Happy ... whatever day it is to everyone who's sharing their time with the SRC. Thank you once for paying close attention to the fate of humanity~ Interestingly, in the end, this story will still be about war, the totality of it, but viewed from a different perspective, and waged for a different reason.

Side promotion~ Here is me reading a bedtime story, the Call of Cthulhu, on YouTube: raCQ3atCOYo (or follow the link from the subreddit at r/MinimalistMusings/)

The Battle for Nova

Without the ability to slow down the chaos ships, Commodore Perry, could only bring his small fleet out of the range of the imposing new vessels. Trailing the enemy, he nonetheless did his duty, sending as much of his information to the administration on Nova III as possible.

To the surprise of humanity, the Chaos fleet veered at the last moment. Instead of laying siege over the capital planet of Nova III, the, now confirmed, chaos warband instead turned directly towards Nova II. With complete disregard to the extremely light planetary garrison fleet hovering over the equator, the warband drove straight through the atmosphere. The ships bore directly on the multiple centers of population on Nova II, with the largest two bearing down on the capital and the second city and the four smaller ships splitting to target the others in order of size.

Instead of crashing, the sharp-nosed ships buried into the city, their hardened front slicing through skyscrapers and stone buildings alike as the vessels used the energy from their descent to bury themselves into the ground. Explosions caused by their forced entry growing from the molten centers, radiating out in a wave of fire, heat, and *sound.*

Upwards of twenty million humans died in that initial conflagration.

From space, the buried ships shifted almost imperceptibly, but from underneath the ground a great groaning was rumbling. Those building that had survived the orbital drop by kilometre-long ships, now came tumbling down as the chaos ships themselves seem to transform *in-place*. Invisibly, the superstructure of the ship slid through the hull and extended outwards underneath the ground, anchoring the great vessels firmly into the bedrock.

Within two hours, it became obvious to the SRC what the meaning of this was. Even as legions of chaotic grunts poured out of the ships, the hulls themselves began to fire *upwards*. It turns out that even while the main cannon on the ships were buried in the ground, the point defence and secondary weapons were still capable, and they were capable of anti-orbit combat. The ships had become bastions of planetary defence, almost completely cutting off the SRC from Nova II.

On Nova III the immediate response was one of shocked silence. But the Scientists in charge of the SRC were nothing if not efficient. Within an hour of the Chaos incursion on Nova II alert levels in all of SRC space were raised to maximum, and all of humanity reconfigured itself for war. For the first time in generations, Humanity had an external focus, and could put aside petty differences and concentrate on the destruction of a clear foe.

Even though volunteer rates were at an all-time high, within two weeks the SRC still instituted system-wide conscription. This was not to increase manpower levels per se, rather the conscription law allowed the SRC to take over multiple critical manufactorum across SRC space, and introduce labour as a form of citizen service.

This had become necessary, because in the intervening two weeks all attempts by the SRC to establish orbital superiority were destroyed by the anti-orbital towers. Even now, there was only a threadbare fleet screening the planet of Nova II as its orbit took it further and further away from the capital of Nova III. So Humanity in the rest of the system could only watch in despair as the world slowly fell back to chaos.

Three months after the impact, the last of the transmitters on Nova II finally cut off. The grim reality had settled into Human consciousness. With the entire planet being written off, the two-hundred million citizens on Nova II were essentially abandoned to chaos. Not only had the forces of Chaos returned to society, but it had retrenched itself in such a way that made it almost impossible to unearth.

There was a little bit of good news for Humanity at least. Two month into the Chaos incursion, Commodore Perry, raging at his failure in preventing the Chaos incursion had found one location on Nova II that was not covered by the anti-orbit weaponry. Braving the seething mass of chaos and destruction below him, Perry borrowed a move from his enemy and brought his fleet onto the surface, sacrificing one of his destroyers in a unmanned-suicide run to clear a safe zone. Into the zone, he landed his entire fleet, using the ships themselves as fortifications to fight off wave after wave of newly turned cultists, or demons themselves.

This beachhead was bought with many lives, but, with the SRC rushing reinforcements developed from the newly expropriated manufactorums, it held. And thus the hardest part of retaking Nova II was accomplished. From here on out, it would be a battle of economics, industry and morale, something the SRC was much more confident about.

Perry, in the meantime, received a field promotion to Commander-in-chief of all Human forces on Nova II. This allowed him to consolidate all the resources remaining on the planet, even establishing contact with several small outposts that were continuing to hold out. It was not possible to relieve them, and, given the chance of chaos cultists already embedded in their ranks, it was not advisable. But these outposts did receive judicious resupply, at times being prioritized even over existing defensive fortification work on the landing zone.

Within a week of claiming the beachhead, Perry had received enough ground formations to attempt an outward push. While most of the planet remained dark to him, long-distance scans, taken from lightseconds away, showed a slow spread of chaos from the major cities. Darkening ground suggested a destruction of ecosystems, while billowing smog meant that whatever the Chaos cultist and their demon masters were doing, it was fuelling an industry that was gearing up for war.

Thus his first action was to advance as far forward as possible, trying to protect his portion of the supercontient that made up all usable landmass on Nova II. With his southern flank protected by the ocean, the various volunteer regiments were consolidated into three groups, and sent in the three cardinal directions. Out of the three, only the western group reached the ocean, allowing it to turn northwards, and take up the flank of the northern group.

The other two groups soon ran into determined opposition, being met on the battlefield first by waves and waves of demented cultists, then by progressively more organized forces as the original city guards were reorganized into chaos armies, ready to fight. Even as the campaign advanced, the resistance offered by the Chaos forces began to stiffen as ever more advanced demonic weaponry were created and put into the fight against the SRC.

Lest his progress all be for nought, Perry signalled his intention to dig in. Even as the campaign was ongoing in the frontier, the Engineering Corps was already hard at work establishing a defensive line closer to his landing zone. For this, a particularly strong river was chosen as the eastern flank, while the north was anchored by a series of tall mountains, and lakes.

Once the fortifications were in place, the front was slowly pulled back, as the formations with the most losses were pulled even further to the rear to rest and reorganize. Contrary to his own expectations, the Chaos armies threw themselves with abandon against his fortifications, resulting in massive losses and very little gain. Finally, three years after Chaos first embedded itself on Nova II, a stalemate settled on the southern side of the planet.