THE EVE OF BATTLE

Throughout late January and early February 2176, Haliat's scouts arrived on Elysium disguised as tourists. These infiltrators spread out across the planet, setting themselves up in towns near to Alliance bases, often posing as couples wanting to get married. The colony is and was a popular marriage and honeymoon destination. They were meant to lay low, out of contact with their superiors, until the invasion troops began landing, at which point they would use smuggled weapons and explosives to disrupt infrastructure and disable AA defences. Their commander had opted for this addition to his plan at the last minute. The Alliance Navy had started more regular exercises, spooking Haliat into trying to assure that his seizure would go smoothly. Unfortunately, this would have the opposite effect. The Alliance DID's Counter-Intelligence Division simultaneously lifted the saboteurs on the night of February 20th, to avoid a message getting back to the batarians of the defence preparations. These would be interrogated for details of their targets, giving the Alliance yet another intelligence advantage.

February 20th was also the date when Alliance agents and listening posts reported the gathering-in-force of the Batarian First and Second Fleets at Khar'shan. The finalised numbers put the invasion force at over four million enemy combatants in all, to be landed continuously using the entirety of the Batarian Hegemony's military transportation capability as well as much of its civilian cargo capacity. The exact date of the attack was now known; February 22nd. Alliance defence plans were put into full effect immediately, again under the guise of exercises. Task Force Wizna emptied its bases in the mountains of Elysium and proceeded to its designated defence areas around major cities and near landing zones. The rest of the Fifth Legion's combat troops were recalled from leave, and placed on high alert.

Meanwhile, the distraction attacks by Haliat's pirate forces began. Several raiding squadrons were sent out to attack on the night of 21-22 February, hitting independent Verge colonies and certain select Alliance targets. Among them was Mindoir, which was attacked unsuccessfully three hours before the main invasion force transited to the Vetus System. The Alliance Navy moved its fleets as if to respond to these threats, pretending to fall for Haliat's trap in its entirety. Meanwhile, the combined pirate-batarian fleets began their journey from the heart of the Hegemony to the battle zone. Many would never see Khar'shan again.

THE BATTLE BEGINS

Phase 1: The Invasion

The Batarian First Fleet jumped into the Vetus System in full force at about lunch time in Elysium's capital, Illyria. They passed through the relay jump-zone entirely unopposed by either Alliance naval forces or the colony's colonial defence forces. Sensory sweeps of the system revealed no surprise Alliance force lying in wait. Haliat thought he had achieved perfect surprise. With the relay secure, he ordered the Second Fleet and the pirate armada to join the First Fleet, and the entire Batarian-Terminus force advanced to the gas giant Joppa. Here they found the ten defence monitor ships of Elysium's flotilla, guarding the fuel depots. These ships were built by the Luna Shipyards, bought by the taxpayers of Elysium for their own defence. In accordance with Alliance law, they had very limited FTL capability, but packed the weaponry and shield capabilities of a heavy cruiser. The pirate frigates fell upon these vessels en masse, as the batarians dueled with them at range. The sheer weight of numbers told their tale, and the monitors were forced to withdraw in a matter of minutes. They retreated out of the system to a designated rallypoint, to await the relief forces.

However, as the batarians moved to claim the fuel stations, the orbitals exploded spectacularly, showering the squadron dispatched to take control of them with huge pieces of shrapnel and destroying the squadron commander's vessel. It was not the only setback to be in the early part of the battle for Haliat. With Joppa secure, the fleets spread out and began their assigned tasks. The Hegemony's First and Second Fleets moved on Elysium and Sidon with the vast transport ships. As they did so, the towing vessels moved to do their job transporting preselected asteroids from their positions to orbits around the colony. Laying in wait was Elysium's force of torpedo corvettes, having arrived at the belt mere hours before the invasion began. General Orzeski had rallied the planet's defence forces at the last possible moment, finally informing the colonial government of its true peril. Alliance intelligence had discovered which asteroids were to be taken for use as WMDs, and the General immediately ordered them staked out. When the pirate and batarian tugs arrived, they were set upon by the corvettes and destroyed, and with them, the ability of the batarians to quickly and safely move asteroids. The corvettes were soon chased off by batarian frigates, and suffered 75% losses before they too were forced to retreat to their rallypoint.

Haliat took the destruction of the fuel stations and the asteroid tugs in good spirits. New stations could be deployed, and with the huge numbers of troops and ships at his disposal, he did not worry. With no tugs, the fortresses in Elysium's mountain ranges would need to be dealt with in some other way. Defeating the Alliance garrison would simply cost more lives, of which he had plenty to borrow from his allies. The Overlord delegated the task of bringing the Alliance bases to heel, granting General Gadnalak the command. The General for his part was delighted with his new orders, finally able to test himself and his troops' new techniques against the foe that had eluded him on Mindoir. The landings commenced with the attackers' morale and will to fight very much intact, despite their plan fraying at its edges.

Orzeski had not been idle during the time between confirmation of the offensive's start and when batarian dropships began appearing over the skies of Elysium. Hardened defence points with powerful kinetic barriers were hastily constructed to augment the large numbers of emergency bunkers that already existed. Evacuations of civilian areas to emergency bunkers were well under way when the enemy fleets entered orbit, conducted with utmost professionalism by the colonial paramilitaries and police. Thanks to the intelligence gathered by the DID, they were able to prioritise the most at-risk areas. Anti-aircraft batteries were mounted on trucks for quick deployment, as the expectation was that the batarians would try and flee as soon as they discovered Consul Taro's gambit.

The invasion fleet over Elysium began deploying the first troops, unopposed by human fighter squadrons. The External Forces were first on the ground, landing around the mountainous "ribs" of the planet where the Alliance alpine fortresses were located. Haliat's mercenaries landed to the south of the Isthmus of Illyria, the strip of land and islands connecting the two major northern continents where the planetary capital was located. The landings of these two forces were entire unopposed. Haliat himself landed at the town of Split, on the coast of the Mare Orientale, and set up his headquarters there in a hotel well-regarded for honeymoons. He found the town largely abandoned, with only a handful of holdouts. These were rounded up and thrown in the town gaol, to be transported into slavery later. Gadnalak by contrast was moving quickly, ignoring whatever civilians he came across and consolidating his forces' positions to surround the Alliance troops. The Batarian Army's Verge Strategic Command began the landings of their huge formations an hour after the initial forces, as the fighting started.

The first engagement was between elements of 4th Corps, Batarian External Forces and the 10th Armoured Brigade (Poland), in the Forest of Nouveau-Noir. Both found each other more or less by accident. The Batarians were moving to envelop the Alliance fortress at Mont Vert in the Midi Mountain Range. The Alliance armour had been dispatched to disrupt just such a move, to allow more time for civilians in the area to retreat. They were caught off guard by the speed of the enemy's movement. The recon elements of both formations met each other in the dense woodlands covering the foothills, and their respective commanders committed their troops to battle. Initially, the Alliance forces had the advantage. They descended on the batarian troops from the high ground, their walkers giving an edge over the tanks in the rough terrain, and the basic superiority of the Alliance soldier over her Batarian counterpart telling almost immediately. This state of affairs lasted about an hour, and the batarians were forced to retreat two kilometres along a wide front. However, numbers soon began to tell as the Alliance realised they had attacked a much larger force than they had first assumed. Massed attacks by batarian heavy tank battalions checked the humans' advance, and turned it. The human unit began a fighting retreat for the next twenty hours, allowing access to Mont Vert in the process but having delayed the batarians long enough. The civilians of the region had been able to flee to safety in time.

The Battle of Nouveau-Noir, as it came to be known, was typical of the fighting that was breaking out across the planet. Orzeski's troops probed the enemy landing zones and expected areas of advance in force to buy time. Batarian forces were initially shocked by the attacks, but rallied their increasingly superior numbers and retaliated. A game of cat and mouse started as dense foliage, decoys, advanced ECMs and heavy anti-aircraft coverage prevented the batarians from accurately bombarding the Alliance from orbit or with gunships. However, by the sixth hour of the invasion, the Batarian Army had landed all of their forward formations. The encirclements of the urban centres and Alliance bases were completed soon afterwards as planned, and what human forces were on the loose seemed minimally threatening to Haliat's objectives. Furthermore, Batarian armoured forces began moving on the northern end of the Isthmus of Illyria. The capital was cut off from the rest of the planet, trapping nearly eight and a half million people, of every Citadel species. Protecting them, two divisions of Task Force Wizna, and Orzeski himself, waited for the blow. However, Haliat declined to attack the capital directly so early in the campaign. The hinterlands to the rear of his position were still unsecured, and his mercenaries did not possess the heavy weapons for assaulting a fixed position held by armoured forces. He awaited the right moment, scouting the capital's approaches and defences. Fighting in the wilderness heated up as he did so.

Gadnalak's troops were in position to attack every Alliance fortress on Elysium simultaneously by Hour Seven of the invasion, breaking through various groups of both Alliance regulars and colonial irregulars to take up their positions. The three largest objectives, Mont Vert, Turciesdag, and Vietnui were protected by extremely powerful kinetic barriers, preventing any effective artillery bombardment from orbit. Small fortresses were softened up by sustained attack from the batarian navy over the course of the day, but the three largest would require a ground assault. This was somewhat problematic, albeit not an impossible task for the elite soldiers of the External Forces. Mountain training was not a standard part of the regimen of the batarians. Gadnalak was determined to attack, and received a direct command to do so from Haliat regardless of his own calculations.

The assaults were extremely bloody. At Mont Vert and Vietnui, the batarians were forced to sacrifice their tanks in order to advance close enough for biotics to make the breakthrough to the inner defences. The weight of fire from these two strongholds was such that dozens of vehicles were lost, as the infantry advanced behind them, huddling for their protection. At Turciesdag, the route to the fortress was too narrow for more than one tank to advance, and so the attack had to be made in a more traditional batarian fashion: By massed infantry assault. It is said that Gadnalak, watching the assault on the latter objective, quietly remarked that he would see the mountain renamed "Martyrs' Peak" to honour those who died to take it. This quiet reverence for his fellow soldiers' sacrifice soon turned to uncontrollable rage. Turciesdag was the first to fall, and when the batarian general entered with his troops, he found only a relative handful of colonial reservists. By hour thirteen of the invasion, the other two major Alliance fortresses had fallen. The imagined thousands of Alliance troops that the batarians had been fighting for control of the mountains were in fact combat drones controlled by weekend soldiers.

The question of where the Alliance had disappeared became an urgent one for Gadnalak. He calculated that nearly 80% of the Alliance regular forces remained unaccounted for. When he reported this to Haliat, the turian reacted with amusement. The Overlord's own mercenaries outnumbered the "missing" forces twice over, and nearly a million batarian conscripts had been landed from the fleet on board the huge passenger shuttles. He remained supremely confident of his victory. This continued even after the Batarian Second Fleet was dispatched back to the Kite's Nest to take up its positions for the coming grand offensive. Haliat sent his own pirate armadas back to the Terminus-Traverse border, to ambush any early counterattack by the Alliance there. He had complete superiority in space regardless, or so he believed, and an absolute advantage in numbers on the ground. He gave Gadnalak a free hand to "look" for the humans in the wilderness, while he struck the glorious decisive blow.

As night fell over the isthmus, the offensive against the cities began. Haliat's own troops moved to claim the greatest prize of the campaign; Illyria, the capital. Victory was within his grasp.

Phase 2: Cityfight

The urban fighting on Elysium began as scheduled on Hour Eight of the invasion, coinciding with the invasion of nearby Sidon for its research facilities and corporate locations. The second stage of the disembarkments were able to commence, as the troops could be fed from makeshift airstrips and prefabricated warehouses. All over the colony, Batarian Army units advanced from their approach positions in the surrounding wilderness, their landing zones now secure and their logistics infrastructure built. What they discovered answered the question of where the Alliance forces had disappeared to. The invaders' advances ran head-long into well-prepared defences, bristling with AAA batteries and the crack soldiers of the Fifth Legion. Within fifteen minutes of the start of the general offensive on Elysium's cities, it was obvious to anyone that the Alliance had abandoned conventional military wisdom for planetary defence. Instead of hiding in the wilds from orbital bombardments, they had evacuated to the cities to make a stand. Cities that Haliat needed, and had intended to capture intact.

This development finally gave the Overlord pause. The cities were packed with civilians, which he would need to capture as slaves. His allies would want to maintain and build up the colony once it was in their hands, as well as humiliate the humans, not simply kill the inhabitants. He had planned for fighting in the streets, but not against professional soldiers. Regardless, his turian military experience would have reassured him that his plan could flex to suit the new situation. He ordered the broadcast of the "safezone" locations, where civilians could go to avoid fighting. Refusal would result in execution. This was conduct taken straight from any turian combat manual, and humanity had seen the sharp end of the doctrine before on Shanxi. Once this was complete, the advance resumed. Gadnalak requested to be assigned to the assault on the capital, now that it was apparent that the enemy he was hunting for was there. Haliat refused him pointblank, not wanting the glory to go to the most prominent batarian commander. The general was reassigned to take Los Bancos, the most distant major city from the capital.

The attacks made mixed progress. On the larger southern continent, the Alliance fared best. The probing attacks on the smaller regional centres were fought off quickly, as the quality and quantity of batarian troops assigned to fight them proved insufficient to overcome even the colonial defence troops and their drones. The larger cities were subjected to much more determined attacks, with air support and orbital bombardments, but the batarians still found themselves unable to break the humans' lines. The Alliance simply retreated to a fresh defence line on the cusp of every major breakthrough. This was the mark of the mathematical approach of General Orzeski. He traded battlespace for huge numbers of batarian lives readily, and with great ease as the fighting moved into more urban terrain. As long as there was another line to retreat to, he could hold the enemy off just long enough. Casualties remained light. At Los Bancos, this tactic was noticed by Gadnalak as soon as the first Alliance retreat started. The attack on that city was halted immediately. The External Forces returned to a defensive posture, to the humans' complete confusion. At the time, the Alliance had no idea why the batarians would stop their assault, but fragments of the general's journal reveal his suspicions. "I began to suspect that the whole operation was a trap, one designed to kill as many of us as possible, though I could not confirm it at the time," he wrote after the battle.

The fighting on the northern continent was far less favourable to the human defenders. More flat than the southern sectors, the batarians had assigned proportionally more armoured units. In addition, the capital fell within the northern defence zone, meaning that other areas within it were less well defended. Lastly, Haliat's mercenaries had landed exclusively in the north. It was a bloodbath for both sides. In several settlements, the Alliance defences were pierced by armoured attacks, only for the tanks to be attacked in the streets where they were vulnerable. Anti-aircraft batteries were turned on the batarian infantry as they attempted to overwhelm the defences, while the batarian tankers took to shelling every building as a precaution. At the crossroads town of Shiloh's Pass, the Polish 24th Infantry Regiment was destroyed to a man by elements of four batarian mechanised divisions after a brutal and continuous six hour fight. Alongside them died every single member of the Alliance Army reserve unit raised in the town, every single police officer, and almost all of the civilian populace. No records or combat telemetry survived to detail how they fought, but it is apparent that every single one fought to the end. Their final message was broadcast in the clear. It contained only the words "In the Elysian Fields, the brave shall live forever," spoken by an unknown woman, followed by an orchestral recording of Nearer to Thee, My God. The remaining population was rounded up for processing into slavery, consisting mostly of young children and their guardians that had hid in the emergency shelters. It was the most important Alliance defeat during the ground war on Elysium. The fighting would continue well into the morning of the next day.

Yet these battles paled in comparison to the combat for the capital. Haliat's plan for Illyria was devious and brutal. The isthmus on which it sat was the most heavily defended piece of land on the entire planet. Twenty thousands troops of Task Force Wizna under the direct command of General Orzeski, the 11th Armoured Division and the elite 3rd Orbital Assault Division, were at the forefront. The colonial defence forces were also present in large numbers, often manning the formidable anti-aircraft, anti-tank and drone defences. Furthermore, the geography would funnel any attacking force. The approaches by sea had been quickly mined and watched by the GARDIAN batteries, and the land approach was narrow on both sides. Lastly, kinetic barriers would delay use of orbital bombardment to soften the defences up for days, and Haliat had no intention of destroying his prize at any rate. Ground assault was the only option once again, and the Overlord took it. His mercenaries boxed the Alliance in from the south, preventing any retreat or evacuation of the civilians. Once enough forces had massed, the Batarian Army struck from the wider northern part of the isthmus, throwing tanks and infantry at the defences in great wave attacks. This forced almost all of the Alliance tanks and walkers to be sent to the northern sectors progressively over the course of the night. This played right into Orzeski's strategy. The batarians would give their all to take a mere half-kilometre of ground, only for the Alliance to retreat again to a new line. Or so it appeared.

By dawn in Illyria, the batarian armour had advanced deeply into the suburbs, failing to destroy the 11th Armoured Division and the armoured elements of the 3rd Orbital Assault, as they fought a skillful withdrawal to the more heavily built-up second ring of the city behind its rocade. However, Orzeski had been deceived. Haliat had counted on the creation of a grinding war of attrition to the north to draw the Alliance tanks and walkers away. The south of the capital was now ripe for the infantry combat his mercenaries specialised in, and he had been preparing for it all night. The Overlord now committed the 150,000 mercenaries he had been rallying to the fight, a force representing more than 80% of his own available troops.

Coordinated perfectly, asari-led veteran squads infiltrated to within mere yards of Alliance positions in the gloom of the dying night and struck. They achieved complete surprise. Engineers set up automated turrets to keep the gaps open just long enough as the 3rd Orbital Assault Division responded. Orzeski ordered an immediate withdrawal to the next defence line as the general offensive began, but it was too late. The poison had entered the veins of the city. The huntresses' teams proceeded ahead of the retreat, bypassing the human professional forces and towards the soft targets. They began disabling anti-aircraft batteries and killing the colonial reservists that got in the way. For the first time, mercenary gunships could fly with some measure of optimism that they would not be shot down, and the second defence line was compromised in the next hour. The asari-led teams continued through the Alliance's interior lines, destroying utilities, cracking open emergency shelters to allow access to civilians, and disabling artillery positions. This had a devastating effect on the ability of the humans to continue fighting in the south.

Orzeski responded by issuing his contingency orders. All forces were to withdraw to their redoubt positions and were ordered to hold at all costs. All combat drones were to be set to ambush the enemy to cover the mass retreat. Alliance soldiers, reservists and police began the withdrawal immediately, potentially leaving the millions of citizens hiding underground at the mercy of the batarians and mercenaries. There was no other choice. At the same time, the 3rd Orbital Assault Division's walkers were ordered back to rejoin the rest of their comrades on the final southern defence line at the narrowest point of the isthmus. The batarian armoured divisions attacking in the north advanced quickly, slowed only by the numbers of rocket drones hiding on rooftops for them. Fortunately, both of the Alliance formations made it to friendly lines with little trouble. Unfortunately, they weren't alone.

What Haliat thought was the final battle raged for hours afterwards. The final lines encompassed the government and business districts, containing heavily reinforced bunkers, a hive of underground tunnels and earthquake-proof skyscrapers. The Alliance forces were able to pour fire down on the batarian and mercenary positions from elevated firing points, checking their advances quickly. Once again, the batarians attempted to trade bodies for ground, but this time, they failed spectacularly. The Overlord, watching from a luxury yacht he had commandeered, was horrified by the prospect of failure at such a cost. He ordered the troops back, and had some of the captured emergency shelters opened. The civilians were dragged out of them to be used as hostages, often in full view of Alliance positions a few hundred yards away. Human discipline held fast. After two hours, as many as a thousand civilians had been gathered in St. Eugene's Cathedral in the northern occupied sector. The threat was issued; the Alliance forces would surrender in two hours, or the civilians would be blown up inside the church.

Orzeski did nothing, refusing to respond in any way. The scheduled arrival of the Alliance relief fleets was less than ninety minutes away. If he surrendered, he would simply be giving the batarians more hostages for use against the rest of the Fifth Legion. He prepared his lines for a surprise assault, sending every reservist to the outer defences that he could and moving the AA batteries forward as well to deal with the massed attacks. Haliat was perplexed by this behaviour. A refusal could have been expected as equally likely to agreement, but ambiguous silence was not. The troop movements afterwards did not help matters, and gave the impression that the Alliance intended to counterattack despite the impressive odds stacked against them. The Overlord wished to avoid creating martyrs of the human troops in the capital. As a turian, he was well aware of the effects such an action would have on the will of the enemy to resist. Frustrated that he had been unable to take the capital in a single clean swoop, he ordered the commencement of his own contigency plan as the first hour of the deadline came and went.

An asari killteam made up of the most loyal commandos and huntresses left their observation post from within the humans' redoubt. They had managed to pre-empt the human retreat, and now made their way quietly towards Orzeski's headquarters. Extensive observation of the city from orbit had gleaned the location, while the movement of the reserves to the front provided no real challenge but empty streets all the way to the bunker's entrance underneath the Department of Justice building on the central public square. It was here that the killteam encountered the first resistance, an Emergency Response Team of the the colonial police that was resting in a recreation room. The asari slaughtered the ERT with ease, overwhelming them with biotic attacks that broke bones and flayed flesh. Afterwards, they opened an emergency exit of the bunker with thermite charges, and slid down the ladders into the military complex below. The alarms went off and the base's troops were placed on combat alert. It wasn't enough. The killteam made their way through the corridors, using the path of most resistance to guide them to the command and control room. The mercenaries took casualties, but caused far more. Their decades of experience, advanced equipment and biotics allowed them to reach their objective.

General Orzeski himself joined the defence of the Alliance nerve centre as the asari burst through the adjoining walls and began killing. The asari numbered less than a dozen by this point, but their abilities made them the match of any three or four Alliance soldiers at the very least. The vanguards charged around the room, emptying shotguns into the faces of surprised technicians while the matriarch in command proceeded directly to Orzeski's command staff. The General and his subordinates fired on the assailants, but he soon had his weapon pulled from his hands. The asari then ripped his leg off at the knee, and stood over him as he began bleeding profusely. As the fighting for the room continued, the matriarch demanded the surrender of the Alliance garrison from their commanding officer. The timing was supernatural. The main holographic interface in the room changed from a map of the city to a direct feed from orbit over the colony.

The Alliance's Combined Fleet had arrived, news to which Orzeski simply smiled.