3 AC: Harsa System, Khar'Shan
Batrak, Lord High Defender of Khar'Shan, hated humans. He had hated them before today, but now he really, really did.
He did not have the forces free to combat the spontaneously created fleet approaching from the sun. He needed to throw everything into the holding action against the main Human fleet on the other side of the planet, and even then he knew he was in trouble. Hit and run tactics had been extremely effective, but as the fleet came into its last burst of deceleration before its arrival, those would no longer be possible. And in a straight up fight, he would lose. Orbital defenses and several other surprises would help, but this was the most dangerous time, where everything balanced on his success, and he could not fail. Nor spare the ships to intercept the smaller Human fleet on the day side.
He glanced at a small data display near him, its pale orange glow detailing vectors and acceleration for the Human fleets. He looked back at the main display, only to snap his head back at the smaller one.
"Confirm these numbers," he rumbled.
A few seconds passed, and an assistant answered, "They are accurate my Lord, to the best abilities of our sensors."
"It's too high," he said.
"My Lord?"
"The largest Human ship. Its deceleration profile is wrong."
The assistant re-examined the approach vectors.
"Ah, it appears we were predicting the fleet's arrival as a whole, and missed this. It has only started to diverge in the last half hour," the assistant said.
"It's not decelerating enough."
"No, my Lord. Updated projections indicate it will impact Khar'Shan," said the aide, their eyes wide.
Batrak, Lord High Defender of Khar'Shan, shook his head slowly. The Council might be turning a partially blind eye to this war, but they would never tolerate the use of extinction-level kinetic impactors against a garden world. In any case, the ship was too large and obviously designed for some purpose. If Humanity had wanted to simply ram Khar'Shan, they could have towed an asteroid. Or a moon, he thought, given the capabilities of the ships currently towing the Relay.
"No," he said, the answer forming in his head as he spoke. You could never truly conquer a planet, not without being able to put a soldier on every street corner, and an army in every city. Millions of troops. And if you wanted to transport them, you'd need a lot of ships. Or one very, very large one.
"It won't impact. It will land. It's a troop transport vessel." A troop transport vessel almost 10 kilometres long. An additional fact flickered through his head. Batarian intelligence was rather sure Human vessels didn't have interior space like other species did. They were almost solid, no wasted living areas or life support. Just weapons, armour, power, and, in this case, troops.
The battlefield changed again. If that ship landed, it would be almost impossible to remove Humanity from his world. If he lost in space, they would have orbital superiority, and his world would be lost. And there was still whatever that other fleet was doing, the 49 ships approaching from the dayside. The bunker in which he sat, miles below the surface of his homeworld, would be on the dayside when the fleets arrived, adding a tiny but potentially deadly delay to his communication with the defense fleet. The Bahak fleet was a dagger up his sleeve, but one he had already thrown. Its deployment time and place was known. He let the pieces of the puzzle settle around that certainty, and planned.
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Admiral Amitomk grinned. Khar'Shan lay before her. Final deceleration maneuvers had begun, and they were about to come in range of the first batarian orbital defense platforms. It was about to get interesting. The human fleet was limited in its weapons. Firing towards the planet with a mass driver risked a missed shot, and no one wanted to use the terms "collateral damage" and "orbital bombardment" in the same sentence.
The Batarian defenses were not so limited.
Still, in another three hours, they'd be parked in orbit above Khar'Shan, and could start the actual invasion.
"Ma'am, we're getting a message from the Expletive Construction. The Relay is activating, but there are no reinforcements scheduled," said Comms.
Amitomk frowned, and called up a window. Why was Sol sending unplanned reinforcements?
The nature of Relays made besieging a system simple enough. Primary Relays worked point to point over great distances, whereas Secondary Relays transmitted to any Relay within their smaller range. If you controlled the Relays that could reach the Relay of the system you were besieging, you controlled what ships got sent through. The fight to claim the links to Khar'Shan had been rough, but with the majority of the Batarian fleets either already in the Harsa System or on the other side of the galaxy, Humanity had them bottled.
They assumed.
In the Bahak System was a Relay older than any other, with a secret. The Alpha Relay could send ships across greater distances than any other known Relay, if activated correctly. The Batarians knew this, but like any good sneaky bastard, they kept it to themselves.
In the Bahak System, every batarian ship that could not make it to Khar'Shan waited. Even slavers, pirates, and other Terminus System outlaws had shown up. The batarians were good for business. Humanity, so far, had been absolute death to business. They might not be willing to die for the cause, but they'd be more than happy to shoot for the cause. Almost as many ships as already waited in orbit around Khar'Shan began to move. They had received the message from Batrak, Lord High Defender of Khar'Shan, and their wait was over.
Still approaching Khar'Shan, the Relay opened.
Admiral Amitomk swore, an old curse in a dead programming language that still hissed into the air as it left her virtual lips. She thought furiously. They still had superior firepower, but were caught in a classic hammer-and-anvil attack. They were tough enough that both the hammer and the anvil were going to regret this, but if they managed to take down the Yggdrasill then the invasion was basically over.
She sincerely hoped whatever batarian bastard was behind the frustratingly cunning defenses did not realise this.
The batarian relief fleet had begun to attack the Expletive Construction and its accompanying ships. Amitomk was too far away to help, but, she thought, grinning, she didn't have to.
"Expletive Construction! Signal the Movers and Shakers to adjust their course to the following heading, then evac to you. As soon as they have, fall back," she sent.
Slowly, the massive ships fastened to the Relay adjusted course. The change was a minute one. A few moments later, they went dark, and the Expletive Construction broke away, retreating and menacing any ships that tried to follow without the full fleet backing them up.
The batarian fleet seemed confused for a second, then began to fire at the apparently inanimate objects attached to the Relay.
Amitomk's grin was now 98% teeth.
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"Tell them to stop firing!" boomed Batrak, Lord High Defender of Khar'Shan.
An aide was already frantically sending the ceasefire message to the newly arrived fleet.
Batrak, Lord High Defender of Khar'Shan, stared at the display. It was a cunning move on the Human's part. The new heading placed the Relay in an unstable orbit. If their ships were destroyed, or humanity defeated, the batarians would have no way to stop the eventual impact of the Relay onto Khar'Shan.
Orbital projections placed impact time in approximately 4 weeks. A long time away, but even if Humanity was defeated here, the batarians may have no choice but to beg them to return to save them all. And Humanity's hands were almost clean. They had been moving the Relay safely enough, and obviously had taken care to place it into orbit at all, rather than simply aiming it at the capital. If the batarians destroyed the only way to stop that, well, hardly Humanity's fault, right?
He ground his teeth, and glanced at the smaller monitor. The stealth fleet, its 49 strange vessels still approaching, had blown through the force he'd sent to stop them. Oddly, only a few had fired, and the others seemed to have no weapons ports or projections whatsoever.
It was, unfortunately, a puzzle he would have to come back to. There were problems he could solve, and problems he couldn't. And he was more than busy enough with the ones he HAD to solve.
His eyes narrowed, all four twitching inwards. The ship. The big ship humanity had been protecting so hard. The ancestor's damned troop transport. All the other human vessels had taken at least minor damage, but some had only taken those hits to protect it. He was torn between the necessity of preserving his defense fleets and the need to destroy that ship before it landed. Humanity had given him the answer. They obviously believed that ship was worth protecting at all costs, so it had to go. There had only been a few moments in his career when the calm voice of strategy had been blown away by the loud voice of brute force, but he had the ships now. It was time for a gamble.
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"The Batarian Relay fleet is inbound, but are staying just out of effective range," announced Sensors.
Amitomk watched the data carefully. The Batarians were waiting. The hammer was poised, the anvil ready.
"WarSeeds?" she asked.
"Lost them in the planet's shadow ma'am, but they should be in position in 30 minutes."
There was a feeling like thunder, or drums. A heart she didn't have beat a rhythm in the blood she'd given up centuries ago. She leaned forwards, all teeth and fire. She could feel the others on the bridge sim responding too.
Sometimes, the Voice didn't speak. It just was, thrumming between the Uploaded; a shared experience and life and connection.
Amitomk spoke the words they'd waited so long to hear.
"It's time."
3 AC: Harsa System, Khar'Shan orbit
From a distance, battle is beautiful, and elegant. Armies and fleets respond like slow liquid organisms, testing opportunities, recoiling from counters. Pressure is slow to build, then changes quickly. Calm stalemates form along battlelines.
Up close, battle is chaos. Pain and panic, fire and death. Combatants may remember every second with icy clarity, or have it slip from their minds. Moments of heroism and cowardice fill every battle, from valiant sacrifices to mortal accidents. Battle is often won by small moments, and war by larger.
The Human fleet was close in, defensively grouped. Ahead of them, the final Batarian garrison fleet moved to engage. Behind them, the Terminus fleet had vanished off sensors, jumping into FTL. Its ETA was only minutes after they would engage the garrison fleet.
Taking a risk, Humanity's defenses were heavily grouped in front, ready to absorb the main forces of the garrison fleet, with a rearguard that was more than sufficient to handle the Terminus fleet behind them, especially considering their little surprise. The Yggdrasil was protected, but not completely. Drawing too much attention to it might prompt a desperate attack, if the enemy realised what it was, and how vital it was to the invasion.
On the other side of the planet, a small force gathered to repel the WarSeed fleet, though they seemed insufficient to break through the Batarian orbital defenses.
As the garrison and Human fleets met, it seemed that the gambit had paid off. There was no desperate attack, no strike. The garrison fleet engaged the Human fleet en masse, attempting to lock them into a static battle, trap them in range of the orbital defenses, the garrison, and the Terminus fleet.
Humanity was making it difficult. Their armour held, their weapons ferociously carving into defensive position and ship alike. But the batarians were fanatically loyal, and fighting in defense of their homeworld.
There were many small moments of heroism and cowardice, on both sides.
When the Terminus fleet emerged, they were met by the minefield the Human rearguard had deployed. Now that Humanity had slowed to enter orbit, their own defensive and area-denial technologies could be used.
However, the fleet that quickly disengaged from the minefield, and began making inaccurate shots at range, was only a fraction the size of the one that had entered FTL.
Moments later, the rest appeared, cutting in from the sides of the Human fleet where there were fewer ships. The necessity of meeting the main garrison, and maintaining the rearguard meant that the sides of the Human formation were weaker. Two halves of the new Terminus fleet strafed the flanks, targeting individual ships, and even striking further in against the Yggdrasil.
Humanity responded in two ways. First, their formation shifted. A small number of ships moving to better cover the flanks. Second, these ships aided in deploying the simplest area-denial technology Humanity had.
Caltrops.
Millions of chunks of metal, barely the size of a fist, were released around the human flanks. Space was big, and they would only maintain an effective density for a short time, even with the Human fleet almost at a standstill. This was why they hadn't used them against the previous hit-and-run attacks.
But now, the second wave of Terminus ships impacted metal chunks while travelling at the insane speeds needed to pull off a successful strafing run. They may as well have held still and let a dreadnought shoot them. After all, Albert Einstein is the deadliest son of a bitch in space.
Then, as though they were waiting for the distraction, the garrison fleet struck.
Headless of their own casualties, they launched forwards in a wedge, punching through the Human defensive line, even as dozens of ships burned.
Roaring defiance, they began to attack the Yggdrasil, a not-insignificant portion of the batarian military might hammering down on its broad, domed front. Gouts of hull armour vaporised, surface explosions blossomed as critical points were hit.
And the Yggdrasil's own point defenses came online. The ship was 10 kilometers long, its broad head almost half as wide. While it carried no main guns or other purely offensive weaponry, more turrets and drone-fighters blossomed from it than protected some planets.
The garrison fleet's attack slowed, and then the rest of the Human fleet closed in.
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Batrak, Lord High Defended of Khar'Shan, felt the icy cold of failure writhe in his gut. He ignored it.
He still lived. The Terminus fleet still flew. The planet-side military was still his to control, and if he had to turn this into a bloody guerrilla war, he would.
His command bunker was a mile under a mountain in the wastes of the southern continent, serviced by a great underground network. From here, he had supplies, secure comms, and hate.
The war was not yet over.
An alert sounded on the screens. The unknown fleet had...vanished?
His eyes widened as the last few seconds of video replayed. The WarSeeds had bloomed, each shrugging off surprisingly thin armour to display oversized Singularity cores stacked like beads on a string, surrounded by dozens of long, thin metal spikes. All pointed directly forward, like a bundle of sticks. And all vanishing as the cores spent themselves to launch the spikes at the panet.
He didn't need to check where they were aimed. He had been in checkmate the whole time, and only now did he see.
The alloy rods, accelerated and aimed with a precision no Council race could match, dropped towards him. The orbital defenses would be unable to stop hundreds of kinetic rods as they punched through, and accelerated. That they shouldn't be able to penetrate his bunker did not calm him.
He knew they'd found him. A tiny alert notified him that one of the distant relay stations, connected to his bunker by hundreds of miles of shielded cable, had just broadcast a burst of data.
He had shut the doors to his house long before the war had started, but there had already been a Ghost inside. Probably from First Contact, he mused idly as the spear of metal and fire on his screens fractured further into a precisely-calculated shrapnel burst that would penetrate straight to his bunker.
The floor dropped away from him, but only for a moment.
XXXXX
Although losses were low, almost every ship in the Human fleet was damaged. Pausing for a time, they initiated repairs and let their armour regen as much as it could before pressing onwards. In particular, the Yggdrasil was given several armour patches from less vital ships to return it to full operating capacity.
With the garrison fleet destroyed, they made short work of the orbital defenses surrounding Khar'Shan. A fraction of its previous strength, most of the Terminus fleet had fled back through the Relay. The Expletive Construction, bolstered by reinforcements from the main fleet, re-took the Relay, and reactivated the great drive engines that had been attached to it. They had a new target.
And the Yggdrasil fell inwards.
As its massive weight began a slow, sweeping equatorial orbit, dropboats the size of buildings launched in droves from under the protection of its armour. From this height, they could arc down onto most of the planet's surface. The dropboats were heavily armoured, and need pay no mind to the rigors of rapid deceleration. They only slowed their descent enough to avoid burying themselves on impact.
They struck major military and infrastructure sites, spawning hundreds of battle-ready infantry warbodies in moments. The dropboats themselves began transforming, emplacing themselves and deploying defense armatures. All but the most hardened sites were overrun in minutes, and firmly Human held.
Still the Yggdrasil swept lower.
Its top acceleration in space was almost 70Gs. A mere planetary gravity was not a concern. It was barely moving, by re-entry standards, when it swept over the capital. Most of the city fell into its shadow.
As it left the city behind for the shallow sea nearby, its massive bulk swung upwards, the broad arms of the dome-like head reaching out like branches. As it touched down, steam from its reentry heat and displaced waves created massive tidal surges that would test the batarian's storm defense systems.
As its mass settled onto the seabed, the citizens of the capital gazed in awe at the vessel that stood higher than their highest mountain, the steam from its landing wreathing its lower reaches, while the clouds disturbed by its appearance began to find new ways around its summit.
The swarms of drones and transports that still flew from it were pleasantly mundane by comparison.
XXXXX
From the star, a new solar prominence emerged. The WarSeeds had not left, simply deployed their first wave in the decapitation strike.
Now, their true purpose was revealed.
Fused together, they had become the base of a new stellar lifting station. The solar prominence that had heralded its emergence from the star distorted, already being drawn in to its hungry interior.
The Third Shell began construction.
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On the ground, the first mass deployment of Human warbodies in the larger galaxy was seen.
Dozens of Avaunts marched side by side, tower shields locked in position against oncoming fire. Hundreds of drones added withering covering fire, punctuated with the thunder of Hoppers. Variants of these mainstays appeared as well, from grenadier Avaunts with micro-factories in bulky back-packs that could deploy custom ammunition for any situation, to smaller but more armoured Hoppers designed for close-quarters combat.
Raptors cleared buildings with brutal efficiency, sliding through air vents and punching through any wall that wasn't reinforced.
Kestrel-held areas were no-go zones, filled with innocuous objects that killed, and invisible snipers.
New warbodies were seen. Trikes, fat-bodied and triple-limbed, moved with uncanny speed and agility on wheels or claws as needed. A hybrid combat medic/engineer, they held within them large amounts of utility fog, the micron-sale liquid machinery used in most Human manufacturing. Field repairs could be done in minutes, and demolitions and emplacements performed with similar celerity.
Slow but tough Megats, with thick bodies and oversized front legs, served as artillery or heavy fire support, their massive torsos and hunched backs holding spinal canons and shoulder-mounted point-defenses. Capable climbers, they could emplace themselves on almost any surface, anchoring their stubby back legs and sinking their massive front claws into solid concrete.
Melvilles moved with irresistible slowness, their building-sized bulk supported by multiple tank-treaded limbs. Mobile staging bases, their progress marked the loss of batarian ground, for once arrived in an area, few things could touch them. They also often housed Sprites, Ghosts-in-training, why could not yet move through raw cyberspace, but whose hacking and e-war capabilities were well-honed.
Finally, the Schwarzschilds heralded a new era in warfare. Brand-new, only three were deployed for the batarian invasion, but their presence was noted upon by all observers. Little more than armoured spheres ten meters across, Schwarzschilds contained Singularity drives, and the power to run them. Humanity's answer to biotics couldn't match the rest of the galaxy in numbers, finesse, or control, but instead of drawing from the biochemical energy of an organic, they were powered by five fusion reactors, a technology long mastered by Humanity. Shields and kinetic strikes were all they could manage, and on a scale too small to be deployed on starships yet, but footage of one Schwarzschild successfully shielding against a massive counter-strike by the remnants of the batarian military made many galactic powers worried about the "yet" in that statement.
Through all this, Humanity strove to minimize casualties. Shock-and-awe broke batarian ranks, and often saved batarian lives. Ignoring fire from exhausted batarians, tireless warbodies incapacitated where possible, and annihilated when not. Trusting armour and QIHs, Human soldiers disarmed civilians who fought back without returning fire, and healed all those captured. The flawless, faceless armour of the warbodies sapped resistance as much as anything else, with nothing seeming to wear Humanity down.
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Over a year later, it was over. Pockets of violence still flared, but with the surrender of the batarian leadership and destruction of the batarian military, no meaningful threat could be made against the new owners of Khar'Shan. In a meeting which was as well broadcast as the rest of the war, Human diplomats presented the batarians with a document that would become infamous, and eventually famous.
The Batarian Concord was the first look at Humanity's plans for the galaxy. It laid out, as clearly as possible, expected rights and responsibilities for both individuals and organisations. While not without flaw, it amounted to a proclamation of universal basic morality. Many batarian customs were illegal under the Concord, but so was the imposition of control over another race's right to self-govern. Warily, the batarian leadership signed, the Concord, and Humanity left their world, almost overnight.
Acting within the precepts of the Concords, the Third Shell began supplying the batarians with trade goods and materials for rebuilding. Human construction technology was freely offered, and instead of a depression, the batarian economy experienced a boom as freed slaves and harsher anti-corruption laws cleared generations of nepotism from their commercial, industrial, and municipal structures. Certain trade goods that Humanity offered were cheaper when bought from batarians now, and the rest of the galaxy had a great need for several of the materials and products only Shells could make.
The Shell remained Human-held, and the Relay moved to a new orbit between it and Khar'Shan. Slowly but surely, a new and better batarian civilisation began to form, its scaffolding laid down by Transcendent Humanity, but led by the batarian people.