1900 hours, May 10, 2542 (UNSC military calendar)
UNSC Everest, Battlegroup X-ray, New Ghent system
Admiral Preston Cole was getting tired of waiting. Every single day he was here meant one less day spent fighting the Covenant and more lives lost. It was starting to drive him up the wall. The news that the derelict on New Ghent was contaminated had done little to improve his mood.
Going by Dove's calculations, it was going to be ten days or so before the diplomats would arrive. But GOLDEN FLEECE was a simple protocol. He -had- to guard the wreckage, and was forbidden from leaving the ruined battlecruiser unattended under any circumstances barring a breach of the Cole Protocol.
The turians and salarians had been very forthcoming when it came to the battlecruiser, and they had been guiding select detachments of ODSTs and engineering personnel of his fleet to make ready for the scientists that were coming. They had also been sending regular updates about the recovery operations on the battlefield and reports about what their scientists were recovering. He couldn't make heads or tails of it, but Dove was cataloguing it regardless.
The turians had continued constructing their logistical support stations throughout the system. They finished setting up refueling stations in the gas giant's orbit, and were now establishing smaller, heavily defended depots on damn near every body in the system. His eyes fell on something the aliens were constructing around the planet closest to New Ghent's sun; they had set down massive structures both upon the planet and in orbit around it.
"Dove, scan Gelabon. What are they doing on its surface?"
Dove froze up for a second as he processed the request. "They appear to be setting up some sort of infrastructure on the planet's surface. The heat and power emissions given off do not seem to coincide with a fusion reactor."
"Ensign Clovis, get me a connection to the turian flagship."
The young ensign nodded. He was a loyal sailor, and he was absolutely devoted to Cole. Cole had asked for him to be assigned to the Everest purely as part of the preparations for his "retirement plan", but that didn't mean he was unskilled. This was just an additional bonus to the young man's skills.
Clovis pressed a few buttons on his console and then nodded to Cole. "Connection established."
The viewscreen changed to show the Primarch, standing at attention on the bridge of his ship. Cole spoke up in his most diplomatic voice, which was still a far cry from actually diplomatic. "Primarch Fedorian, my ships are detecting power surges and unexplained heat emanating from the structures you've put up on Gelabon, the planet closest to the star. May I ask what you are constructing there?"
The Primarch nodded. "We are building particle accelerators and antimatter refineries to fuel our spaceships. Because of the large fleet presence, antiproton capture around the gas giant doesn't cover our needs, so we're setting up an operation on Gelabon. Apologies for the concern it might have caused."
Cole perked an eyebrow at that. Antimatter was incredibly volatile, which meant that it had largely been discarded as a potential fuel for UNSC ships due to the difficulty of keeping it contained. Some small private ships, mostly yachts, used antimatter drives, possibly some ONI prototypes as well, but no UNSC warships he knew of used antimatter for propulsion. Perhaps these aliens had better containment technology? The ease with which they seemed to manipulate gravity or be able to create singularities with man-portable weapons seemed to imply that their gravity control was formidable.
"Thank you for the confirmation." The admiral answered. "How are your construction efforts going? Any assistance we might be able to lend?
"We'll soon be able to use this system as a logistics node to support our operations against the Covenant. Our scouts have not yet discovered any other UNSC or Covenant vessels in surrounding systems."
Obviously you haven't. New Ghent is the most remote colony left in this part of the UNSC space, and most habitable worlds around it were burned years ago. You'll be looking through dozens of systems if you don't know where to look. Cole thought to himself.
"Our envoys will arrive in seven days or so, and we can formally establish our alliance. Until then, I am unfortunately unable to disclose the location of any of our hidden worlds. I am sure you understand."
The Primarch nodded slowly, but his body language seemed to radiate annoyance, if Cole read it correctly. "We understand. We're using this time to set up our beachhead in this galactic arm. Once fully operational, we can provide military assistance to any human system within fifty light years of New Ghent. When we join you formally, we could reinforce your entire frontline simultaneously"
Cole grit his teeth. That gave them access to damn near half the UNSC worlds left, including Reach and Earth. If they were truthful about their capabilities, they could hit Earth before any UNSC ships could warn the planet. He had to keep a plan in place for that contingency, no matter how unlikely it appeared to be.
Dove popped up on his holographic display.
"Admiral, a new asari ship just jumped into the system, it claims to be carrying our observers. They are sending us a message."
"Let's hear 'em, then, Dove." Cole said. He was eager for some good news.
There was a pause.
"This is Lieutenant Franklin O'Connell. I am pleased to report that the state of the refugees on Telvanis is exemplary, Admiral. I am transmitting our logs as we speak. The place looked better than most Outer Colonies in their prime, and the people looked happy and well fed. We received a full tour of the planet, and we have little if any negativity to report. It was quite hard to leave, to be honest."
Cole felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. It was looking more and more likely that these new aliens were actually speaking the truth.
"Well done, Lieutenant. I'm sending a dropship to pick you up for a medical and a full psych evaluation."
"Looking forward to it, Sir."
Dove's avatar suddenly flashed red. "Captain, unknown ship coming out of slipspace. It's transmitting a civilian transponder on emergency channels."
"This is the UNSC Guaranteed Fresh. We have taken damage and are leaking atmosphere. We have civilians aboard. We're fleeing the destruction of New Milan. We're just a cargo vessel. We need immedi- HOLY SHIT! " The transmission suddenly cut off, presumably when the captain saw the Citadel fleet.
Cole immediately grabbed the reins before anyone could do something stupid. "Ensign Lovis, get me that ship on the horn. Now!"
"Already on it, Captain."
"UNSC Guaranteed Fresh, this is UNSC Everest Actual. Do not be alarmed, these other ships belong to an independent coalition of races also at war with the Covenant. We are currently engaged in diplomatic talks with them. What is your situation? What happened to New MIlan?" Admiral Cole asked hurriedly. New Milan was the breadbasket of more than a dozen other planets, both in the Inner and the remaining Outer Colonies. If it fell, there would be a famine.
"I trust the Cole Protocol was followed during your escape. Did you head here on purpose?"
"Yes, Admiral Cole. We thought New Ghent would be safe. We hadn't received word anything happened here." The voice of the freighter captain was filled with an embarrassing amount of awe for Admiral Cole. So much in fact that Cole had to restrain himself from calling the man out on it.
"Take up position in our formation. I'll scramble a force to head to New MIlan. What's the situation there?"
"The Covenant found the system and we immediately began evacuation. When we left, they were skirmishing with the local garrison, but we couldn't see who was winning."
Cole cursed under his breath. If he headed for New Milan and left the fallen battlecruiser unprotected, he'd be breaking GOLDEN FLEECE and be in a heck of a lot of trouble. It'd give his enemies an excuse to court-martial him, although he was not sure they'd be able to do that without public outcry. As he thought of a way to help New Milan, an idea started to form in his head. A way to save New Milan as fast as possible, and to ascertain the true intentions of the Citadel.
New Milan needed to be reinforced, but it didn't have to be him. Cole Protocol did not apply to a system which had already been discovered by the Covenant. And the Citadel was eager for locations of known combat theaters. Their ships were also faster than his by a large margin. They could get to New Milan in a day.
"Get me the Primarch!" Admiral Cole ordered Ensign Clovis, who complied, entering something on his console..
Cole spoke up. "Primarch, the ship that just entered the system is a refugee ship from another world of ours, which is under attack by the Covenant. I can not give you the coordinates for any of our hidden worlds-"
"But you can give me the coordinates of the one under attack." The Primarch finished. "Send me the location data, and I will deploy the salarian fleet immediately. Their ships are the fastest in the fleet, and they'll want to try out their new technology and weapons systems against the Covenant."
Cole nodded at Dove. "Send them the data."
The AI nodded. "Done."
The Primarch looked distracted for a moment, looking at something off screen. "I'll send a fleet immediately. Thank you, Admiral Cole. I hope this can prove our trustworthiness to you."
Cole smiled at the viewscreen. It was a rare happy smile. "If you save New Milan, you'll have half the Inner Colonies owing you their meals for a year."
2100 hours, May 11, 2542 (UNSC military calendar)
ONI prowler Circumference, New Milan system
The Covenant had come, and New Milan would burn.
Aboard the Circumference, John-117 looked at the viewscreen, at the Covenant fleet that had invaded the system. He was calculating the odds in his head, and they weren't good.
The UNSC forces in the system consisted of four Marathon-class cruisers, six aging Halcyon-class cruisers, forty Paris-class frigates and a smattering of hastily armed civilian freighters and pirate-hunting corvettes, stuffed with nuclear weapons to be used as fire ships.
Facing them were a CAS-class carrier, three CCS-class battlecruisers, four CPV-class destroyers and twelve CRS-class light cruisers. The only ships the Covenant had lost so far were another carrier, and their DAS-class storm cutter escorts after a daring assault by the UNSC forces defending the system.
The first Covenant invasion of New Milan, a month ago, had managed to land a massive army on the surface as they engaged the UNSC garrison in the system. For the last three weeks, the fighting had gone back and forth. The Covenant fleet had destroyed the garrison, only for a UNSC reinforcement fleet to arrive and drive off the Covenant and land their own forces on the planet.
Then another Covenant fleet linked up with the Covenant survivors from the previous waves and drove the UNSC away, deploying another ground force. The only thing holding off their glassing of the planet was the threat of an attack by the remaining UNSC ships in the system, as well as whatever machinations drove the Covenant military.
The UNSC battlegroup Blue Team had been with was just another fleet thrown into the grinder. When they'd arrived, the Covenant and UNSC forces still in the system had whittled each other down to less than ten ships each, all damaged. The Covenant had cut anchor and ran, but before the battlegroup could get into position to provide orbital fire support to the armies clashing on the surface, another Covenant fleet had arrived, the largest so far.
Now it was fifty against twenty. The UNSC had occasionally won battles like that, hadn't they? John hadn't been part of a space battle the UNSC won for what felt like a decade. His Blue Team had boarded and taken out a fair share of Covenant ships, but always on the outskirts of battle or against opportunity targets.
"Captain, if you let me deploy Blue Team, we can take out the carrier, and our fleet might stand a chance." John said to Captain Exaviel, the captain in charge of the prowler carrying Blue Team.
The prowler captain shook his head. "Too risky, Spartan. This isn't an isolated carrier with its shields down. This is a carrier with escorts, in the midst of a battle, with its shields up. I'm keeping you in orbit to assist whichever unit on the ground needs a Spartan team the most."
John grimaced inside his helmet. He'd hated space warfare since the war started. On the ground he could win, he could beat the Covenant. But too often he and Blue Team were recalled because the Covenant won the battle in orbit and were moving in to begin glassing, and by all metrics, the same was going to happen here. If only they'd had booster frames. They'd have been able to board the carrier then.
The ensign manning the sensor station spoke up. "Captain, I am detecting new signatures arriving in the system. No signs of them leaving slipspace; no tau bursts, no radiation, Oh my god, there's more than a thousand of them, most of them corvette or frigate size."
Dread gripped John's heart. Just the thought of a fleet that big rampaging through the Inner Colonies was enough to cause concern. They might not be able to match UNSC ships with their size, but what would happen if they got deep enough behind UNSC lines and hit the vital supply lines keeping the UNSC war machine and the colonies fed?
"Captain, we need to get to FLEETCOM and inform them of this fleet." John told the prowler captain.
"You don't need to tell me twice, Sparta-"
"The new ships have opened fire on the Covenant!" The ensign yelled, everyone turning to look at him.
"Show me." The captain ordered sternly.
The Circumference did not have an AI due to logistical shortcomings, and the crew had to do everything themselves. There was a short pause before the image on the viewscreen was magnified, showing in detail what was happening.
The Covenant fleet was wreathed in fire as what had to be thousands of small magnetically accelerated rounds impacted all across the shields. The individual projectiles were weak, but that didn't matter with the sheer volume of fire the newcomers were capable of.
Then the Covenant returned fire.
Combat Information Center, Turian Hierarchy dreadnought Titan's Might
"Look at the size of that ship!" A sensors officer yelled as the dreadnought's spinal cannon fired, the deck shaking under their feet..
"Stay calm." Fleet Admiral Karandis commanded sternly. As the only admiral who'd faced the Covenant so far, he'd been put in charge of the fleet sent to relieve New Milan, although the fleet was an equal mix of all Council races. The salarians and asari had wanted to try their new weapons in action and insisted they join the first battle.
The massive size of the enemy ships concerned him to no end, but he had a thousand ships to throw at the enemy. Let the strategists and intelligence experts analyse the ship sizes in more detail afterwards; he had a battle to win.
"Asari flagship down!" The sensors operator called out. "Some sort of extreme range energy weapon. It instantly punched a hole through the ship!"
Karandis cursed. The tactic of staying at range did not matter if the enemy could just pick away at the largest ships of his fleet, no matter the range.
The battle had started well: recon probes had mapped out the locations of the Covenant ships, allowing the Citadel Expeditionary Force to jump into positions all around the enemy fleet and open up on every single ship simultaneously, at close range with mass accelerators, and nuclear torpedoes. They'd managed to inflict heavy damage to the shields and almost instantly obliterated all the smaller CRS-class Covenant ships in the first minute of the engagement.
Then the capital ships returned fire, unleashing weapons whose effective range far outranged the other covenant ships the Citadel had fought.
Massive plasma beams lanced out from the cruisers and instantly burned through dreadnoughts, or scythed through entire formations of lesser ships.
"Salarian flagship just took a grazing hit from a plasma beam. She is disengaging!"
The worst killers were the Covenant's guided plasma torpedoes. Once one was locked on, the only way to dodge it was with an FTL jump, and if that happened, the torpedoes oftentimes just switched to another target.
It was difficult to get good sensor readings of the Covenant ships due to sustained mass accelerator impacts causing the shields to grow a bright white, the energy release interfering with sensors
Dozens of ships were going down each second in the bloody battle, as streams of plasma projectiles, pulse lasers, and plasma torpedoes crossed the void, with the Citadel ships firing back from extreme ranges and performing pinpoint FTL jumps to avoid plasma torpedoes.
The Covenant destroyers were being engaged by the salarian fleet, while the asari were attacking the battlecruisers with everything they had. The carrier was under attack by every ship the turians had sent.
The shields of two Covenant destroyers went down from the sustained bombardment, and opportunistic salarian drone frigates and drone fighters dove in for the kill, taking heavy losses from point defense fire that wiped out whole attacking squadrons, only for the fighters to release disruptor torpedo swarms at close range. With the shields down, the torpedoes could punch deep into the ships, taking out weapons systems or puncturing the plasma reactors.
The frigates meanwhile launched large nuclear missiles that were slung under their hulls. These modified planetary bombardment warheads would be too slow to be of use against ships capable of instantly going to FTL, something that was beyond the Covenant's ability. With the enemy destroyers crippled by disruptor torpedoes, the nuclear warheads finished off the wounded ships.
The salarians proceeded to unleash their new ultraviolet frequency GARDIAN lasers on the swarms of fighters the Covenant ships hurriedly launched to attack them. Purple beams shot across the void, pinpoint high accuracy fire burning seraphs to slag with repeated hits. When the fighters went down, the beams switched to the remaining covenant ships, melting anything that stood out from the hull.
Good. The salarians are doing well. Karandis thought inwardly.
The asari attack on the battlecruisers began with the asari fleet concentrating its fire on a single ship at a time, quickly burning down the shields with mass accelerator fire from the dreadnoughts and cruisers, while fighters launched from the dreadnoughts and cruisers to deliver their own nuclear payloads. Nuclear fireballs blanketed the Covenant ships. Shields exploded, leaving the ships open to mass accelerator rounds from the asari dreadnoughts, which punched holes clean through them. This was followed by remote-controlled frigates laden with warp bombs exploding in close proximity to the Covenant ships, the reality-bending fields ripping large chunks from their hulls.
Karandis grit his teeth as the casualty reports streamed in. The salarians had lost three dozen ships in what felt like moments, but thankfully most of them were VI-controlled fighters operating in wolf packs. But they had still lost a dreadnought and ten cruisers, with a fifth of the fleet taking pulse laser damage in one form or another. The salarian ships trailed streams of ablative material as they moved through the void. The mass effect compressed Silaris armor was proving effective enough at absorbing an occasional laser hit, but survival was still a gamble.
The asari had suffered fewer total ship losses. Still, they'd lost their two dreadnoughts, ten frigates and five cruisers.
Things were starting to heat up aboard the Titan's Wrath. They'd taken multiple pulse laser hits, and although the ablative armor had held, the heat was playing havoc with multiple major systems.
"Split the remainder of our forces and assist the asari and salarians in taking out the smaller ships. We need everyone to fire on that behemoth at the same time!" Karandis ordered.
The carrier was a monster, six kilometers long and lashing out at all around it with those energy beams, plasma torpedoes and batteries upon batteries of pulse lasers. Even at extreme range, the ship had enough firepower that it didn't even have to aim once it concentrated on a particular sector of space. Every plasma beam was another dreadnought or cruiser lost and one less shot before Karandis' flagship was taken out as well.
"Activate FTL and dodge the moment their plasma beam charges up again." Karandis ordered. "We can't afford to take the hit."
"Human ships are moving in, Admiral." His communications officer Ger Letanis piped up.
Fifty-four massive rounds slammed into the underside of the massive ship. The Covenant fired plasma torpedoes and pulse lasers at the incoming projectiles, but over forty slugs still hit. The shields collapsed in a beautiful explosion of blue light, followed by the projectiles tearing large chunks out of the hull. The ship began to break apart in a series of internal detonations.
Then a hundred large, arrowhead-shaped black fighters followed, breaking off and heading to attack the wounded Covenant ships. Massive nuclear fireballs lit up the crippled enemy ships and turned them into so much molten slag.
Karandis breathed a sigh of relief as the fighting ended. It felt like the most hectic three minutes of his life. "Initiate contact with the human ships and transmit the message their admiral sent us. They're going to want to know what we're doing here."
Karandis went over the events of the battle in his head, and the new weapons they'd tested. Missiles with nuclear warheads while too slow to hit anything other than a dreadnought at the best of times, would prove quite effective against the much larger Covenant ships. Silaris armor could turn a killing plasma bolt or pulse laser impact into a survivable hit. But did nothing against a plasma torpedo. Warp bombs could be turned into effective anti-ship weapons when detonated closely.
He quickly began writing his thoughts down and prepared to send it to the war council of the Citadel Expeditionary Force.