told Elisa he had the complete respect of his unit. Elisa followed close, knowing the Alpha Corridor would qualify as a 'target-rich environment' for people of her skill set.

"Sniper, hack into the bridge, enter and clear!" the Star Captain orders over the sound of renewed battle fire, with ordinance heading in at least six directions as the Red Team was being squeezed from that many directions in just this one corridor alone. Elisa spared a moment for amazement: Magi were always taught hard defense, but every now and again a unit cropped up that was better, almost aces on the offense. This showed all the hallmarks of an offensive unit by the book, as the Blue Team was being pushed back faster than their defensive skills ratcheted up to the increasing challenge and pressure.

She took two shots downrange to take out more vociferous resistance, then racked her rifle on the rear of her right shoulder plate and pulled two beam sabers to literally hack her way through the doors. Being a Marine sniper, she knew an old, dirty trick of the Phalanx-class bridge doors, a certain locking mechanism could be tripped to retract the doors if you shoved beam sabers through two certain points on the door. It was set up that way as an ostensible rescue mechanism, and strangely the Negaverse had never twigged to it: many was the story where Negaverse infantry had died literally leaning against the doors of a Phalanx bridge when they could not get inside and take out the ship's CIC before they were flanked and eradicated by Marines.

With the mechanism tripped, the blast doors slammed open and Elisa was the first to sweep inside, immediately looking for armed threats. Satisfied that Blue had not established a foothold inside the bridge, she began looking for the enemy commander, a search that did not itself take more than a second. "Tango! Hands up!" she shouts as her armor sniper rifle centers on Star Commodore Jin Kojima, the fleet admiral-in-training and captain of the escort monitor Redland.

"Hands up!" one of the follow-on MS technicians shouts, his M4 centered on the enemy commander.

"Valid threat—" Elisa shouts as he begins to bring a pistol up, but she reacted faster: the head vulcan on her armor, chambered to nine millimeter, rattled off a dozen rounds onto the center of his chest, creating a neat circle of red paint just above his sternum. That he was still in his officer's uniform did not matter according to the exercise, nor did Elisa give much credence to the thought until after she had tagged him, realizing he might not be all that happy about being 'marked' in such a fashion.

Elisa realized as he came to his knees that directly behind the enemy commander was the two highest-ranking officers on the ship, as well as one of the commanders of the Three Ships. Immediately, she stands down the massive armor sniper rifle; resting the butt of the rifle on the ground and bringing it vertical put the muzzle brake of the rifle well above her head. "Armor Sniper Elisa reporting objective completed, Star Admiral."

The shock on the face of the Commander from the Eternal was itself rather amusing to the Armor Sniper, though it faded fast as the ship's AI reported the trial completed in a Red Team victory. Never seen a force that relies on the strength of the Infantry, have you, Elisa thinks crassly about the Commander from the Three Ships. She figured it was the same everywhere: the sheer awe of sixty tons of combat hardware had to have the most sex appeal for commanders, but relying too much on Mobile Forces was a sure way to doom yourself to a fast death. Training and outfitting 30 conventional (unarmored) infantry or 5 armored infantry cost less than the average Mobile suit and pilot training.

"Neg, no longer Armor Sniper," the Star Admiral replies. "Elite Specialist. As shall each of your team be promoted. Everyone on this bridge thinks you are way under-ranked for how good you are, and that performance you just gave is proof enough."

"Sir, I—that's way too much, Star Admiral, there's a lot better out there than just the five of us," Elisa protests, jerking her thumb over her shoulder at the dwindling shooting down the corridor and the length of the ship.

It went unheeded: "Ai, file the paperwork, I'll sign off on it within the hour. For the record, Point Commander, when you show skills like that, it is only fair they are recognized, especially after the decades of deprivation this ship has seen. And by your team's own logic, we will be here a decade, so promotions may be in order. Who knows how long it will take us to fix this jaloppy and get home, when everything is said and done?"

"All right, Elite Spec, I need to talk to your unit's maestro, compare notes about symphonies of demoralization. The rest of you, go find some beers. Losers get to clean up the Trial area," Century Commander Gerald Lightbringer orders in back-to-back declarations. The outcome for the losers was unspoken tradition of practice exercises and Trial by Combat, of which this fell into both categories. The AI was already passing orders out to that effect.

-x-x-x-

(25 September CE 71, 2010 hours UTC)

Kika found Gerald in the Club 300, much as she expected she would find him: half in the bottle, half out, sitting in a corner on the upper balconies, with more than a few empty bottles. Doing his damndest to ignore the world. Succeeding, for the most part, given her paging of her unit CO for almost an hour now.

"The ghosts, again," Kika comments as she sits down.

"Aff, the ghosts. Always the ghosts."

"Enemies you killed?"

"Friends I didn't save," he replies. "I laugh in the face of the ghosts of enemies slain, for they who are stupid enough to stand against a superior foe, too bad home boy, I'll pass my condolences on to their mommies in due course."

"God you're blitzed." She could tell because Gerald could get rather satirical, but he never attempted to speak half-ass ghetto or make his invective that directly personal as to challenge their families as well as the foe.

"Getting the ghosts drunk with me," Gerald replies straight-faced. "It is amusing, how ghosts end up piled in little heaps when drunk, kinda groaning like they have constipation, kinda moaning like they've been shot once or twice in a fleshy spot. Most of them are rather bitchy even when wasted, some are kinda cool about it. If you ever get cleared for it, I'll tell you about a few of the more amusing ones."

"I'm not sure if I want to hear your spook stories," Kika groans.

"A drink, ace pilot?" Gerald offers her a shot of sake, his drink of choice for the day.

"No, and I think you need to down a cleanup capsule. We've got work coming in from starboard, they'll be announced as a threat in about twenty."

"Unh, can't we tell the pissants to back off? I'm working on a perfectly good buzz here," Gerald grumps.

"Murphy's Law, old man. The enemy will attack on two occasions: when they are ready, when you are not."

"I am definitely not ready, therefore they will attack," Gerald declares sourly. "Get me three capsules and mix them in with orange juice."

"You gotta be shitting me!" Kika half-shouts. "You're going to speed yourself three clean-up capsules? Are you fucking nuts?"

"I avoid fucking nuts or bum-holes whenever possible. The 'one capsule, sealed' stipulation on the packaging is intimidation tactics by the anti-nano tin-foil-hat crowd. I've done five speed-fed through me to clean up a damned-awful BAC that should have killed me, and suffered no ill effect. Now, if you want to do the response to these pukes, best ye be on your way to grab those, I handed mine to a poor Marine a few minutes ago."

"Right," Kika grouses as she heads back downstairs to the bar, collects the cleanups and a tall glass of orange juice, and back upstairs. At the table, she broke the capsules apart and squeezed the almost-gelatinous nanomachines into the glass, where on contact with the orange juice they dissolved into the liquid. "Damn, you were right," she says in a shock as she starts breaking open the other capsules and dumping them in. After she was done, it looked like the orange juice had paled a shade or two, but was still drinkable. "Have at it," she says as she slides the glass over to him.

"Here's to victory," he salutes her with a shotglass of sake, then slams it, then begins chugging the orange juice. Immediately he went bright-eyed, then banged his head off the table a couple times. "Damn these things work fast! From helluva buzz to rip-roaring migraine in very short order! Yeowza!"

"Dude, you sure you're going to be all right doing that?" Kika asks.

"Yeah, yeah, I've done it before many times," Gerald replies casually. "Oh, Gods, this hurts, this hurts like a sum-bitch!" Even still, Kika could tell it was working—and real fast. Gerald had gone from somewhat slurred speech to completely on the level and he was starting to straighten up and breathe easy after three minutes. "The things I do for this fucked-up job," he grumps after a few moments more of resting. "All right, now we head for the bridge."

The Club 300 was a good ten minute walk from the bridge itself, since the club catered to the enlisted personnel on the ship it was nowhere near the bridge and its larger, fancier cousin in the Sniper Bar and Grill. As soon as he walked in: "Conn, Sensors, I show activity to starboard consistent with a fleet headed to the battle site. Possible range differential, enemy may know we're burning hard for the battle ourselves."

"Chief of the Boat, find Century Commander Lightbringer, and kick over whatever rock he's hiding under," Star Admiral Centara orders.

"The rock kicked me over, Star Admiral, so I decided to get back to work," Gerald replies before the Chief even knew he was there.

"Erm, I am not going to ask, I don't think I want to know," Wayne replies.

"Conn, sensors, activity and emissions consistent with Earth Alliance fleet maneuvering, bearing change shows they are angling for us now and not the battle zone."

"Roger that," Wayne replies. "All right, Gerald, I want some ideas."

"I will see to it. Four of us can take these things down with little issue. Use the rest of the fleet to flatten the Earth Alliance before civilians get caught under a nuclear-slaved trigger. We can catch up to the fleet easily enough after the shooting is done."

"Not betting on that?" Wayne asks with a raised eyebrow.

"Not at all," Gerald replies. "They'll put up a good fight any way, it is just a matter of their definition of 'good' versus our definition of 'good'."

"Ah," Wayne mumbles. "Do it. Make sure you keep copious video records of the battle, no sense in being accused by the EA of foul play."

"Will do." After coming to attention, Gerald was out the door and headed for the hangar that his unit was parked in.

"So, how are we doing this, Gerald?" Kika asks.

"Oh, I have a plan, a hellish plan. Call it a field test of a new doctrine of mine, and for the fleet..." Gerald went on to explain his plan, which relied heavily on traditional strengths and disciplines of the Magi, as well as a new implementation thereof.

-x-

"If we can intercept them, we'd be doing the Earth Sphere a favor, erasing their kind from it. Seriously, trying to flee to Mars or beyond..." Chairman Riseman mutters.

Captain Harald Makos snorted quite loudly at the comment from the chairman. He was Blue Cosmos by default, and really did not support their ethos any more than it took to get promotions. If he could get away with being a soldier of a neutral faction, he would be there, but with this war there was no such thing as 'neutral' anymore. The Earth Alliance had hooked or crooked everyone into a war against ZAFT, for no reason other than political expediency and their 'puppeteer' controller's wishes. Practically everyone knew Blue Cosmos was calling the shots now.

"Conn, sensors, four objects detected closing from port, Captain. Estimated time to intercept is two minutes."

"Mobile suits, token defenses or something," Riseman says.

"Unchecked, they are still a threat," Makos replies. "CIC, prepare to launch the 105 Daggers. Intercept at range." If the Captain could sound any more bored, how was lost on his crew.

"Conn, radio, we have something on our radio frequencies. Listen to this;" the ensign on the radio flips it onto the main speakers on the bridge.

"What the hell?" Captain Makos asks nobody in particular, suddenly keenly alerted to the fact that something was severely wrong. Nobody had thus far hacked the Earth Alliance radios, though the lilting, slow strains of a guitar was evidence enough someone had succeeded.

"Conn, sensors, we're being tracked!" Something about the electric guitar in the song made him think that the music was about to shift pace; after a few moments, it became obvious the music of choice was heavy metal with the tripling of pace and distinct shift in the guitar. "They fired! Missiles inbound!"

"They launched right at the opening crescendo?" Riseman asks; nobody paid attention to his bureaucratic bleating at the time.

"Intercept them!"

"They're not aiming for us!" The target of the missiles was the periphery of the fleet, clearly intending to cause damage to or cripple the smaller Drake-class ships. They even succeeded, a missile blew the conning tower clean off one of the escorts, leaving it dead in the water for all intents and purposes.

"What—not even a word of defiance!" Riseman half-shouts. "How dishonorable!"

"Enemy units unknown type, estimate ten times larger than a Mobile Suit or more!" the sensors officer shouts.

The haunting strains of the song continued, blaring over all of the Earth Alliance frequency band, even defeating standard Earth Alliance encryption, and at such power there was no way to communicate by overpowering their music. Then the lyrics began in earnest: " 'A force of light; an angel, sent through time to destroy; Avenging the dark ones, descending angelic force,' " to the sight of anti-warship beam cannons being fired from each of the four units as they broke apart, headed in four different directions.

"Sir! Two Nelson-class ships just took severe damage!"

"They're operating independently; we can hammer on them one at a time until we destroy them!" Riseman declares proudly, incorrectly assuming that mass-formation battles were how wars were won in space.

"Only in your dreams, Chairman," Makos replies. "Guns on the large one, missiles on the nearest small one. Fire at will!"

One of the small ones, this one painted with a large '3' with angelic wings around the number, fired a pair of canisters that broke into large missiles; each missile slammed into the ventral surface of a Drake and caused an impressive amount of damage for something so small, easily rivaling the torpedoes on a Drake in terms of net damage to the ship per strike.

Of the return fire, the only notable attack at actually struck one of them was the machine cannon on a Drake, and that not enough to actually damage it. One of the Gottfried cannons from the Thrones did strike the large one, but failed to penetrate an anti-beam-weapon barrier around it. "No way! That thing just—it just—"

"What the good God is going on? What are these things? Who are these maniacs?" Riseman asks, for the first time actually knowing what it felt like to fear for his life.

"Jesus, sir! That thing just wiped the floor with a half-dozen Strike Daggers in one stroke!" the Ship's 2-I-C declares.

"No shit!" Captain Makos replies angrily. "Order the fleet to fire only on the nearest of the four to them, using their whole arsenal. Continue moving forward, maybe we can outdistance them."

"What the hell?" one of the sensors officers asks. "What is that?" From the small unit with the markup of a '1' in angel wings, a rocket-propelled chain streaked out, wound its way around two Nelson-class ships, in the process passing over the fan-tail of the Thrones, and detonated. The damage to the ship was immediate and extensive, as holes as big as a man and deeper than three would be tall had been driven into the ship by whatever had just happened. The damage was much more severe to the ships it encircled, as the nearer of the two began venting fuel from one of the penetrations that was igniting and driving the ship toward earth, the other had taken several hits in the conning tower that killed off that ship as well.

"Sir! Engine damage, thrust down forty percent minimum, maybe more! Attitude control and maneuvering thrusters from the Valiants back have been disabled!"

"Fire Helldarts! Load all tubes with Wombats, fire when target is in range and profile! Valiants, single out enemy two, Gottfrieds, on enemy one in thirty seconds!"

"Sir!" his weapons officer shouts. A quick flurry of key strokes changed the targeting profiles of every weapon on the ship except the Igelstellungs, which went into overdrive as the '2' unit loosed three canisters that fired off literally hundreds of missiles between the three canisters. Despite the efforts of the CIWS, the missiles themselves still ended up hitting the ship in the side, also striking several other ships and, more importantly, caused extreme casualties in the Strike Daggers of the fleet.

"Where's our 105 Daggers?" Riseman asks a moment before the ship shudders to the sound and impact of the catapults deploying the first pair of the said machines.

The next moments themselves were horrific. The 105 Dagger launched from the port side was eliminated barely two lengths outside the catapult, a pair of small violet beams struck the right shoulder and blew down through the waist, disabling the suit and likely killing the pilot. The right unit was killed less than three seconds later as one of the 'smaller' armors flew vertically down through the fleet bubble, passing within a length of six ships at very high speed, with a very large beam saber set at an angle to saber the stray suit. There was little left of the 105 Dagger, just part of one of the arms; the saber itself was large enough to eradicate the rest.

"This...this is impossible!" Chairman Riseman shouts after witnessing the outright destruction of a Nelson-class ship by way of six precision beam cannon strikes from the 'larger' armor followed by missiles and large-caliber cannon rounds striking it in the prior hit locations. Internal failure took thirty seconds, but the ship was assuredly dead with several chinks in the armor giving out explosively from the contents of the inside cooking off. "Can't you do a damned thing to stop them, Captain?"

"Did Commander Badgiruel befall this unit? Sensors, do we have a visual on that high-speed colony?"

"Sir, one moment," he replies. "Sir...that's no colony, it's a Warship, it's gotta be a Warship of some damn kind," the Sensors officer replies in clear panic.

The thought of the large ship was interrupted by the horrid sight of one of the smaller units chopping a Drake-class Warship into three uneven parts with its beam sabers, moments before it fired another explosive chain mine around a Drake and a Nelson, detonating moments thereafter. The Drake involved was toast, its fuel bunker detonating in a hellish radial blast that cleaved the ship in half. The Nelson survived physically intact but nonetheless crippled and half disarmed.

"That's not a Warship, it's a god-damned nightmare," Harald Makos replies, the computer-enhanced image of the ship in the distance clear for them to see...and they would never get to it, given how much damage the whole fleet was taking. "Comms, issue an immediate declaration of surrender and order all ships and Mobile Suits to cease fire immediately. Weps, launch a single white flare every five seconds until acknowledged."

The ultimate irony of the whole battle was the sound of the lyrics of their battle song that was jamming the radio frequencies used by the Earth Alliance. 'To be the thorn in the devils back; To make him weak, the final fight' struck Captain Makos as prophetic and ironic all at once. They had indeed become the thorn in the Devil's back by taking down over half of an Earth Alliance fleet and denying the whole to the Operation Elvis fleets. The thought of the chorus lyrics 'Descending from Heaven, the Angel sworn to bring them down' only made things clearer: whoever they were, they had clearly intended on crippling or destroying them.

The shooting died out of its own accord fast enough; the four enemy machines ceased fire immediately on seeing the first white flare, the fleet ceased fire after the weps officer fired a cease-fire flare pattern (the latter being a series of three red flares). To their knowledge, the fleet had not significantly damaged any one of the armors. The music faded out before the final chorus could complete. Less than four minutes of battle, and an entire Earth Alliance fleet had been destroyed or demoralized to ineffectiveness.

"Attention Earth Alliance fleet, this is Gerald Lightbringer, commander of the rapid-response unit Angel Team. We acknowledge your surrender in good faith. You put up a good fight for a scratch-up unit with less than effective Warships, excepting the Archangel-class ship in your fleet. For this, you should be commended."

"Angel Team, this is Captain Harald Makos of the Archangel-class Warship Thrones, thank you for the backhand compliment. Your own force deserves the credit of the battle, commander, I have never seen four units of anything so easily disable or destroy Earth Alliance Warships. If I may ask, what unit are you with?"

"Task Force Jokers Wild, an independent unit that serves only the purpose of defending the civilians who would be visited by nuclear death. And we cannot allow a reinforcement fleet to potentially flank our transit path, thus this battle." The implication was clear: they could have disregarded and completely ignored the fleet if it had not been so fast to pursue.

"Understood," Captain Makos replies. "I will surrender myself to you unconditionally. I do not care a bit what you do to me, on the provision that you spare my crew and subordinate ships."

"There will be no executions, Captain, provided you do not stray out of line henceforth. Your fleet will immediately set course for L4 and will be escorted by Angel 2 and Angel 3 to that destination. You will be met by Marines at that location, and will be dealt with at that time. Follow those instructions, and no further harm will come to you, your ships or your crews; disobey those rules, and you will quickly learn why I try to avoid turning Angel 2 and Angel 3 loose on any given formation at the same time. Is this understood?"

"Crystal clear, Commander."

"Mina, Wendy, escort to holding at our camping grounds; once you arrive, have the Marines secure the crews and await further orders. With any luck, by the time you get there, the shooting should be over without more civilian casualties."

"Aff, sir," one of the two replies.

"Aff, Gerald, it shall be done," the other replies; the voices sounded incredibly similar to each other.

"Turned over to you, two and three. Angel One, return to Joker's Hand for refit and refuel."

"Aff, sir, moving now."

"We will speak again in due time, Captain. Stay out of trouble until then," Gerald closes before the largest of the armors turns and leaves the combat area.

-x-x-x-

(26 September CE 71, 2110 hours UTC)

"Star Admiral, Conn, we are now neutralized inertia, ready to cut into tactical engine settings and close up to the melee."

"Time to arrival?" Wayne asks the radio lapel mike he now wore almost permanently.

"Three hours at four minute burn. Looks like the Earth Alliance will beat us to the operations zone by two hours."

"Three hours silent run," Wayne grumps. He wanted to just close on them at full burn, but in so doing he ran the risk of blowing the engines on the Mjolnr and assuredly would overshoot the target zone. "Okay, here's the operational plan," he begins but is cut off by Cagalli:

"Three hours? That's how close we are?" she asks, almost shocked.

In point of fact: "Attention all hands, this is Commander Ward. We expect we will meet battle in three hours. All personnel are to be readied for battle, defensive and offensive, in 60 minutes. At that time we will go to condition 2, and will upgrade to condition 1 in 120 minutes. That is all."

Wayne clears his throat. "The formation is going to sweep through here," and Wayne indicates the sparsely-defended gap between the rearguard ships and the Jachin Due fortress itself. "The Mjolnr will plow through and keep going, coming back on the enemy far flank and trapping them between the two halves of our forces. Mjolnr will be supported by the Aerofighters. The six escort monitors will hit here, on the near-side of the ZAFT formation, giving the mobile suits and mobile armors the best possible anti-shipping arsenal. The Three ships will strike here, the left-rear flank of the Earth Alliance forces, and for that I will assign you Diamond Element, a unit of hard-hitting Mobile Armors, give you better odds against the large amount of Earth Alliance ships in your package."

"Your fighters, are they really going to be enough to defend the Mjolnr? It is a very big target," Murrue asks fairly.

"Oh yes, the amount of fighters still in service in the fleet is more than enough to go end-to-end on every military installation in North America and have striking power to spare. The Mjolnr will live to fight another day. It is the next battle or two that I concern over, unless we can force the issue in neutral terms."

"Oh," Murrue replies in kind. "Okay, assuming that we can knock out their fleets, then what? ZAFT's defensive position is still too hard to crack ourselves..." Murrue's sentence trails off when she sees the look from the largest person in the room, and possibly the largest person she had ever seen. That he was a Marine was a no-brainer.

"The whole purpose of the Mjolnr getting this close to Jachin Due is to punch a large hole in the entry / exit locks so we can enter and clear. A Nu Gundam will sweep the facility of Mobile Suits and blow us enough entries to get inside, then the Marines take the place meter by meter by meter until there is no resistance or the enemy has surrendered. Or both." Carlos Michaels was the epitome of the Marines on the Mjolnr: deadly serious, no bullshit, a master of his trade and an aggressive one at that. Murrue did not like the rumors she kept hearing of this being an 'assault Marine' formation, though the official rolls did not list it as such. She really didn't like the Mjolnr or its bloody purpose at all, but better the devil without a cause than the demonspawn with their own 'idea' of 'righteousness' that would kill everyone in the Earth Sphere for no apparent gain. Better the devils without a cause, she repeats mentally, not realizing that Calamira was looking at her for a reason.

"Conn, Sensors, massive phase-shift energy anomaly detected from area nearby Jachin Due!" the radar room reports over the radios, which Wayne's radio picked up.

"Oh my Gods," Calamira half-shouts. Without any form of pretense, she ripped the lapel microphone from Wayne's shirt and activated it. "Helm, hard left, full combat burn for two minutes, aim towards Saturn and put your foot down!" Before anything was said, the ship began shifting as Willy did exactly as ordered.

"Conn, Sensors! Massive nuclear anomaly detected, far side of Jachin Due! Estimate yield 300 megatons!"

"Conn, Observations, there's a bigass beam of something emanating from the large device on the far side of Jachin Due! Estimate impacting now on the Earth Alliance fleet, closest point of approach 7-5-0-thousand kilometers to starboard!"

"Thanks, Cal, even if we weren't all that close to it," Wayne says. "Helm, Conn, return to base course and reduce to equivalent of four minutes cruising burn. Good reactions, Chief Warrant," he concludes so as to not make it look like Calamira had overstepped her bounds. "You too, Calamira," Wayne adds after killing his radio transmit.

"Conn, Helm, aye," Willy replies immediately. The ship stops accelerating, begins decelerating, and shifted back towards its original heading within thirty seconds, though completely correcting would take as much as three minutes.

"Talk to me, Ai," Wayne orders.

"Analyzing now, thirty seconds," even while said, a holographic projection of the device in question came up over the table that they were plotting the battle on, and even still the device was plotted on the map itself. A separate wall projection showed the beam in transit, and how it chopped through a significant portion of the Earth Alliance fleet, along with analysis of what the beam appeared to kill frame-by-frame.

"Preemptive strike, hoping they would scratch the nuclear assets of the Earth Alliance fleet before they got close enough," Star Commodore Jin Kojima comments as one possible to why ZAFT fired so soon.

"Best guess, sir, this is a focused gamma-ray laser system that turns the uncontrolled chaos of a nuclear weapon into a very large laser. Very large and very irresistible laser," the AI entity tells them after the display concludes.

"An elegant solution to nuclear warfare. ZAFT sure does love their one-upmanship," Gerald grumps sourly. Gerald did not realize that in so saying he had half-way pissed off Lacus, who was not in a good mood regardless since her favorite Haro had gone missing the day prior. Gerald has a sneaking suspicion what happened to said Haro, but was not going to dig on the issue since he really didn't care what happened to it one way or the other.

"This weapon has increased tactical flexibility owing to the fact that it is focused, not a radial nuclear blast like normal," the AI declares in analysis. "It does appear to have one major problem, however," the holosim of the object highlights the small object in front of the barrel of the device. "This mirror cannot be made to withstand repeated blasts, apparently, so it is designed replaceable. My best estimate on turnaround time would be two hours given our technology and training, assuming ZAFT elite troops handling the weapon I estimate three hours minimum, more likely four."

"Mirror is too hot to touch, even with hardened machine claws," Galaxy Commander Rico says almost nonchalantly. "There's our Achilles' heel, boss man, deny them the mirrors and the weapon is not a weapon, it's decoration."

"Actually, I think otherwise," Gerald replies. "Ai, what's the numbers on an unfocused shotgun-style blast? Worst-case it, assuming ZAFT gets so freaking desperate they're willing to kill off their own fleet as well as the EA and us."

"From dead stop, we can probably get the ships out of the way of an unfocused blast, or move far enough away that the weapon won't cause enough damage unfocused to completely kill the ship. The smaller Escort Monitors are more than capable enough to escape the blast, as well as any MS or MA when forewarned. They would do a good job killing their own fleet and the EA, but that is it. Regardless, this gradient shows damage potential, with a damage dropoff due to loss of focus that makes it effectively a non-weapon outside of 150 hexes, and a path width at that range of 320 hexes."

The gradient shown told enough of a tale. An unfocused blast would kill the entire ZAFT and Earth Alliance fleets in one omnicidal stroke, and caught flatfooted would also kill off anything in the Magi fleet under 3,500,000 tons at the expected combat ranges (essentially, everything except the Mjolnr itself). The gradient had been superimposed over their battle plans, which also gave credence to Andrew Waltfeld's comment: "We have to do this fast before the Chairman gets any crazier," he says.

"We have overlooked one thing," Gerald begins. "A weapon like this is great for standoff fire. Ai, numbers on using against Earth Alliance lunar bases, Artemis, and possibly Terra, please." One thing that had captivated the whole of the Three Ships above and beyond the existence of real (and real powerful) AI entities was how Magi always treated them like real people, even if as subordinates.

"This platform can range to Ptolemaeus, but not the other Lunar bases known to us or ZAFT. The weapon has a clear line of sight to Artemis, but at the expected range and total surface area of Artemis versus beam spread, less than 30 percent of the weapon total energy output would reach the Eurasian military station. It is theoretically possible that Artemis may survive such an attack, given its powerful defensive measures. When used against Terra, however, this weapon is literally 'the gun pointed at the head of the world'."

"That sounds pleasant," Captain Ramius says coldly.

The AI continues her briefing: "As a strategic bargaining chip, this weapon is terrifying in potential. In terms of direct striking power, the weapon is overkill if shot at the surface of the planet, literally a hundred times more powerful than what would be needed to kill off anything on the surface that was targeted, given the raw damage potential would not spread more than four times the width of the beam impact cross-section, best case 500 kilometers radius from center of targeted zone. The major problems come in the form of immense amounts of fallout generated by the weapon striking the planet's surface, with possible contamination of a 7500 kilometer radius downwind pattern and at least 2500 kilometers upwind, with rapidly-lethal does at half those ranges."

"What else?" Gerald asks, sensing the AI was holding something back.

"Repeated blasts targeted on the same area have the potential to breach the crust. In as short a time span as 96 hours, assuming maximum fire rate and the political will to do it."

"Oh shit," Galaxy Commander Rico says. "Talk about making the cradle of humanity completely uninhabitable, they do that and it will kill everyone else on planet not already dead from fallout or the direct blasts."

"No shit, Galaxy Commander," Gerald replies sharply.

"All right, I want solutions to completely strip this damnable device out of play."

Strangely, the room was silent for fifteen seconds, as the various officers in the room looked between each other for something resembling support. "Erm, I have an idea, but I cannot discuss it openly."

"Huh?" Wayne asks.

"Orders from the DCT, boss-man. You, me, Calamira only."

"Right," Wayne replies. The Division Commander Techstrikers was the guy who signed the Star Admiral's paychecks, and when necessary, death warrants. An old hand, and a ruthless Durgan soldier as was the Emperor in millennia past, he was on everyone's 'do not fuck with' list, therefore if he said 'certain people only' he meant it. "All right, everyone but the aforementioned, please take fifteen. I'll call ahead and have the Sniper Bar and Grill forewarned you are coming, and to charge it back to my account." Wayne figured if he had to tell them off, he would do so in a generally polite fashion. Free food and coffee helped there. The AI handled that part immediately for Wayne, and informed him it was done.

It was very reluctant on everyone's part, but in less than thirty seconds the three remaining in the room were it, not including the AI entity that naturally heard everything on the ship except telepathic conversations.

"Talk to me, Gerald. What's the big hullabaloo about?"

"There is a NEST team on the ship."

"What the fuck?" Wayne asks immediately and sharply. "Since when have I had a Nuclear Elite Strike Team on this ship? On whose authority? And why wasn't I informed?"

"Hey, chief, not my call. I was ordered by Division Commander Caecilius to keep it quiet unless the team was needed. They're Techstrikers, not full Commandos, so technically they fall under your authority. They've been here one tour longer than I have, and two tours less than Calamira."

"Okay, I'll leave aside the concealing of such information at this time, since it was above you. I take it they are all certified for full deploy?" Wayne asks, meaning that they had the necessary rights and responsibilities to deploy their nuclear payloads.

"Aff," Gerald replies immediately. "Look, I don't like this thought any more than you do, but a 500-megaton antimatter warhead should turn ZAFT's big nuclear squeak-toy into scrap, what parts of it actually survive such a blast. Without their nuclear option and their fleets brought to heel, ZAFT will have little choice but to belly up to the negotiating table, along with the Earth Alliance and the neutral parties. I don't like the thought of using an antimatter bomb to end the war, but we can end it right here and right now if we do this right."

"I concur," Calamira adds. "If you take down all the military options available to them, and present serious threat of eradicating their military infrastructure, they will take clear notice and start playing nice. The alternative for them, we annihilate their military forces, will eradicate their ability to pacify their respective populations, and neither side will do something that stupid."

"Makes sense," Wayne replies. He knew the two sides were a step or two past clinically insane if they thought nuking each other was the only way out, but they still had to retain a small semblance of logic about the matter. If they were undercut by civilian coup aimed at the government, there would be no nuking the other side and there would be no surviving the lynch mobs, a lose-lose scenario. "Ai, your opinion?"

"Concur one hundred percent, Star Admiral. This is the best way out for everyone, when combined with our plan to take their forces down conventionally."

"Very well, summon the NEST team here. We will go over operational concepts and plan an attack. We will keep the Mjolnr's nuclear capability secret for now."

Gerald picked up a growler phone. "The following personnel are to report to the bridge briefing room immediately: Star Colonel Tellos, Star Colonel Gars, Star Colonel Tim Meridias, Star Captain Elena Waterly, Star Captain Nikolai."

"Existence forgive us all," Calamira says reverently. "To end a nuclear war before it gets real messy, we must participate in said war."

"Seyla," Wayne and Gerald reply immediately to Calamira's proclamation.

"Star Admiral, estimate readiness for ZAFT superweapon at five hours, given what is going on in the area of the weapon. We have a two-hour window to bring them down," the AI unit makes note of.

-x-x-x-

(27 September CE 71, 0025 hours UTC)

"I vote we use GENESIS on their moon base, just eradicate it completely," one of Yzak's subordinates declares coldly. "All they are is scum of the Earth, we're better than them and they know it!"

"Yeah!" another of the greenhorns under his command replies.

"Sir? Something wrong?" Shiho asks in the silence. Yzak usually ripped the recruits up one side and down the other for being overtly racist. Yzak himself was a bit of a superiority freak, but he was far smarter than to allow his hatred to cloud his judgment, especially after seeing what one ship and one Mobile Armor had done to three of the best ZAFT Warships and their mobile forces. There were real demons out there, somewhere, and the unit number on the mobile armor, a zero enshrouded by very ornate angel wings, was symbolic of something very nasty, he just knew it.

The hell of it was, his subordinates were right. The Earth Alliance really had become scum of the Earth since the nuclear attack on Boaz. It looked like there was no Earth Alliance any more except in name; all the shots were being called by the terrorists, Blue Cosmos and the like. It was almost disgusting, but far from unexpected. There just was no stopping these terrorists, and GENESIS may be the only solution, as deplorable as it seemed to him. "No, no! I can't think that, damnit!" Yzak rebukes himself loudly. "We are better than they are, we will do better than they have done to us, and we will still win, clear?"

"Understood, sir!" the subordinate that had just made the suggestion replies.

"Erm, Commander Yzak, I have a question," Joule Nine asks in the silence after he gave them the obligatory chewing. The formation was standing by for orders to move in and engage, as a reserve force as well as a final guard to prevent a nuclear attack against the PLANTs. It reduced coverage at the front, but as the chairman had said, if they struck the PLANTs it was all over.

"Ask," Yzak orders curtly. He expected questions, because most of his team had less than four battles to their name they needed to learn and learn fast, and Yzak was a veteran of chasing the damned Legged Ship around Earth, making him a prime instructor.

"Why does it feel like something big and scary is heading right for us?"

"Huh?" If there was one lesson that Yzak had picked up about his subordinates, one of them could 'understand', 'sense', 'feel' his way through problems almost as fast as Yzak could. And he could dodge or deflect shots taken at his sides almost instinctively, never mind facing off against foes directly in front of him.

"I feel it as well," the silent one of Yzak's team says, revealing she had the same talent (hopefully). "Massive presence, thousands of people, and they ain't happy. Somewhere over..." her GuAIZ points towards L4. Coming from that area was a group of ships that somehow, nobody had noticed prior, until the two of them had mentioned it.

"Oh, holy shit," Yzak moans immediately after seeing the dreaded white and very ghastly Mobile Armor, as well as the Warship that had sunk his prior assigned ship Vesalius. "Command, Joule Team, Joule One reporting I have contact with the forces encountered outside Mendel, and there is a helluva lot more of them than we initially guessed."

"Joule One, Chairman Zala, I am listening," Patrick Zala replies immediately.

"Chairman, I show two of the Flame Eater-class ships, four ships very similar to the Flame Eaters, the Archangel, the Eternal, and an Orb Izumo-class ship, arrayed in an oblate hexagonal forward guard formation with something else behind it. I'm maneuvering now to get a better look at the flanks of the formation."

"The renegade ships from Orb," Zala replies. "Get me a total count on their mobile forces, we'll plan on intercepting them in close. And try to get an estimate on that last unit behind the forward screen."

"Command, Joule Six reporting twenty large Mobile Armors are visible at this time, interspersed with the Warships forward and behind them," Shiho says. "Commander Joule is moving laterally to get a depth check and investigate the last ship."

Yzak had moved laterally, technically toward the Earth Alliance lines but still well away from them, all the time keeping an eye on the approaching fleet. It was the work of a minute before he could see a good, clear angle to the ship that was trailing behind. "Oh, good God, I was right. I hate it when I am right. I hate it."

"Sir?" Shiho asks.

"It's big. Very big. Bigger than Jachin Due, definitely bigger than GENESIS." Barely a pause as he changed radio bands. "Command, that last ship is a massive Warship armed to the teeth and apparently set up to be the carrier for the smaller ships as well as a huge gun platform of its own right. Warning, fleet is on a head-long charge for our lines at this time, danger close, estimate four minutes to contact."

"Roger that, Joule One, move to and intercept, we are redirecting other forces to join you at this time. Do not allow them to interpose their ships between Jachin Due and the fleet."

"Honestly, I don't think there is much we can do to stop that," Yzak grumbles. "Joule Team, form up and prepare to intercept unidentified fleet. Shiho, you have second squadron. Try and avoid getting massacred, these guys are at least as good as we are, and their mobile units aren't the pussy weapons the Earth Alliance uses."

"Roger that, Commander," Shiho says. "Sir, our ships are turning towards to engage."

"I get the feeling this is not going to end well," Joule Fifteen (the silent one) says warily.

"Joule Team, move out—" Yzak's last was cut off by the sound of...an electric guitar? "What the hell is this? Can anyone hear me?" he asks on several different frequencies that ZAFT used.

Yzak began to have an even worse sinking feeling than prior. Fighting these crazy mothers with the badass ships was one thing, doing it completely unable to coordinate was guaranteed suicide.

"Sir!" Shiho's CGUE DEEP Arms had drifted extremely close. "Can you hear me?"

"I can now. Give me a moment!" Yzak broke out the keyboard for his machine and tapped out a short-burst tactical text message to the rest of his team requesting they reply immediately. He received replies within ten seconds from each. He then text-messaged that they coordinate with the messages, and to move out. As the nature of the song kicked in, the sound of the really heavy metal he almost expected, the ZAFT warships opened fire on the approaching fleet; one of the beams even struck the approaching ships on the nose, causing no notable damage to it and certainly not sinking it.

"For what we are about to receive..." Shiho mutters as the enemy ships return fire with a totally different collection of weapon types, of beam, ballistic and even missile weapons, all to the sound of metal lyrics that ran chills up and down Yzak's spine, especially when he remembered someone in that fleet had a reverence for rather violent angels.

" 'A force of light, an angel,' my ass," Yzak mutters over the continuing song while typing out a tactical message to his team. He did have to admit it was a catchy song, though, and not all that discordant with the battle.

-x-

"In position," the Flight Controller declares.

"Enemy laser designators detected by all six Monitors, sir," the Sensors controller declares. "Power spikes, they're firing!"

The beam cannons fired at the fleet mostly missed, belying ZAFT's uneven gunnery skills. One shot hit, however: "Montgomery took a hit, port forward. Minor damage, no critical. Continuing mission."

"All ships return fire, Flight control launch remaining Mobile Armors," Wayne orders as the song starts into the first verses. The ship shuddered slightly as the first of the Mobile Armors were deployed to the truly haunting lyrics of the first band Wayne had ever considered a real match for Nightwish. " 'Descending angelic force' we may be," Wayne mutters to himself, repeating the lyrics of the last verse aired as the Dendrobium units surge forward, the first line of defense in any Magi fleet action. "89 Mobile Armors...out of 200," Wayne spat his contempt for the Mobile Dolls that had cursed him to this location and battle.

"All elements, all Mobile Armor elements launch immediately. Diamond Element to assist the Three Ships in taking down the Earth Alliance, all other elements are to attack ZAFT forces. Acknowledge my last," the Flight Boss orders.

"Spade acknowledges."

"Diamond copies."

"Club is in."

"Hearts hears that."

"Red Element copies your last."

"Black Element is in."

"Gambler is ready."

"Dice is rollin' out now."

Wayne could see the hesitation in the enemy ranks on both sides as the remaining Mobile Armors launched from the Mjolnr. Wayne was deliberately holding two classes of assets back (three, if a commander differentiated between Gundams and Mobile Suits), giving his ship the potential for excellent mobile reinforcement if things got too hot out and about when he pulled the stunts he was about to pull. After starting with potentially two full (small) galaxies of fighters, he now had barely one and a few leftovers, but the striking power of one galaxy of Fighters was still insanely high, and, when needed, he would deliver that message to them.

"Sir, enemy forces are picking up fire volume," Sensors reports.

"Break it up, execute go-code Alpha," Wayne orders. A 'Go-Code' was a command to begin a certain plan or phase of a plan, allowing for flexibility on the part of the operation pace and as necessary backup plans. Wayne had six Go-Codes established for this operation, the sixth being a fallback plan in case something went horridly wrong. There would be little chance of that, but preparedness had saved many a Magi fleet from annihilation in the end and Wayne did not intend that to change.

"All forces, go-code Alpha, execute, execute, execute."

Things began moving with a heightened pace as the lyrics 'The Hunter, the thunder, the wrath of Heaven's coming down' echoed through the first chorus. Already the disorganization of losing radio communications was showing in the whole enemy action, as some of the forces had disengaged and pulled back from each other, and others were fighting wildly, blindly, missing opportunities to exploit mistakes in the enemy forces. The confusion only became worse as the Magi formation broke up, the Monitors headed pretty much straight in for the ZAFT lines with the bulk of the Mobile Armors, the Three Ships and a separate unit of Mobile Armors headed into the Earth Alliance forces.

"Our turn, Commander Ward," Wayne orders.

"Helm, Conn, break left and apply reverse thrusters. Take us down causeway Bravo, don't scrape the ship's side on Jachin Due, clear?" Commander Ward relays to Willy after reviewing the potential movement plans in the holoprojector. "Sensors, Conn, are we losing sensor effectiveness?"

"Some, we've still got enough power to burn through the N-Jammers," the Sensors Controller orders.

"Conn, Engineering, we're losing engine power at the rate of a half-percent per hex approach to the battle," the Captain of Engineering says unbidden.

"Freaking great. Estimate max power loss and compensate for it," Commander Ward replies crassly.

"Sir, dual-stage fusion engines, we could lose half our engine power and still have more power than we did prior to the upgrade," the Captain of Engineering replies.

"Conn, Helm, I am in causeway bravo, estimate one minute to point Alpha," Willy says.

"Helm, Conn, aye," Commander Ward replies. "Weapons, Conn, do you have solutions?"

"Aff, Commander, solutions up and down the sides with capital weapons at long range. Permission to deploy?"

Commander ward looks to the Star Admiral, who in turn nods. "Fire at will," he orders after a moment.

Whereas the catapults for the Mobile Armors had caused the ship to shudder somewhat, the bark of tens of naval particle cannons and launch of scores of missiles from the ship caused just as violent a shaking across the ship. The Mjolnr did have side-mounted autocannons, but said guns were of a shorter accurate range bracket than the lasers and missiles and did not yet fire. The entire front weapons arc itself was silent, as driving between the rear of the ZAFT fleet and the front of Jachin Due did not thus far present any targets, likewise for the rear arc and most of the left side.

Some of the missiles were Teleoperated missiles, meaning the gunners for those weapons were to play a hellish game of 'demolition derby' with the missiles by crashing them into the enemy ships. Bets were always on between missile batteries as to who could drive a missile into the bridge of an enemy Warship, if it had an exposed bridge. Even the standard-class launchers, particularly the multi-purpose AR-10 launchers, were themselves in on the action, their self-guiding missiles targeted on the individual Mobile Suits to bring down the possible major threat to the Mobile Armors.

Star Admiral Centara watched the sensor plots as the first waves of missiles went outbound, some aimed at Mobile Suits, others aimed at the ships. The returns became clouded as the missiles detonated, in many cases throwing chunks of the targets in multiple directions that began generating false returns for the sensor teams to sort through. The damage to the ships would be no worse, most likely less than the damage from the Naval Particle Cannons and Naval Lasers the ship used in profusion, but the sight of the massive capital-grade missiles bearing down on the ships and Mobile Suits itself would be a pure morale crusher.

Forward of the ship, an intrepid Laurasia-class had decided it wanted to try and stop the far larger Phalanx-class charging it down, leading to the response from the Mjolnr of the six heavy Naval PPCs and four heavy Naval Gauss Rifles, as batteries of lasers aimed in different directions to fire on either the Jachin Due fortress itself or other ships not directly challenging the Mjolnr. Approaching formations of Mobile Suits triggered the point-defense grid on the Mjolnr, the longest-range weapons being the eponymous ER Large Laser installed expressly as an anti-fighter and anti-MS armament.

As the distance closed between the Mjolnr and the mobile forces, more of the dreaded anti-fighter armaments came into play, primarily the vast arrays of Large Pulse Lasers, four lasers to a bay, over a dozen bays total. Gauss Rifles and Streak Long Range Missiles (2) also struck out to long range, with Medium Pulse Lasers and 105mm Rotary Autocannons for close-in defense. The arsenal for anti-fighter defense itself was unlike anything else in the present earth sphere, in the employ of any force, yet surely they knew of Magi anti-fighter capability due to their battle with the Absinthe?

The Star Admiral had to remind himself that ZAFT eagerness to close with the ship was based on the sad belief that taking down a warship was easy for a Mobile Suit. Nothing at all could be farther from the truth when discussing Magi warships.

-x-

"Sir, this—this can't be right!" Joule Eleven half-shouts, having drifted close enough that her radio bled over the music. "Can't they see we're the ones being attacked?"

"I don't think they care," Yzak replies stolidly. He types out a tactical flash for all forces to spread out and attack in pairs. Given that he was probably ZAFT's most senior pilot remaining in service nowadays, with the possible exception of Commander Le Creuset (whom he did not trust any more for some reason), a lot of the mobile forces took heed of his advice.

"Oh shit, no way, they just launched another sixty—seventy of those massive things—and a lot of those are huge!"

"Wait a second—is that some kind of massive mobile armor or is that a ship?" Shiho asks in clear dismay.

"Spread out, now!" Yzak orders to his entire team, since the Mobile Armors and the smaller Warships were changing vector practically straight for his team and the flank of the ZAFT teams.

The fire coming from the enemy Warships only became more intense as the range gap closed, until all at once the unrecognized Warship headed practically straight for Yzak's team let loose with its whole forward-facing capital arsenal in one swift stroke. Crimson lasers, the azure streaks of some before-unseen energy weapon combined with the sight of tracers in capital-scale machine cannon volleys and the characteristic swirl-groove pattern of magnetic slugs passed by his Gundam, clearly aimed through his team's formation and at the Warships behind.

Never had Yzak seen such a frightening sight as a heavy-gun destroyer take down two Laurasia-class ships in one volley. Seeing it firsthand, as one began drifting helplessly as the other started spinning along its yaw axis due to venting fuel bunkers, was immensely terrifying to the veteran of repeated battles with the Archangel. The Archangel had only ever struck down two ships of ZAFT, one submarine on the surface and one of Waltfeld's land battleships, and this ship in one stroke had outdid it.

Yzak noticed that already three of his team had fallen way back, apparently not intent on remaining close to the advancing wall of Mobile Armor and ships. For good reason, as far as he could tell: as he had watched one ship spin and another become hopelessly crippled, the Mobile Armors had opened fire themselves on the MS forces and in a few cases against the ZAFT warships. As he refocused he found himself cringing as a wall of missiles from a mobile armor larger than the Moebius units coming in for his formation; those aimed at himself he was able to intercept with vulcans, but the missiles were just a precursor to the actual units.

One enemy unit in particular forced the issue on Yzak, a massive machine that looked like a triangular-shaped hunk of metal with two large, spindly claws coming from its base. A beam missed close to his left, though the pilot of the Mobile Armor closing rapidly on him seemed less concerned with hitting him than herding the Duel...somewhere? Yzak shifted toward the line of fire instead of away, coming up with a split-second plan at the last moment to attempt to saber the enemy machine even as he returned fire with the Shiva railgun on his machine. A last shot was fired at close range, this one did not miss and Yzak blocked most of it with his shield as the armor passed underneath him just barely. An outstretched hand locked onto the eye slit and dragged him along for the ride as the enemy machine accelerated, faster and faster. It was a serious strain on his machine to pull loose a beam saber and drive it into the top of the enemy armor, only to find that the armor on the enemy machine resisted the beam for almost ten seconds, a ten-second interval that gripped at Yzak's heart in dread that they were resistant or immune to beam weapons. Whence it finally cooked through the armor and into vital components, Yzak breathed easy as almost immediately the engines cut out and the armor shook violently from an ammunition explosion inside the craft, then nothing more as it began a lazy roll and yaw that made no sense if it was still piloted.

"Got one!" Yzak half-shouts, now glad he had the proof that the enemy was not indestructible. "Who's next?"

I shall be, a voice of a lady tells his mind directly. Yzak turned his machine to face where he thought he heard the voice from, and indeed there was another enemy unit gunning for him. This unit, also a mobile armor about three times larger than his Mobile Suit, had the shape of some old hat from Earth he had seen in history books long ago, with a pair of big-ass engines strapped onto the bottom of it. And a pair of warship-grade beam cannons to make it an actual weapon platform.

"And here's for the try!" Yzak half-shouts before firing a beam at her. The hell of it was, he thought he had her defeated in one stroke, but just before he snapped the trigger, her armor moved aside and the beam missed wide to port of the target. "What the fuck?"

He saw the glow of something launching from the rear of the armor, several somethings, but the darkness of space and several battles in his area made visually tracking them impossible. Until the fire started coming in. Yzak dodged one, two, blocked a third, fourth, but his luck ran out in less than a second with the strike of four beams on his machine: left leg, left hip, right arm (severing it in the process), and the rear lower torso, just next to the cockpit. Two seconds later his Gundam was struck again, this time blowing the shoulder weapons and armor apart as well as several upper torso hits that knocked out his ability to fight at all.

It was not long before the rest of his team messaged him with the same problem: their units were heavily damaged and some of them had been outright killed by the enemy. "One god-damned Mobile Armor took out a whole team? This is insane!"

Insane is believing you can win a nuclear war, pilot. This? This is just battle.

"What the hell is this? How can you talk to my mind?" Yzak asks, though it did not go out on the radio.

Humanity has no pinnacle, much as you are wont to believe otherwise. Many simply have different traits and skills compared to others, and mine is the ability to read minds and sense attackers. I will leave you to wallow in that truth for now. Yzak could clearly see the collection of remote weapons draw back into the armor, and it was off toward the Warships.

Given he was defeated but not dead, Yzak simply watched the progressing battle as the smaller Warships moved past the defeated Joule Team, and in the distance he watched the large Warship (identified as Mjolnr, Thor's hammer as Yzak knew of old mythology) begin a turn toward Jachin Due.

"Still alive, sir?" Shiho asks by radio, her DEEP Arms unit having lost both arms, a leg, a head, and most of its upper torso to weapons fire.

"I am. Lucky, but now there is no stopping them," Yzak grumbles. "Who the fuck are they?"

"I don't know, Commander, but we'll find out soon enough," Shiho replies.

-x-

"Beginning the combat turn at point Alpha," Willy informs Commander Ward as the ship begins rotating while still headed in the general direction of the enemy nuclear laser. "Sir, shall I deploy Rail Guns?"

"Just one," Commander Ward replies. Since the Heavy Naval Rail Guns were themselves a fixed weapon, they had to be aimed by aiming the whole ship at the target. "Fire on valid solution, target the lower MS access bunker door." The guns had been armed prior to the commencement of shooting, given they knew this was going to be done.

"Standing by, almost rotated to point," Willy says. "Firing, three, two, one, NOW!" The port-side Naval Rail Gun fired its first shot in anger in over two millennia, deploying a 5-ton ultra-dense long-rod penetrator on a perfect ballistic arc right into the lower bunker door to Jachin Due. After a ten-second flight time the slug struck and blew through the concrete portal, caving the whole door structure in and causing a ripple-stress fracturing of the rock in every direction from the door. With just one shot, the way into Jachin Due was open.

"Go-code Bravo, launch Marines, launch Mobile Suits, go go go!" the Flight Boss orders immediately after seeing the lower gate blown through. In the moments thereafter the ship shuddered to the impacts of catapults launching the transport shuttles of Marines, which would be the Astral Chinook Landing Craft. Each LC carried a full star of Marines in speed and relative comfort, though in terms of defense they were only average and lacked any serious weapons beyond a pair of medium lasers, hardly a threat to a unit of Mobile Suits.

As the ship continued to drift toward GENESIS, the rear of the ship got into shooting at the backs of the ZAFT fleet while the Mjolnr rotated. Even facing completely away from the ZAFT ships, there was no denying the awesome striking power of the Mjolnr and its crew, especially in the art of intercepting enemy fighters and mobile suits.

"You do realize we just effectively 'mooned' the enemies, right?" Commander Ward asks the Star Admiral with a bit of grim humor to tone.

"Oh yes, and—" watching the rear camera, a previously damaged enemy ship was finished off by two bays worth of Naval Particle Cannons. "Scoring impressive amount of kills even while doing something as crazy as that. They will learn to fear even the ass of our ship!" Wayne says with just the right evil intonation to cause those around him to either giggle maniacally or laugh hysterically. "Conn, damage report," Wayne orders.

"Sir, less than 2 percent damage total to ship's hull. We can do this several times without hazard of blow-through," Commander Ward replies. "You know what it takes to bring one of these ships down, boss, a lot more guns than ZAFT has." In point of fact, the Negaverse called the Phalanx-class ships 'old ironsides', in respect to their age and how much punishment one ship could take. When the weakest part of the ship's armor (the rear armor) required a hundred shots from the largest Naval Gauss Rifles or a thousand shots from a high-power beam rifle to defeat, and the front of the ship carried half more armor than the rear, killing a Phalanx-class ship took a very large effort. On the other hand, Negaverse Warships had that kind of firepower in spades.

"Amazing," Calamira replies. "The great strength of the Magi, the defense, is the undoing of ZAFT."

"Explain how, if you will." Wayne wanted to hear her logic on the battle.

"The only way ZAFT can stop us is by focusing solely on us, ignoring everything else including our Monitors and Mobile Armors. They can't do that, or they would get shot up by the Earth Alliance and our forces. Lose-lose."

Wayne was silent for a moment. "I take it you didn't intend that," Commander Ward notes.

"Not at all," Wayne replies. "I was just planning on hitting them fast and plowing through, nothing much else. This may make things harder on me at the negotiating table, if they feel they could not have won they may continue to see us as far too powerful to trust."

"That could be a problem," Calamira replies.

"Command, arriving at point Charlie in ten seconds," Willy declares from the helm station.

"Roger that, prepare to stomp on it and slow the ship down," Commander Ward warns the Helmsman.

"Give me a full stoppie, Willie," Star Admiral Centara orders.

At point Charlie, the Mjolnr applied maximum combat thrust on the engines, with an ETA of 3 minutes 20 seconds to completely neutralize their momentum, and oh, by the way, such a deceleration perfectly aligned the ship with the reserve mirrors for the ZAFT superweapon that were even now being pushed into place. "Conn, Helm, we are at a dead stop, sir."

"Conn, Sensors, replacement mirror 80 percent aligned for next shot," the sensors controller declares.

"Flight Control, launch Dominion under go-Code Whiskey," Wayne says. "Commander Ward, you have the Conn. I am heading out to assist the Dominion."

"Aff, Star Admiral, I have the Conn. Flight Control, have the Star Admiral's Gundam preflighted and waiting hot for him."

-x-x-x-

(27 September CE 71, 0035 hours UTC)

"Big sucker," Elisa notes, referring to the space fortress that ZAFT had carved out of an asteroid and put in a final defensive position around the PLANTs.

"Well, next time our chauffeur needs to launch us sooner so we don't have a huge-ass approach march," the pilot replies sourly.

"Oh, well," Elisa grumps. "At least the enemy fire is minimal."

"That is a bonus," the co-pilot replies. What fortress guns were still active after the Mjolnr passed by were being seen to by the Mobile Suits and Mobile Armors. Though reasonably capable of intercepting Mobile Suits, the guns could not stop the Mobile Armors that had I-Fields to defend themselves with, making the battle extremely one-sided. And a unit such as a Big Zam carried enough weapons to cause extreme amounts of damage to a piece of rock in one salvo.

"Take her in," Elisa requests before turning to head back into the crew compartment. "All right everyone, listen up!" Elisa orders roughly, which brought the humored banter among the other 24 Marines to silence in their landing craft.

"Ma'am!" one of the other Marines replies, one not in her Point. Her promotion to Elite Specialist had been iconic of the changing face of the Mjolnr and the crew, lending her a bit of respect from the rest of the Marines.

"This is the real deal, people. Most of us have seen combat in one way or another, Trial by Combat or pirate raiding, but this time around we have to act fast and take the controls for that superweapon or they cook the people on the planet below for dinner. This objective is strategic; you are not allowed to give them a break. Send 'em to hell unless they surrender."

"Aff, ma'am!" the whole shuttle choruses in reply.

"One minute!" the pilot shouts into the crew compartment.

"Hey, check out the Nu Gundam! Viewport 1 right now!" Immediately, the Marines brought up the camera retransmit viewports attached to the landing craft, and sure enough one of the exceedingly rare Nu Gundam machines had blazed a trail into the interior of Jachin Due over the deceased remnants of dozens of enemy mobile suits. Inside the fortress, the killing streak continued unabated, the fin funnels dancing back and forth to intercept MS and heavy concentrations of Infantry as the Gundam itself blew open several access hatches into the interior of the base for the oncoming Marines.

"Thirty seconds!" the Copilot shouts.

"Draw beam sabers!" Helga shouts thereafter. Each Marine reached down between their legs to the bench they were seated on, where four infantry-scale Beam Sabers were waiting for them. Most Marines carried hard-points for two, some of those who preferred close-quarters battle had four or more hardpoints for the favored close-quarters weapon. Each Marine had to draw his or her sabers at the last minute, as their armor could not power the sabers, therefore the weapons charged from the engine of the transport until deploy time. A few carried the traditional sword of the Magi, the short-blade Gladius, and even more carried more exotic close-range weapons such as Pilebunkers, katana, or a flail.

"Lock and load!" Elisa shouts. A cacophony of firearm bolts, belts, motors for 10mm gattlings, missile arming pins, and the sinister sound of lasers pre-charging echoed throughout the craft. The last sounds heard were that of the two Ion Cannons in the unit charging up and Elisa drawing the bolt back on her Armor Sniper Rifle. "Fifteen seconds!"

" 'Cut me free, bleed with me, oh no,' " One of the Marines from Third Point chants from the ancient and time-honored song Tenth Man Down.

" 'One by one, we will fall, down, down,' " the rest of the cabin chants back, including Elisa. Some things were tradition beyond even which she would not walk away. Reciting lines of the Remebrance relevant to the unit or lines of songs were favored, in this case lines of a song.

The whole craft jolts once, twice, then the buzzer above the door begins blaring as the red light glows. In less than three full breaths, the door slides open and the light turns green.

"It's enter and clear!" Helga shouts as she bolts to standing, her shield set forward as she charged through the door, the rest of her point in line immediately behind her.

The first entry was mercifully clear, on the premise that it had been vented to space and the two guards that had been posted in there had died of exposure suffocation. They moved up to the first door that had sealed and came to a halt. "Verify gas seal in the hallway," Helga requests.

"Verified, the landing craft has good seal."

"Close it up behind us," Elisa orders. Behind her, the breaching collar sealed shut and ejected from the craft, loosing the transport to return to the ship and if necessary pick up another star of Marines. "Helga, breach this door."

"With pleasure, boss lady," Helga draws two of her beam sabers, lights them off, and stabs into the safety door high up. With a little bit of sawing action, she dragged the two beam swords downward to the ground, while Victoria used a saber up high to cut from her vertical cut on the left to the vertical slash on the right. Lastly, Helga brought her two beam sabers together at the bottom to complete cutting two meters of the door out in a rectangular formation. The remnant she shoved through with her shield, the severed plates clattering off the left wall as a full star of Marines (25) marched into Jachin Due.

"Knock knock," Victoria says mirthlessly, looking past her shield at a half-dozen ZAFT personnel armed with assault rifles and submachineguns.

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Author's Chapter Afterword:

Oh holy crap, this took a lot more than I thought it did.

I'm not going to say much in this afterword, as you can sense the battle coming along. More of that to come, for damn sure, as things get very bloody before they get better. All forms of battle will be explored ore in depth in the next chapter, from the Marines in Jachin Due all the way to the ship-to-ship combat outside. It will be messy, convoluted, maybe even confused. Stay tuned.

For those of you who have been asking why the Magi place so much emphasis on psychological warfare, the Logic and Reason section below will give you an idea as well as some historical lessons on the matter. Many of you have asked about the Mjolnr, what its core stats are and how it is armed, look no further than the TRO section which includes a brief history of the ship and a lot of note on how it is used by the Magi. Fear, fear like you have never done so before.

Let these stand as proof that there is a lot of history to the Magi, of the kind of twisted, gritty, cold, hard reality that would chew up Harry Potter and Star Trek and spit them out in pieces. Seriously, wizards hiding in plain sight from non-magic-users? Aliens decided to give humans a major boost in damn near everything just because they look like they were up and coming? Bullshit, I say, the Magi clawed their way out of leftover nazi fascism, taught themselves common wizardry, went to the stars on pure balls (and boobs as necessary), fought the Gods to a standstill, beat the hell out of four other Star Empires for millennia, and still find time for their own pursuits and purposes. The only thing the Magi have been given over the years is ration after ration after ration of shit, and they aren't impressed by neighborhood bullies with nukes, self-righteous 'evolved' purists clinging to fragile and under-defended colonies, or competently indecisive atoll 'countries' whose claim to fame goes no father than their borders and their untenable ideals. It is time for the Earth Sphere to get the obligatory wake-up call and chug the necessary ration of coffee, because the Universe itself is only open to those who have the balls (boobs), brains and willpower to step out of the cradle and get on with it!

(You can tell I believe in equal opportunity for the ladies, no? Sorry for the rant, just felt like doing that after writing all this out!)

Next Chapter: ZAFT, the Earth Alliance, and even the remnants of Orb learn and learn fast why the Magi won the Star Empire Wars, and learn why Magi won't stand around and watch people nuke each other. After the shooting and the scare-downs are done, the silent battlefield demonstrates why genocide is a bad idea. There will be much blood and battle ahead.

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Review Replies: Multiple reviews from my last chapter, thank you one and all for the continuing ideas and motivation! W00t!

FraserMage: I think I will have to accentuate the Astray being the best of the Mass Pro units in the series, but I will also be accentuating the pilots as well. A good pilot in a lesser machine is still a very potent force in a battle, especially one as chaotic as this.

Rickroller: Much thank you for the review, good to see I am doing well here. Wait a second...does this mean I just got Rick Roll'd? Whoa, full stop.

One-Village-Idiot: Your vote is heard and actually agreed with. I liked the Astray series as much, if not more than SEED itself. I hope the intro section with Serpent Tail covers what you wanted to see...

Gatomon41: I'll be working on getting the main SEED characters some action, if not in this next chapter then definitely in the next few chapters. They will be critical after the war, as you can guess. Azrael will have a rather bizarre fate, nothing like how he died in the first Jokers Wild build. I have something special for him to come.

Etienne Of The West Wind: The shipboard movement was the move to start differentiating themselves as descended of the Magi but not completely Magi. Some of the crew see a lot more writing on the wall than the others... And, of course, I have an obligation to kill off as many of Lacus' Haro collection as possible. One small step for UC Haro, one giant annoyance crushed for mankind...

Knightowl 4183: What you are referring to is the same thing a modern howitzer artillery piece does: Fired flat, the shell moves flat, fired angled, the shell arcs. Howitzers replace bombards and carronades with a single do-all artillery piece. Linear Artillery may resemble a carronade in how it fires, but remember that if Earth Alliance doctrine wasn't so slapshod it would make an astounding artillery weapon.

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The Gripe Sheet: No gripes, no problem!

Actually, I owe an extended shout-out this chapter. Due to a communication error on my part, I ended up with two betas this time around: Strata-Assassin, who is her own very accomplished author, and returning savior Necroblade. Thank you both for saving my can on grammar and spelling and logic!

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Footnotes:

(1): Armor Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot, also called Long-Rod Penetrators. These are the main anti-tank rounds used by Main Battle Tanks and Infantry Fighting Vehicles, easily capable of defeating a lot of armor with a very small but dense high-speed rod.

(2): Streak Long Range Missiles are designed to not fire unless guaranteed to hit. This prevents wasting ammo and generating heat without result.

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Logic and Reason: Psychological Warfare and Scare tactics

"All of warfare is two components: Physical and Mental. The physical side I do not have to explain to you ladies and gentlemen, you have been training at it for over a year now. The mental aspect is my dominion, and soon shall it be your dominion as well. Listen well and heed my words, for when the enemy does not fear you, fear your existence and actions, you will have to fight twice harder to achieve the same goals, and fight twice more frequently to stave the enemy onslaught."

--Exerpt from Psychological Warfare Introduction Speech, Academy of Military Sciences, Kathil 010

Magi forces traditionally have viewed the mental aspects of war as equally critical as the physical aspects, sometimes more important than the physical considerations. Common wisdom holds that breaking the morale of an enemy is easier than breaking their bodies (or weapons or ships), therefore the pursuit of a mental campaign of combat is just as important to victory as is the blade, the firearm or the mechanized units. Though all six Star Empires practice psychological warfare, the most thorough and generally accepted to be effective in this arena are the Magi.

Magi forces break psychological warfare down into six components: Reputation, Classification, Presence, Willpower, Distraction, Deception. These are modified by the three principles of Equipment, Morale, and Purpose.

Reputation: "We've been beating your ass for thousands of years, boy, what makes you think that's going to change?"

Reputation comes into play in several levels. Foremost is the reputation of the forces Empire-wide, whereby any unit carries with it the baggage of the forerunners and comrades they serve with, and this can be a powerful motivator in and of itself. Simply stated, the exploits of the Touman semi-translate to the sub-units, and for persons having been defeated by an Empire once to face those forces again lends a bit of fear to their actions and mindset. Not far behind in effect is the reputation of individual formations, of which the foes of an Empire will pay close attention to which units are more effective and take note. The exploits of Galaxies in the Magi Empire, just as one example, taking planet after planet after planet of the other Empires with suffering hardly a defeat or none at all presents an effect that a force commander will bid said Galaxy to take a planet and the defenders will surrender outright, eschewing the inevitable destruction for just walking into the stockade alive. Lastly, and less frequently seen, is the reputation of Aces, the best of the best of the Empires and the smaller governments or organizations. Despite the rarity of such stunning aces as Char Aznable, Anavel Gato, Kamille Bidan, Garrod Ran, Kira Yamato, Heero Yuy, and innumerable names from the Star Empires, or more likely due to such rarities, even the name of an ace invoked in a battle can change the tide of the conflict drastically. The fear of going up against the best of the best is itself a raw weapon, one exploited many times throughout antiquity by the Star Empires, and even in some cases it was true, making the defeat even more complete and demoralizing.

Classification: "Never take a pair of scout tanks to a Battlemech fight. Conversely, never take a Battlemech to a Warship fight. And get the fuck out of there if someone says something about a mage and you're not capable of defending yourself against such attacks."

Classification refers to the different types and correlations of units in combat in a given battle, and how they can affect 'that sinking feeling' the opposing sides feel about each other. One of the major deciding factors of a battle among the Star Empires is not necessarily the numbers of troops, but the types of troops and where they are used. With so many different force types in operation at any given time, choosing where and when to use assets is likely the most crucial aspect of campaigns, as one blatant screwup can literally destroy a campaign outright. As the old saying goes, there is a time and a place for everything, and warfare is no exception, such as the place for infantry not being wide open fields at the time of an enemy Battlemech advance through that area. Conversely, it is not the time nor the place for Battlemechs to storm a garrisoned city full of close-range tanks and battle armor infantry hiding in the buildings. Magi in particular are infamous for being one of the best, if not the best, in using the right men and machines for the right job at the right time. Open-field battle? Battlemechs with Aerofighter and artillery support, follow-on infantry and armor to mop up the fleeing few. City invasion? Infantry and urban assault tanks, with helicopter support. The list goes on.

Using the right units for the job—or, technically speaking, using better units than the enemy for the job—can have extreme effects on the morale of the two sides in battle. In a forest engagement of tanks and infantry against Battlemechs and infantry, the force with the Battlemechs and Infantry will generally have the psychological advantage unless the enemy outnumbers them or has higher-quality armor than the enemy has high-quality Mech forces. Support forces such as air support, artillery, transport, and naval forces all correlate into the battle as well, provided one or both sides are intelligent enough to use them. Done properly, a significant show of tactics and force can break the morale of an enemy down in a huge hurry, as well as force outright surrender if the enemy is caught in a position they cannot retreat from.

Presence: "I don't know where the fuck they are, General! They're everywhere! They're nowhere! They're all around us! They ain't in this sector! We're getting slaughtered, we need backup NOW! Now Godda—" fzzzzsssst.

Where one stands, where one does not stand, and where one makes the enemy think they do and do not stand is the presence that one shows. Commonly called maneuver warfare, presence is the way that armies can corner each other, force and deny options, and even scare the enemy into taking illogical or self-destructive actions. Heavily commented and thoroughly described by Sun Tzu long before the inception of any modern government or Empire, it is a staple of the Star Empires and their conflicts. With the adoption of Clan practices and traditions maneuver lost some focus in strategy, but was quickly revived during the Star Empire Wars as the Negaverse in particular turned out to be easily panicked by their shadow when they thought the Magi were moving in non-direct ways, positioning for possible ambushes and to sever supply lines. In more than a few cases, the Magi were able to steamroll the core of an enemy formation by faking movements, feinting an attack in one direction and playing complacent in another, drawing the enemy sideways and then striking through the middle of their formation with them facing the wrong direction. Less than a century into the war, the Negaverse had to pull in their surviving few competent commanders to begin retraining the rest of their command staff to recognize Magi maneuvering for what it was. This changed the pace of the war to something more manageable for the Negaverse, though even with establishing high-power academies to train their troops, the Negaverse was never able to fully overcome the deceptive practices of the Magi. Some are wont to say that in the calm interim after the wars, the Negaverse have become the masters of maneuver, though this is hotly debated by every military analyst this side of Podunk.

Willpower: "Only by sheer force of steel balls—or steel boobs in the case of you ladies—can anything meaningful be won. If it is an easy victory, it is an ambush masquerading as a cake-walk."

In the barracks, sharp banter and hearty boast are the order of the day, but out in the field, with lasers and missiles flying in both directions, willpower is the force that carries the battle forward. Though some would say that willpower is the last ten percent that a troop has to give, it is more appropriately classified as the 'all' that a soldier gives for his comrades and his country. An amalgam of discipline and morale, willpower is the drive a force is willing to apply to their purpose to achieve the objectives. The reason to will to do battle varies between the Empires and independent states, though for Magi the answer is dead simple: Magi fight for everything. Raised from young to be independent and free-willed on every matter, guaranteed a wide margin of latitude by the Empire, the average Multimage citizen cannot stomach the feudalistic ways of the Negaverse, the lesbian monarchy of the Illyaris, the drunken excessive bureaucracy of the Dark Moon, the outright dictatorial tyranny of the Dynasty, the list goes on. Faced with losing everything they have known to outsiders they could never approve of, the Magi fight long and hard for every meter of ground and space they can, giving in only as an affair of honor dictates, and that rare enough. This sense of purpose, the knowledge that millions more rely on each soldier to do his or her part, drives and disciplines the massive army of the Magi through the worst of conflicts, honor their purpose, and force the enemy into realizing the faults of their ways. Strangely, this also applies to dealings with third parties: Magi will readily stand between an aggressor and their prey, with the implicit warning that the Magi have fought long and hard against foes more numerous and ferocious, and will not countenance blind pointless aggression or holocaust.

Distraction: "An enemy cannot function if you interfere with his inner workings. If you jam his radios, sub-units cannot communicate. If you sever supply lines, they cannot make their machines run. If you intercept commanders, the operation becomes disarrayed. If you destroy transports, you deny those transports to them and you make impossible a retreat."

Distracting an enemy from the main goal of his campaign or from the main operations you are running is a time-honored tradition to chop at the strength of the enemy in preparation to hammer their forces flat at a later time. By making unreliable the services and processes they rely on, you cripple morale, the flow of information, the maintenance of the units, and mostly the resolve of the enemy. Magi do not prefer such tactics to a straight-up victory over an untarnished foe, though wise commanders look past the ethos of glory and routinely employ such hardened tactics. Though far from the best at intelligence gathering, the Magi are some of the best in electronic warfare and signal intelligence, giving them easy mission-kills in jamming the enemy radios and intercepting their mail. Many is the battle twisted from a sure defeat to a stunning victory because the foes of the Empire were unable to maneuver against the Magi without the Magi seeing through their ploys or jamming communications and throwing whole regiments into disarray. Supply raiding provides a double-victory for the Magi, as stealing the enemy supply convoys denies those supplies to the enemy and allows them to the Magi. Armor Snipers, widely feared and respected among all the Empires, are specifically trained in the Magi to recognize command units and kill the commanding officers whenever possible. Intercepting or destroying transport methods is more rare than common among Magi formations, but is often used as a bargaining chip to force an enemy formation into reconsidering holding out or surrendering. In the employ of these tactics, the enemy frequently sees the peripheral symptoms for what they are, but very rarely if ever sees the central purpose of such otherwise 'dishonorable' actions until the maneuver forces close in on the enemy from multiple directions and the commander is struck down mid-sentence by a sniper's round.

Deception: "Don't think too hard, they're trying to get you to think like a Negaverse Lord. Think like a goddamned pirate, that is what Magi act like some days."

Another core tenet of Sun Tzu's legacy, deception is an integral part of modern warfare even when hiding is practically useless on the electronic battlefield. Deception is not simply relegated to hiding from the enemy, it is also making him think things are happening that are not necessarily happening. Allowing an enemy to think he is winning the war of maneuver by allowing him to take land you have staunchly defended for weeks, while moving your reserves into flanking positions and preparing minefields and artillery is deception in action—a feint and an ambush. A cunning commander can use multiple illusions at once, stage-managing his forces and manipulating an enemy commander into positions that seem safe but are far from tenable when pressure is applied, with apparently disorganized strikes and retreats designed to funnel the enemy into kill zones prepared for the purpose. Magi completely refrain from deception when using Trial by Combat, but in other engagements deception is a powerful tool that every command officer trains on long and hard. Some of the best Magi commanders in the Star Empire Wars were literally proven to make their Negaverse, Illyaris, and especially Dark Moon counterpart commanders outright cry, go insane, become utterly paranoid, or suffer mental breakdown simply because they were harried to the point of collapse, never given to the straight battle but always one step behind the Magi forces and their unpredictable actions. The effect on the troops is far worse than on the command staff, as the outright fear of not knowing what the enemy truly intends, where they will strike next, eats at the soul and the will until some units literally rebelled or surrendered to Magi patrol teams. The Dark Moon generals even came up with a rule of thumb pertaining to this phenomenon: "If the Magi commander is a cardsharp, actor, gamer, or historian, you will never get a straight fight out of them. If their commander is a pervert, drinker, glory-hawk or trained in the Draconis Combine, you may get a straight fight. If more than one of the above applies, assume the worst and double it."

Equipment: "He who has the most ammo and the best of the guns typically wins the battle, but when those Magi Armored Infantry get up in your face, all bets are off."

Equipment can provide a major sway to the arc of the battle, and among the Star Empires this is no exception. The automatic assumption of many is that the side with the better units, guns, tanks, planes, etcetera, is typically better outfitted, though this is not the case. If all the guns are in the hands of a few soldiers and the rest languish with a simple rifle, two grenades, and half empty magazines, the bulk of that force is not going to look favorably on any order to attack oncoming enemies. Conversely, a force that is small but has the best equipment their Empire can afford to give them is also not necessarily in a position of supreme power over the battlefield, especially if they are on the wrong end of 10-to-1 odds and the enemy had equipment 'just good enough to get the job done'. Striking a balance between capability and numbers is the respected position among all the Star Empires, though how this is accomplished is a major variable between them. The Magi, owing to their Emperor having started life as a mercenary swordsman, typically put a lot of faith in the common foot soldier, and along with the faith goes a lot of the best capabilities. Armored Infantry, Armored Marines, Armored Ghosts, Armor Snipers, Mobile Engineers, all have one thing in common: they are all outfitted with the most feared and respected technological armor systems, weapons and equipment of all the Star Empires, hands down, to the point that there are no unarmored Infantry in the Magi, though this is accentuated with the fact that the Armored Infantry are as numerous as Negaverse unarmored infantry. The pole swings in the opposite direction for the Mechs, where few expenses are spared by the Magi for their standing armor forces, including duplicating and mass-producing the infamous Gundams. Back to the side of quantity, though not lacking in quality, Magi ground armor (battle tanks and such) are numerous as well as cost-efficient, and even tanks exist that can go toe-to-toe with the heaviest of Battlemechs and survive the battle.

By providing their troops with excellent equipment in adequate or better supply, the Magi have a step up on the logistically-disorganized enemies they face. More than once, whole enemy formations have been squelched and captured by the Magi because less than half of the force had their necessary weapons systems, the other half languishing with their weapons still in transit and relegated to being nothing more than poorly-trained riflemen. There were even reports, though unconfirmed, that some Dark Moon formations of division size or larger surrendered outright without firing a shot since they could not put up enough resistance to even waste Magi time.

Morale: "That warm, fuzzy feeling you keep getting in your pants, Corporal, has nothing to do with how the rest of the unit feels about the Magi bunker three hills over. While you're busy in the ammo dump with a Playgirl and a vibrator, the rest of us are shitting ourselves senseless because of those goddamned Thumpers and Long Toms."

Morale is more than just simply how 'happy' a unit is, though at a core perspective happiness does factor into it significantly. Morale, like willpower, is the willingness to endure the constant threat of death for whatever your purpose is, though it is not as broad as willpower (which typically is more focused on the whole picture, not the given battles). Many things affect morale, from leave to supplies to families, but two things stand out above all else: how the unit sees itself compared to their foe, and what their foe is doing to them. A unit that considers itself elite, facing down an equivalent force that it considers not elite, is going to have a serious advantage in morale because the unit is better than the enemy and should not lose. Conversely, a greenhorn unit that is tasked to attack even a small force of hardened, ruthless veterans is likely going to break hard and fast as soon as the going gets real tough. Magi are themselves masters of manipulating morale and keeping their own in good spirits, as the mail gets through on time or ahead of schedule, supplies are in order and well stocked, equipment is ruthlessly maintained, and training long days and hard nights makes for close teams, solid tactics, excellent gunnery, and a feeling of eliteness rivaled or bested by the enemy's special forces only. With solid traditions and good camaraderie to draw heart and resolve from and adventures of glory and duty ahead of them to look forward to, it is often said that "Magi are the only soldiers known to walk into battle with their stereos turned up loud as hell, their armor shined and waxed, smiling grimly as they do their jobs with insane precision and equally crazy jokes about it."

Though much is said of morale in both directions, one thing is crystal clear to all involved parties: breaking an enemy's morale is far easier than breaking their bodies or machines. A combination of overwhelming firepower, deceptive and damaging practices, outmaneuvering battles, and hopeless causes have brought armies down to the point of quivering, huddling, helpless masses on all sides of the equation, Magi included. Magi in particular are favorites of this rule, and nothing crushes morale of defenders and offensive formations faster than having a pair of Phalanx-class ships parked in orbit over the surface of a planet, raining death down on the enemy, and no hope whatsoever of stopping said ships from doing what they want to do. Artillery, fire, direct assaults, air strikes and carpet bombing are all just as effective if used right, and Magi are far from afraid to use them.

Purpose: "Pick your reason to fight." Pause of six seconds. "Know why you want to fight yet? Good. No go forth and make those bastards die for the cause you believe is right and just."

Easily the most influential mindset of a war, the purpose for the war is itself the defining factor for which a side, a unit, or even an individual soldier strives to fight his or her hardest. Despite this, it is often the most overlooked or downplayed mindset factor of all. Every person carries with them reasons for doing everything, from the mundane to the maleficent to the magnificent, but not always does these things translate beyond the person. The collective of the unit often takes up the slack from the persons, when the unit has a purpose that can be recognized, that is. Negaverse soldiers many times recounted that they pitched battles seemingly at random on the orders of their commanders without knowing why they were doing so, sometimes winning, not always losing, and very rarely making sense at all. The worst offenders in such conduct happened to be the Dark Moon and Dynasty, who very rarely showed any purpose or logic other than inflicting as much damage on their erstwhile foes as possible, and even they admitted as much after the war ended. In contrast, the Illyaris rarely fought without a clear purpose and the New Moon forces never fought without at least a basic understanding of the flow of the campaign. The most competent in this matter, the Magi, hold a deep-seated obsession with information and coordination in military matters, meaning that at all times every fighting trooper was aware of his or her tactical and strategic purposes and goals, never wasting effort and resources better spent elsewhere. Because purposes and goals were common knowledge, the action and command could be decentralized, giving more initiative to lower-ranking officers and formations to complete objectives independent of large maneuver formations, which forced the enemy to guard in ways that they could not readily do so and maintain effective defense.

The purpose of the Empires themselves also weighed heavily on the campaigns they fought. For the Magi, survival against no less than two or more than four other Star Empires was the hallmark of their every action, spurring even the civilians into feats beyond reasonable expectations. At no time during the Star Empire Wars, even during the peace of the Star League Era, was the populace of the Magi sufficiently divided that demilitarization or negotiation was preferred over honorable and disciplined defense of Magi national integrity. Some historians would point to this as the reason why the Star Empire Wars did not end with the Solstice Accords of year SL-683, which the Magi refused to sign whatsoever on the grounds that the treaty terms would force them to disarm by more than half, and instead the war continued for another 1400 years after that, including the bloody abattoir of the Quarter War. In stark contrast, the purpose of the Negaverse, for Queen Beryl to become the effective Empress of Existence, often hampered morale and mindset as much as it spurred the troops onward, as the promise of glory they fought for was not a promise of glory for them but for a promise of power for their Queen. This lust for power and control spurred the war onward and to greater excesses than ever before, finally culminating in a literal coup de main by the Magi to end her tainted bid for supremacy.

---

TRO SECTION:

It is time I quit screwing around. You have asked for the TRO for the Mjolnr for a long time, it is time to give it to you.

AeroTech 2 Vessel Technical Readout

Class/Model/Name: Phalanx

Tech: Mixed (Clan) / 3067

Vessel Type: Superdreadnought *

Rules: Level 4, Custom design, not tournament legal

Mass: 5,850,000 tons

Length: 5,500 meters

Sail Diameter: 3,850 meters

Power Plant: Standard

Safe Thrust: 4

Maximum Thrust: 6

Armor Type: Ferro-Carbide

Armament:

2 Heavy Naval Rail Guns *(Custom)
4 Heavy Naval Gauss Rifles
6 Heavy Naval PPCs
30 Medium Naval PPCs
26 NL55
8 NL35s
24 Naval Autocannon 30s
16 AR-10 Launchers
10 Kraken-T Launchers
24 Killer Whale-T Launchers
12 White Shark-T Launchers
30 Barracuda-T Launchers
26 ER Large Lasers
80 Large Pulse Lasers
130 Laser AMS
24 Gauss Rifles
44 Rotary Autocannon/10 (MF-UK)
36 Streak LRM 15
30 Streak SRM 6
10 Screen Launchers

Overview:

The existence of the Phalanx-class ships is itself an exercise in the power of bureaucratic inertia continuing well after the commissioning bureaucracy was undercut and annihilated. The initial specifications written up by the Holy Olympus Government, whom had taken over the Multimage Empire and were thought to have killed the rightful Emperor, had requested a ship capable of defending and transporting the legions of Divine Priests and specifically for eliminating any renegade Magi warships who did not bow to the will of the Gods and the Olympus Government. Due to 'creative engineering' on the Magi scientist's part, the ship never cleared the drawing board in any combat-worthy configuration before the Gods themselves found out they failed to kill the Emperor—and failing to kill an Atrebas only makes them stronger.

Engineering on the Phalanx-class ships was officially halted in year 1016 of the After Empire Calendar, as their insidious purpose was considered useless now that the Emperor was back in command and there were no rebellious fleets to take down. Unofficially, an army of engineers, scientists, and technicians would continue the effort over the next two centuries, working on the project for hobby or minimum wage purposes, never officially sanctioned, never discussing the continuing effort outside their circles. Those few times inquiries were raised, there were always three other Warship projects and innumerable smaller craft projects on the boards that could be used to explain away the slow but steady effort. So good was the concealment of the continuing project that not even the Magi intelligence service knew it was happening until after the first ship had been built and slipped its moorings.

The original request from Zeus, the leader of the Greek Gods, had called for a Warship of 4 million tons and sufficient armor and firepower to crush at least two Warships of 2 million tons each, not including carried fighters or mobile suits. During the engineering process following his violent demise, the engineering teams found that the goal requested could not be matched or bested by the 4 million ton restriction. 5 million tons was settled on partway through the process. This turned out to be a problem for the K-F Engineers on the project, as their engine specifications could not be dialed in properly to match the change in mass, and with the latest modifications in K-F-E engines, the mass ratios would change and throw the whole unit out of balance. The ship was reengineered again for 5.5 million tons. Decades later, the project was revised yet again, to double the amount of Dropships carried by the unit from 40 to 80, citing the latest advances in Dropships that would allow one Phalanx to carry enough forces to crush any opposition in air, space or on land, as well as carry enough supply Dropships to maintain at least a 600-day patrol, which increased the mass to 5.6 million tons. One more revision came out five years later courtesy of a hair-brained fifteen-year-old female engineering student, who had designed the most ungodly-large Naval Railguns and opined that said guns could be very effective at smashing Warships in as few as one shot, as well as be useful for deploying other types of shells in suborbital bombardment; this development definitely drew the attention of the Phalanx engineers, who quickly incorporated such powerful weapons into their ship. After this last revision, the size was finally settled in at 5.85 million tons, and the whole project agreed that the ships would be finalized at that mass and no more.

Construction on the first Phalanx began February, year 1244 at a privately-funded naval contractor's shipyard station that had to be specially modified to construct the single massive vessel. Construction was run entirely on a black budget, no funds were used that could be traced directly to the Multimage Empire, and investors believed that they were investing in a series of new classes of smaller Warships, not one large ship that could trace its roots back to the Gods of yore and their insane depredations against the Empire and other parties. There was no press coverage of the ship during its engineering or construction phases, engineering and construction crews were sequestered in a series of colonies dedicated solely to the project, and outside contact and supplies were delivered only by the original Phalanx engineering team, who moonlighted as Dropship personnel to prevent the release of the secret by transferring documents or pictures to a foreign Dropship crew. Construction of the first Phalanx-class ship was completed in September, year 1246, again with no fanfare or even known Media coverage. This was a calculation on the technician's part, as they wanted to prove their ship from the ground up in the coming Naval Operation Games.

The Naval Operations Games of July 1247 saw many new classes of Warship in deploy, though to everyone who followed the games, they knew well of the ships that had been entered, as well as the ships that were returning from the games two and a half years prior, and betting was running heavily in favor of some of the new 1.9 million ton ships. No information was released whatsoever about the Phalanx-class except its name, HW-01 Phalanx, and the carried assets and assigned mercenary units that would be taking part in the games. The ship was listed in the registry before the games as having 20 attached Dropships, two of which were ground-only mercenary units, and had contracted out a dozen mercenary Aerofighter Trinaries and Clusters, as well as two clusters of mercenary Mobile Suits and two trinaries of mercenary Gundam units. Compared to some of the other ships, it was woefully understaffed and under-guarded, considering that Magi regulars had taken up the banners of the newer ships and were even crewing the older commissioned ships, though the catch was that the mercenary units had been training long and hard for years for the competition and were ready for anything that would be thrown at them. Betting ran heavily against the Phalanx in every category, a showing in the lack of confidence in the ship, the name, and the unwillingness of the manufacturing corporation to release any details. Price of the stock of Denete Naval Shipyards plummeted in the week prior to the competition, though the executives of the company, themselves kept in the dark about the Phalanx-class until it was entered in the competition, wagered their own personal fortunes on the shadow newcomer, knowing the extent of the monster they were about to unleash on the Games.

Nothing was known of the Phalanx until it showed up at the site of the Naval Operations Games, at the Waypoint-class Space Dock station where the Division Commander of the Techstrikers was waiting to begin the games. At first everyone thought the ship was something of a joke, a paper tiger made to look bigger than the other ships and thus more intimidating, though the Division Commander was the only officer on the station that knew properly of the old tale of the Phalanx-class, and knew immediately he was looking at something positively monumental in both scale and implication. Without hesitation the DCT took to space in his Zephyranthes Gundam and boarded the Phalanx to inspect the ship and meet the crew. The ship was not crewed by Magi officers, was not commanded by an experienced Admiral, was guarded by Mercenaries, had damn little documentation, manuals, or procedures, and had an absolutely horrendous price tag per ship, but unlike the other ships in the ballet it had something the Magi always respected: an extremely motivated crew that was willing to die if necessary to prove their vessel superior to anything in the skies. So impressed with the modern architecture, engineering, systems, and weapons of the Phalanx, and especially with its scratch-up non-professional crew, the Division Commander overrode every protest from the other Admirals and allowed the ship into the games without any form of handicap, as he wanted to see how the ship would perform under real world circumstances.

Of all the ships in the 1247 Naval Operations Games, the only ship to complete every task set to it with less than ten percent casualties was the Phalanx, and that simply because the engineering teams had literally overengineered the Phalanx-class for its mission. No combination of five combatant Warships and carried assets were able to stand up to the massive Warship, to the point that ComStar began calling it 'The Superdreadnought', in clear homage to the ancient naval Warships that were considered the kings of naval warfare. The ability for the Phalanx to smash smaller Warships in two to four blows of its massive Heavy Naval Rail Guns made it the hands-down winner in the dueling bracket of the games, to the point that it won two of its ten matches without firing a shot, the enemy simply refused combat and retreated. The defensive staying power of the ship proved literally so massive that multiple Warships could beat on the same sector of the ship and not breach it in a half hour's simulated gun action, and this all the while the ship was returning amounts of fire that well exceeded their own firepower. The true nature of the Phalanx-class became known in the anti-fighter category, as its hundreds of fighter-scale guns positively tore apart fighters, Mobile Suits, Mobile Dolls, and Small Craft without reserve. The capstone of the Phalanx triumph was the planetary landing and ground support operations, where the carrying capacity of the ship was heavily exploited and the naval weapons batteries sundered whole simulated regiments in minutes flat. Combined with the most advanced sensor systems available to the Magi, even Dropships maneuvering around in atmosphere were far from safe from the Phalanx-class, traditionally a difficult or impossible shot for most Warships.

The final day of the Games saw the arrival of one very unusual spectator: the Emperor himself, fresh from campaigning against a sect of Clans that had been attacking Magi interests in an alternate dimension, who looked forward to the final outcome of the exercises and had taken up observation on the Phalanx itself. The last task required of the champion ship, the Phalanx, was a live-fire suborbital bombardment exercise against real (and outdated) military equipment that was being remotely piloted to simulate real crews. The crew, hardened in the past month's combat exercises and sharpened by exertions they would never have imagined needed by a Warship, took to the challenge without reservation, laying in a complete broadside capital barrage for five minutes against the targets, then rotating over to deploy the massive Heavy Naval Rail Guns against the final target, a nuclear-strike-hardened bunker. Two shots with the naval armor penetrators was all that was required to turn the bunker into rubble, which had survived repeated strikes of NAC/40 in years past. After the cheering subsided, the Emperor declared that he would free up the necessary budget to commission the Phalanx-class ships immediately and begin production on 'the first truly innovative Magi warship in a century'.

In the decades to come, the Engineering teams that had worked silently and unobtrusively on a long-dead project would be honored by the Empire and specifically by the crews of the new ships. Each of the first 1140 official ships of the class bore the name of one of the 1140 engineers that had worked on the ship during its engineering cycle, and all the engineers stand honored at the Phalanx Memorial on the Empire's capital world of Terra 2. The crew of the first Phalanx-class ship was commissioned directly into the Multimage Empire Techstrikers by order of the Emperor, and more than half of the crew was inducted into the Eugenics Program for meritorious conduct on their first tour of duty.

Phalanx-class ships bear the designation MHW in their hull number, which stands for Multimage (super)Heavy Warship. The designation MSW had been assigned to a now-deceased class of Warships decades before the completion of the first Phalanx, and the Admiralty would not revoke the prior-assigned designation for the new hulls to use it. The name Superdreadnought was not accepted among the Magi for the ship's nomenclature officially, though most personnel offhand refer to it as a Superdreadnought, with anything over 7 million tons classified as an Ultradreadnought.

Capabilities:

The Phalanx-class was engineered thoroughly for the purpose of intercepting fleets of smaller Warships and sinking them before they could pose a threat to local shipping or the planet the Phalanx is guarding. From the first day it saw combat in the Games to the latest ships of the class on long-range border patrol, the Phalanx has acquitted every task it was assigned that was not deemed impossible by military review.

The main distinguishing feature of the class is the amount of armor the ship carries, giving it the necessary defensive staying power to handle any task it needs to. With 35000 tons of Ferro-Carbide Armor covering the ship, the Phalanx-class is extremely tough to crack in all real terms—the effective protection carried by one ship exceeds that of a dozen or more smaller ships; for reference, the much-feared Leviathan-class Warship only mounts in the area of 1250 tons of armor; the main contender for most feared Warship ever, the McKenna-class, carries 1340 tons of armor of a type almost exactly matched to the Phalanx. This absurdly large amount of armor—literally massing more than 96% of Dropships in use would mass fully loaded—gives the Phalanx the ability to take sustained heavy fire from any other Warship in Existence, including other equivalent or smaller Superdreadnoughts, and continue fighting.

The arsenal of the Phalanx-class seems less than an afterthought on paper, but in practice is nigh-terrifying to anyone who has to do combat with the ship. Where many ships would dedicate as much as 30 percent of their mass to weapon systems, the Phalanx carries less than 15 percent of its mass in weapons. On the other hand, the 630,000 tons of weapons carried literally makes the arsenal outweigh most non-combat Jumpships and even some Warship designs in their entirety. The bulk of the arsenal is in point-defense weapons, designed for the purpose of eliminating the large amounts of fighters and mobile suits that smaller fleets tend to rely on for smashing through Warships. Additionally, in close range to larger ships these weapons are often turned on the enemy shipping as a way to cause even more damage than would be expected by the capital weapons.

The crowning achievement of the class is the Heavy Naval Rail Guns, weapons deemed too large to be useful on a Warship when initially discussed in open forum, but weapons for which the engineering student that designed them became famous. Each Railgun is capable of throwing a five-ton titanium-plated ferrous 'slug' as default munition, or can also be used to launch other configurations of weaponry, namely a five-ton winged ultra-dense long-rod penetrator or a five-ton contact-fused explosive shell. The Long-rod penetrators in particular are renown for being able to blow through ships under 1.25 million tons mass the long way, and ships double that size from the side. The only limitation the gun has is the shell weight cannot be pushed past 5.5 tons without risking serious damage to the rails, otherwise if it can be magnetically thrown (or shoehorned into something that can be magnetically launched) it is fair game.

Defensively, the Phalanx carries a staggering 130 Laser AMS spread around the ship except dead to the front. Though the system accounts for over 10 percent of the ship's cooling and component power system, the Laser AMS Grid has proved so useful that stripping it down is typically the last thing considered for field modifications. With the capability to intercept an average of 900 individual missiles fired at the ship per minute, concentrated missile strikes against the ship are more likely to fail than straight-on gun action. Consequently, missile frigates are the first and usually the fastest to withdraw from battle against a Phalanx, since their primary armaments are practically useless against the ship and are often singled out quickly by veteran Magi ships to prevent them causing significant damage to fighters.

The most surprising characteristic of the Phalanx is the sheer volume of carried assets one ship has. Internally, a single Phalanx in default configuration can carry 200 Mobile Armors, 300 Mobile Suits, 50 small craft, and 225 Aerospace Fighters, giving a single ship more than three short galaxies of mobile assets to counter whatever is thrown at them. This can be reconfigured into practically any combination of units totaling no more than 301,000 tons, though this typically requires several months of overhaul to complete. It is not unheard of for a Phalanx to completely eschew its Mobile Armor collection in favor of more Fighters for space battle or Mobile Suits for ground campaigns. At most, given that the bays mass the same but are structured different for MS and Fighters, a ship can have up to 2006 bays for Mechs, MS, Gundams or Fighters, or in practice one reinforced galaxy of fighters (800) and three reinforced galaxies of MS and Gundams (400 each).

In terms of speed, the Phalanx is not as much a slouch as its bulk would lend credence to. With 12 StarCore XVIII Engine nacelles integrated in four batteries to the stern of the ship, the class has more thrust than most Star League-era Warships and is at least the rival of more contemporary ships. In pure maneuverability it is not lacking in the least, with enough cross-range thrusters and apogee motors to easily turn full circle in as little as sixty seconds if needed. These capabilities are married to an advanced navigation and control system that allows the behemoth warship amazing agility—many horror stories abound of rival Star Empire naval forces caught in two-way, three-way, or four-way ambushes by Phalanx ships that had maneuvered around them through debris fields and asteroid belts to conceal their flanking attack, and suffered little to no damage courtesy of such maneuvers.

As always, the heart of a Warship is the K-F hyperdrive, and the Phalanx is no exception. Equipped with an advanced modulated K-F-E compact drive, the Phalanx is capable of the all-important interplanetary jump as well as cross-dimensional transit that makes it truly useful in long-range recon and patrol missions. Unlike the other ships of the era, the Phalanx does not carry the incredibly expensive Lithium-Fusion Battery necessary to make two jumps consecutively without a recharge, which both drastically hauls back on the final price and simplifies maintenance on the mammoth ship. The eighty docking collars tied to the massive drive allow for the transport of a wide variety of shipping, and rare is the ship that jumps with half or less of those collars loaded. The ship itself has stowage for 160,000 tons of material, typically used for extra supplies for the crew, ship, and carried assets, and it carries 58,000 tons of spare parts for the ship itself to keep it underway for several months at a time without the need to stock up frequently.

Crew amenities on the ship are not lacking in the slightest. Personnel are quartered in standard bunks, officers in slightly better bunks, and there are recreational facilities available throughout the ship. Concessions are available for whole families who take residence on the ship, even including standard-grade schooling for children as well as obvious vocational training in military or spacecraft sciences. Standard galleys are spread throughout the ship as well as usually having a collection of private-owned and -operated restaurants and bars on the ship. Each ship includes standard simulation rooms and most have extra entertainment facilities for the off-duty personnel, such as nightclubs or karaoke bars or similar. Earlier ships launched with gravity decks to provide the crew some simulation of weight, though ships built after year 2210 all include the Gravitic Lattice throughout the ship that allows for whole-ship gravity (or antigravity) and precludes the necessity of rotating sections. And if things pale out on the ship, there is always fun and fortune to seek in the bowels of the carried Dropships and Monitors, a common haunt of off-duty personnel on long tours: many a Marine has learned how to assemble an Omnimech from spare parts lying about the hangars of carried Dropships when not on duty.

Though engineered long before the Universal Maintenance Initiative of the Quarter War, the Phalanx-class was easily adapted to the changing standards and retrofitted onto the old ships just the same. Maintenance is costly nonetheless, given that the ships are extremely costly per unit they have large and very expensive subsystems, but the tasks and difficulty of those tasks are ameliorated by the fact that the ship was overengineered for its purpose. The design teams made sure that fixing what was broke on a Phalanx-class was as simple and painless as possible, giving technicians plenty of room to work in and around components and FRUs, making mounting systems modular and lockable while easy to replace if needed, and even providing cabling access corridors around computers and powered equipment so a technician could easily run new wire or reconnect existing cables without having to try to 'fish' it through conduits that may not exist after battle damage took its toll. This alone has made it beloved of the millions of crews that have served on these ships, that above and beyond the fact that the ship was deliberately overstaffed by as much as 1100 personnel to crew it, allowing for rotating vacations even while in a tour and far from port.

Battle History:

The battle history of the Phalanx-class is one almost as ancient as the Empire itself, and the long service record of the ship has garnered it many feats of insane prowess matched by no other ship in Existence. The first blows of the Star Empire Wars were struck against the side of a Phalanx-class, and the final naval blows of the same war were struck literally by the same ship that was the ship fired on first by the Negaverse. In between, the 46,200 Phalanx-class ships manufactured before and during the war reaped impressive feats and stunning victories unheard of in naval warfare, though not without astronomical costs in both material and net losses. In total, 27,184 ships of the class remained active at the end of the war.

The ship that both began and ended the war, the MHW-644 Eileen Weste, served as the flagship of one of the Capital Orbital Fleets that protected the heavy-populated colonies and satellites around Terra 02, the Multimage capital world. Relieved by Task Force Red Blossom to leave orbit and conduct independent training maneuvers away from the colonies and travel routes, the Eileen Weste moved to the nadir jump point and proceeded farther outside the gravity well to conduct three weeks of simulated ship-to-ship combat between the two Phalanx-class ships of the COF group. Three days into heavy ship-on-ship simulated gun action, an unidentified task force of a dozen large Warships, ranging from 1 million tons to 2.2 million tons each, jumped into the Nadir jump point nearby the maneuvers. After failing to receive a reply from the unknown vessels, the Eileen Weste and her sister ship Dona Riquez moved on the fleet as they began the seven-day transit to Terra. Herein the astounding speed of the Phalanx came into play, as none of the ships in the hostile fleet were able to outpace the massive ships or their escorts. Rather than surrender as ordered, the flagship of the hostile fleet opened fire on the Eileen Weste preemptively at long range, followed ten seconds later by practically every other ship in the force.

It came as a very rude shock to the Admiral of the enemy fleet that the heavy barrage did not even slow down the Phalanx-class ships, who returned fire in spades moments after the whole enemy fleet let loose; with four long-rod penetrators of the monolithic Heavy Naval Rail Guns fired against the flagship, two strikes disabled its engines and K-F-E jump core, and just like that the Star Empires Wars began in earnest with the disabling of the Negaverse McKenna-class Warship Void of Soul. The two fleets clashed hard for ten minutes, though in the end three of the enemy Warships surrendered to the two Magi Phalanx units, proclaiming themselves a woefully underprepared invasion fleet of the Negaverse Star Empire. The combat action started that day would be only the precursor to 3500 years of war that would grow to involve six massive Star Empires and thousands of minor players.

The final shots of the same war were fired by the same ship that received the first shots of the war. Eileen Weste, a ship over four millennia old and veteran of hundreds of campaigns, was ironically the last ship to fire in anger at the Negaverse, hours after the surrender was officially declared on their homeworld. Having sunk the final guard fleet around the manufacturing world of Tharkad 682, the Eileen Weste moved into position over the planet's main spaceport to support landing operations of mixed battlemechs and ground vehicles for taking the planet by force. The battle for the spaceport began with Aerofighter strikes against defending gun emplacements as the first two clusters of elite omnimech forces sky-dropped from their transports. As the Aerofighters moved outward from the Spaceport to bomb and strafe the incoming ground forces, the warship took up the support of the landing forces with broadside strikes of Naval Lasers, Naval Particle Cannons, and Naval Autocannons, each weapon tearing into the hardened bunkers and gun emplacements without reserve. With the forces on the ground and the static defenses all but annihilated, support priority shifted to the garrison armor that was bearing down on the spaceport from the north as the fighters manhandled the three companies of mercenary Battlemechs to the south and east. As the Eileen Weste retasked to the north, the fighters were recalled to the ship to guard against a possible fighter incursion from the moon seen on on long-range sensor scans. As the first batteries of guns opened fire on the garrison tanks, the HPG on the ship received a priority message to cease all combat actions due to Negaverse unconditional surrender. It would later be determined that no other Magi Warship was in combat with Negaverse units at the time of the reception of the stand-down orders, though several ships were within minutes of opening fire at that time. The ground forces in battle had already ceased fire, most of them forewarned faster by other means or Negaverse HPG messages to that effect.

The last shots fired against the Negaverse were a series of twelve Medium Naval Particle Cannons from the Eileen Weste, resulting in 26 heavily damaged or destroyed light and medium ground vehicles. A memorial was placed at the impact site of the last of those Particle Cannons to hit, signifying 'the last naval action of the war that nearly destroyed Existence in its bloody fury' as the memorial marker says. To this day, 12,000 years after the end of the war, military personnel, school children, historians and tourists from all six Star Empires visit the memorial to see where it ended. The twisted wreckage of a Partisan anti-air tank is the foundation of the memorial, and in the field surrounding it is the hulks of nearly fifty tanks, armored cars, and hovertanks destroyed in the moments and seconds leading up to the final shot.

Variants:

Variants of the venerable Phalanx are a dicey proposition. The arsenal was structured and engineered prior to the Universal Maintenance Initiative, therefore care must be given when modifying even the standard-scale armaments of the ship lest the cooling and power systems be overtaxed. Even still, there are numerous Phalanx that do not mount the standard arsenal in its entirely, mostly eschewing some of the ballistic or missile weapons for a more energy-based compliment and additional cooling system. The performance of these modified ships is comparable to the other ships of the class but far from enough of an improvement to justify retrofitting thousands of the ships and reengineering the new ones to the same effect.

As prior mentioned, the most common modification made to Phalanx units is the ratio of mobile assets carried. Most ships are in the standard 200-300-225 configuration of MA-MS-Fighters, though this has been inverted on some ships to be 200-225-300, a move which favors space battles and hit-and-run operations. Also sometimes seen is the aforementioned stripping out of all Mobile Armors from the ship for vastly-increased fighter and MS squadrons in a 0-1200-800 configuration, given that in certain eras of the ship's operation Mobile Armors were incredibly scarce but Mobile Suits and Gundams were not.

Lastly, an exceedingly rare configuration option is the reduction of the Mobile Forces entirely, trading in the ship's carrier status for the extra 300,000 tons of mobile assets being used as cargo storage, and relying on carried Dropships for fighter escort. This has been done only to two ships as a testbed for using the class as ultra-heavy freighters after the war ended, though even with theoretically reducing the arsenal of the ships by 60 percent (bringing the cargo capacity up well past 750,000 tons), the operating expense of the Phalanx-class is still far too much to be economically feasible even for the largest of the Megacorps when wagered against what it can carry to and fro. These two ships were reassigned to Colonization Corporation as military liaisons, and are now used as heavy colonization ships along with a significant portion of the other Phalanx-class ships, though the remainder did not trade in their carried units.

Notable Vessels & Crews:

Simply stated, there are no Phalanx ships that are not notable. The ship has performed so admirably over the millennia that it has a different nickname from each of the other Star Empires:

Negaverse: "Old Ironsides", in reference to its age and how hard it is to kill. This is the only nickname that can be chronologically confirmed as to when it first came into use, and was coined by Negaverse Admiral Jess Devoix Smith after watching one Phalanx ship (MHW-3307 Golden Grip) take enough punishment to annihilate twenty smaller ships and continue fighting as if it had not been damaged to begin with. First used in year 2941 of the Magi calendar.

Illyaris: "Star Destroyer", a backwards joke referencing the ship to the movies of the Star Wars franchise, though any Phalanx Captain will tell you that a Star Destroyer would win in such a fight hands down, due to the immense striking power of a Star Destroyer's guns.

Dark Moon: "Super Crusher", in clear reference to the paired Heavy Naval Rail Guns that were used to literally crush an 'impregnable' Dark Moon Fortress on a sub-capital world. The fortress was long assumed to be destroyable or could be captured only by way of a nuclear weapon, and plans were disseminated to build such fortresses on every important planet,

Dynasty: "Steel Demon", homage to the fact that normal Dynasty methods of killing things did not work on Phalanx ships, making it practically impossible for the almost-completely-groundbound Dynasty forces to defeat it at first. It was over 1600 years into the war before the Dynasty sunk their first Phalanx, MHW-5718 Phantom Train.

New Moon: "Star-Damned Angel", a particularly nasty epithet in the common culture of the New Moon Empire. Angels are considered highly evil by the mostly-nonhuman New Moon populace, as they are a symbol of human religious barbarism, xenophobia and persecution against those who do not conform to said religious practices. To be Star-Damned is essentially the same among the New Moon as telling someone to 'get butt-fucked by Satan after going to hell' in common Human language. The Phalanx earned this reputation by being literally untouchable by the completely-nontechnological New Moon forces, and it quickly became a symbol of the bloody excess of Star Empire warfare and how war had become something far less honorable than was passed down by their ancestry. The New Moon Empire never claimed a single Phalanx in combat, though after the initial opening decades of the war it never became necessary: the Magi and the New Moon were the only two Empires to stabilize and maintain a positive relationship with each other, never requiring further combat with the ships.

Deployment

Phalanx Ships are the elite of the Multimage naval forces, though far from the most numerous. In total, as of the beginning of the Second Star League (year 15611 of the Magi calendar) there are 202,943 Phalanx-class ships in active duty with the Empire, not including museum ships or memorial ships. The fleet of Phalanx ships, personnel and carried assets account for 3.84 percent of the Multimage military budget per year, though this percentage is relatively stable in terms of the expanding military size, given the population expansion exceeding this percentage faster than the military budget can expand.

The ship is used in four fashions: patrol, offense, defense, and colonization. In a patrol scenario, one or two ships will move with a limited amount of escorts and carried assets, jumping from one inhabited system to the next on a randomized path generated by Fleet Command, usually operating for a year at a time. These patrols typically cover only otherwise unguarded or lightly-guarded planetary systems or deep-space colony groups, as more important systems have static defenses and forces to repel an invasion.

In a defensive scenario, three to five of the Phalanx will guard a very high value area or planetary system with a moderate amount of carried assets (typically fifty to sixty Dropships), often for decades on end, guarding and training for an enemy invasion attempt against their ward. Defensive fleets are typically also used as training cadre for incoming Warship personnel and greenhorn fighter groups, though this practice does not describe the net effect to an enemy fleet if they are foolhardy to attack the defenders head-on.

In an offensive use, four to six Phalanx ships will be deployed heavily with massive ground forces, escorts, supply Jumpships and enough transport Dropships to conduct a long-term siege campaign typically lasting as much as three years. With each ship carrying as much as a Legion of forces (as many as 35 Galaxies of ground forces), an offensive fleet is easily capable of taking control of a very significant portion of an empire's holdings in one dimension. Typically, after taking a system, garrison forces will be brought in to free up the assault teams to move on to the next system slated for invasion. In a by-the-book offensive tour, a four-ship fleet will normally take 72 heavily-defended worlds and as many as 240 lightly-defend worlds in the space of three years.

The final and most frequent use of the ship does not itself involve combat. The 80-Dropship capacity of a Phalanx gives the Colonization Corporation one-jump capability to colonize a whole planet without the need to involve multiple relay-runs of smaller Jumpships. As the Magi are one of the most prolific groups in Existence in terms of both raw size and expansion rate, the necessity of opening up new planets to hordes of civilians willing to relocate is a requirement. As such, when loaded completely with Guild II-class Dropships in Colonization configuration, a Phalanx-class can transport 400,000 colonists and 1.76 million tons of supplies and cargo to a new world to be made into a new home for the citizens of the Empire. This also includes an array of 8,000 ground vehicles, mostly noncombat vehicles but also a smattering of garrison armor for the new planet; these first troops are usually engineering teams to aid in building up the new planet alongside the civilians, not traditional garrison or armor forces.

It is testament to the power and symbolism of the ship that it is still being constructed at the citizenry-mandated rate of 15 ships per fiscal year, even an eon after the end of the Star Empire Wars.

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Class/Model/Name: Phalanx / (Standard carry bays)

Mass: 5,850,000 tons

Equipment: Mass

Power Plant: Standard (1404000)

K-F Hyperdrive: *Modulated Super-Compact KF Core)* (Integrity = 72) (1755000)

Jump Sail: (Integrity = 17) (322.5)

Structural Integrity: 190 (1111500)

Safe Thrust: 4

Maximum Thrust: 6

Heat Sinks: 8420 Double (6700)

Fuel & Fuel Pumps: (18750)

Bridge & Controls: (14625)

Fire Control Computers: (100000)

Food & Water: (200 days supply) (6340)

Hyperpulse Generator: (50)

Armor Factor: 22200 Ferro-carbide (35000)

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Armor Value

(Capital Scale)

Fore: 4500

Fore Left / Right: 3850 / 3850

Aft Left / Right: 3500 / 3500

Aft: 3000

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Equipment & Options:

Cargo: (Tonnage)

Bay 1: Mobile Armors (200) with 50 doors (210000)

Bay 2: MS or Gundams (300) with 75 doors (45000)

Bay 3: Fighters (225) with 50 doors (33750)

Bay 4: Small Craft (50) with 13 doors (12500)

Bay 5: Cargo (163450 tons) with 80 doors (163450)

DropShip Capacity:

80 Docking Hardpoints (80000)

Escape Pods: 240 (7 tons each) (1680)

Gravitic Lattice: 1 System (58500)

Crew and Passengers:

383 Officers

1215 Crew

700 Gunners

400 Marine Battle Armor Troopers/Elementals

1100 Extra Crew and Technicians

2550 Bay Personnel

TOTAL PERSONNEL: 6348

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Weapons & Equipment:

Heavy Naval Rail Gun (40 rounds) (Fore)

Heavy Naval Rail Gun (40 rounds) (Fore)

2 Heavy N-Gauss (120 rounds) (Fore)

2 Heavy N-Gauss (120 rounds) (Fore)

3 Heavy Naval PPC (Fore)

3 Heavy Naval PPC (Fore)

2 NL55 (Fore)

2 NL55 (Fore)

2 NL55 (Fore)

2 NL55 (Fore)

4 NL35 (FL/FR)

4 AR-10 (15 each class missile) (FL/FR)

4 AR-10 (15 each class missile) (FL/FR)

5 Barracuda-T (20 missiles) (FL/FR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (FL/FR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (FL/FR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (FL/FR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (FL/FR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (FL/FR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (FL/FR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (FL/FR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (FL/FR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (FL/FR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (FL/FR)

4 Gauss Rifle (C) (240 rounds) (FL/FR)

4 Gauss Rifle (C) (240 rounds) (FL/FR)

4 Gauss Rifle (C) (240 rounds) (FL/FR)

3 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (1080 rds) (FL/FR)

3 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (1080 rds) (FL/FR)

4 Streak LRM 15 (C) (240 rounds) (FL/FR)

4 Streak LRM 15 (C) (240 rounds) (FL/FR)

3 Medium Naval PPC (L / RBS)

3 Medium Naval PPC (L / RBS)

3 Medium Naval PPC (L / RBS)

3 Medium Naval PPC (L / RBS)

2 NAC/30 (120 rounds) (L / RBS)

2 NAC/30 (120 rounds) (L / RBS)

2 NAC/30 (120 rounds) (L / RBS)

2 NAC/30 (120 rounds) (L / RBS)

2 NAC/30 (120 rounds) (L / RBS)

2 NAC/30 (120 rounds) (L / RBS)

4 Killer Whale – T (120 rounds) (L / RBS)

4 Killer Whale – T (120 rounds) (L / RBS)

4 Killer Whale – T (120 rounds) (L / RBS)

3 White Shark – T (90 rounds) (L / RBS)

3 White Shark – T (90 rounds) (L / RBS)

2 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (720 rds) (L / RBS)

2 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (720 rds) (L / RBS)

2 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (720 rds) (L / RBS)

2 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (720 rds) (L / RBS)

2 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (720 rds) (L / RBS)

4 ER Large Laser (C) (L / RBS)

4 ER Large Laser (C) (L / RBS)

2 NL35 (RL/RR)

2 NL35 (RL/RR)

5 Kraken – T (150 missiles) (RL/RR)

5 Barracuda – T (150 missiles) (RL/RR)

5 Barracuda – T (150 missiles) (RL/RR)

5 Screen Launcher (125 screens) (RL/RR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

4 Large Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

4 Medium Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

4 Medium Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

4 Medium Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

4 Medium Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

4 Medium Pulse Laser (C) (RL/RR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (RL/RR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (RL/RR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (RL/RR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (RL/RR)

6 Laser AMS (C) (RL/RR)

2 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (720 rds) (RL/RR)

2 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (720 rds) (RL/RR)

2 Rotary Autocannon 10 (C, MFUK) (720 rds) (RL/RR)

5 Streak LRM 15 (C) (200 rds) (RL/RR)

5 Streak LRM 15 (C) (200 rds) (RL/RR)

5 Streak SRM 6 (C) (150 rds) (RL/RR)

5 Streak SRM 6 (C) (150 rds) (RL/RR)

5 NL55 (Rear)

5 NL55 (Rear)

3 Medium Naval PPC (Rear)

3 Medium Naval PPC (Rear)

2 ER Large Laser (C) (Rear)

2 ER Large Laser (C) (Rear)

2 ER Large Laser (C) (Rear)

2 ER Large Laser (C) (Rear)

2 ER Large Laser (C) (Rear)

5 Streak SRM 6 (C) (150 rds) (Rear)

5 Streak SRM 6 (C) (150 rds) (Rear)

5 Laser AMS (C) (Rear)

5 Laser AMS (C) (Rear)

TOTALS: 16262 Heat

5849950.81 Tons of equipment

Tons Left: 49.19

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Calculated Factors:

Total Cost: 117,075,885,103.95 C-Bills

Battle Value: Unknown (In excess of 900,000 BV)

Cost per BV: 133,084 (assuming 900,000 BV)

Weapon Value: Unknown

BATTLETECH SPECIAL RULES:

Phalanx-class ships follow all standard combat procedures for Warships, with one notable exception: Initiative for the Phalanx-class ships is always below any other kind of vessel, except for Ultradreadnoughts. Therefore, all phases go as follows: Ultradreadnoughts, Superdreadnoughts (Phalanx), Dreadnoughts, then follow normal Aerotech 2 turn order.

When determining effects of a jump performed by a Superdreadnought, increase the affected radius around the ship from the magnetic field by two hexes and step up the damage incrementally assuming the the outermost two hex rows are the same as the normal radius of a jumpship or warship. Note that a Jumpship in the outermost row of hexes will still be affected by a jump, but will not interfere with a Superdreadnought's jump (no chance for shutdown or critical damage to the Phalanx jump engine).

HEAVY NAVAL RAIL GUN:

Classified as Naval Gauss weapon. Each standard slug causes 200 points of capital-scale damage. AT2 Range special: this weapon performs flat across all four range brackets in a normal AT2 game, which comes out to +2 to hit penalty for short, medium, long and extreme range, highlighting the difficulty in turning the whole ship to target an enemy. This weapon is capable of interplanetary bombardment, whereby a ship can take orbit around Terra's moon and fire on the surface of Terra with only the usual suborbital bombardment penalties (firing through ASI, each hex of atmosphere traveled, suborbital penalty). Against space targets, these guns fire at a +1 penalty per 300,000 kilometers of travel.

This weapon cannot under any circumstance deliberately target craft below 300 tons, and suffers +10 to-hit against craft below 1000 tons (replacing the normal modifier for capital weapons against targets below 500 tons).

Each shot of the massive guns produces 100 heat. Each HNRG masses 200,000 tons, and ships are limited to 1 HNRG per 2 million tons of ship mass. Ammo for the HNRG weighs five tons per shot. Cost per unit is 500 million C-bills, with a cost per slug of 300,000. Obviously, this is Level 3 equipment (non-tournament in CBT Tech Manual parlance).

SPECIAL ORDINANCE: The HNRG can use special ordinance as defined below. Prior to the start of gameplay, a player controlling a Phalanx should designate what type of shells are carried per each gun. This is due to the fact that the two magazines for the Rail Guns are not co-located and the ammo reserve for one cannot feed the other. Any combination of the shells listed below can be carried and used in any order the player desires.

Standard Slugs: Each slug causes 200 points capital-scale damage and follows normal rules for Aerotech weapons fire. This is the most commonly-used shell and the default option if no ammo type is specified.

Long-Rod Penetrators: APFSDS shells can be used by the Heavy Naval Rail Guns for attacks against heavy-armor targets. Each APFSDS long-rod penetrator causes 200 points of capital scale damage, but see the rules below before marking the armor boxes off. APFSDS attacks differ from standard weapons attacks in the following ways: APFSDS shells receive a -1 to-hit bonus when used in suborbital strikes, as they are faster and less prone to atmospheric shifting when going through the atmosphere. When resolving hits against other Aerotech units, the APFSDS checks for a critical hit regardless of whether or not it exceeded the damage threshold of the struck location. Additionally, against targets smaller than 2 million tons or targets that have less than 150 capital-scale armor, roll 2d6. On a result of 8 or better (5 or better if both less than 2 million tons and less than 150 capital armor), the projectile has gone straight through the target (over-penetrated). In such cases, automatically apply the appropriate critical hit for the location hit, and resolve damage in the following fashion. First, roll three to-hit rolls. If any of the rolls match the same facing as already hit, automatically apply those critical hit effects as well. Second, the damage applied to the facing struck is 75 capital-scale points. The internal structure of the ship takes 50 capital-scale damage, and if the ship targeted is a Warship or Jumpship, roll 2d6: on a result of 6+ for jumpships or 8+ for Warships, the K-F Drive takes a critical hit. The Slug then attacks the facing of armor directly opposite the ship from where the hit initially struck (for example, if shot in the nose, the slug then attacks the rear of the ship). Damage to this armor location is 75 points capital, and the defending player rolls against each class of critical hit for the location in question using the appropriate column as if they had been shot in the opposite location to begin with, and all critical hits taken apply.

Explosive Shells: Explosive shells are primarily used for dealing with thin-skinned targets and ground targets, though can be used against larger ships if needed. Each explosive shell causes the prerequisite 200 points of capital damage, though this is not necessarily all to one location. When resolving hits against capital-scale targets, roll a location on the appropriate column, then roll an additional 2d6. On a result of 2 to 5, all the damage is in one location. On a result of 6 to 8, the damage is divided evenly between two locations, the second one is picked by 1d6 dice roll: on 1 to 3, the second location is clockwise from the first location, on 4 to 6 the other half is counterclockwise. On a roll of 9 to 12, the damage is split 100 to the struck location and 50 points each to the adjacent locations. When used against ground locations, the shell has a +1 to-hit penalty but operates differently when resolving damage. Rather than reducing the damage from a strike by 20 percent per hex away from the impact point, the damage is reduced by 10 percent per hex distance. Therefore, the center hex struck takes 2000 points standard damage, the next hex out takes 1800 points, two hexes out takes 1600, and so on. Additionally, the center hex of the targeted zone becomes a two-level crater, and all hexes surrounding the impact point become a level one crater.

Canister Shells: Canister Shells are used to deny whole swaths of space to smaller craft, as their usefulness is rather limited against larger targets. Additionally, the Canister Shell cannot be used in atmospheric attacks, as the shell will not survive reentry, much less the individual pellets. Each time a cluster shell is fired, it will travel a distance as set by the player and detonate, releasing a conical spray of LBX pellets forward from that point. From the detonation point, for each four hexes the blast travels in a line from the firing unit, the pattern of the shot will expand one hex to each side. Therefore, at nine hexes from the detonation point, the width of the attack path is five hexes in the continuing direction of the attack. For every craft caught in the path of the attack, both friend and foe, roll a to-hit attack with a bonus modifier equal to the distance from the detonation point divided by four. If successfully hit, roll out an amount of missile hits as if the craft had been struck by 100 LBX pellets when within 4 hexes, reducing the amount of pellets by ten for each four hexes of linear travel. Check each unit in the line moving progressively farther away from the firing unit and detonation point, and each time a craft is struck subtract the amount of hits it took from a total of 1000 pellets in the canister. Continue checking each unit in the fire path until all ordinance is expended or there are no more targets to check. Note that this shell inflicts 150 points of capital damage if used against a target without detonating it first.

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