THE EVE OF BATTLE
June 1st was the proposed start date for the beginning of the attack, but this was pushed back. Naval resources dedicated to delivering the Army taskforces were required at the border of the Terminus, due to manoeuvres of the former Anhur Protection Fleet there under the command of its new owner, Aria T'loak. The asari 'ruler' of Omega had yet to decide whether or not the Systems Alliance was a threat to her interests, and being asari, the timeframe she had in mind for evaluating this stretched into the very long term from a human perspective. Furthermore, the last delivery of resources from Torfan to Alliance corporations had been delayed due to weather, and Dennison, having the final say on the attack, did not wish to interrupt war production any more than she needed to.
This pause allowed for some fresh covert reconnaissance to be undertaken. The Nile-class cargo vessel Thames, owned by Dennison's own shipping corporation, was outfitted with military-grade sensory suites and dispatched to pick up the load of high purity heavy metals on Torfan, along with a trio of naval analysts on board. The ship began scanning at a most fateful moment; heat blooms from the GARDIAN batteries nearby the main defence bunker were clearly visible, identifying what was thought to be the main anti-aircraft defences for that facility. Reliability testing on the weapons had been conducted mere minutes before the arrival of the ship. It is perhaps a testament to the disjointed nature of the batarian administration on the moon that no one thought that such tests should be conducted when no foreign vessels were in orbit. The External Forces, operating in secret, were not in control of the AA batteries. The Torfan Hegemonic Militia, not expecting to be attacked and being far less mindful of such things, had no fears their world was being surveyed.
Regardless, the Alliance now thought it had the exact locations of the main batteries covering the planetary capital, arranged among warehouses on the outskirts of the town of Haven, sited on the top of a forested hill designated 403, between the town itself and a command bunker. The town sprawled up the hillside towards it. The mission parameters were adjusted accordingly.
617 Squadron touched off from Terra Nova on the night of June 4th, the Army Biotic Assault platroon and Verdun Squad on board, making its way through the relays at the low point of traffic in the Skyllian Verge sectors. Meanwhile, the Alliance Navy combat group responsible for deploying the Army taskforces began embarking the troops and loading the titans for the second phase of the attack.
On Torfan itself, there seemed to be fresh conflict between Governor Sak'davran and Captain Sasko Char. The former issued a decree on June 3rd, ordering the commanders of the militia to report to him in person within ten days or be removed from their commissions. No reason was given for this publicly, other than to reassure the public of the loyalty of the Governor to the Hegemony despite their poor circumstances, but it is clear from the urgency of the order that there was some concern about whether or not the militia leaders would follow Sak'davran or Char. This was quite appropriate, considering that a great many did indeed owe their loyalty to the Firstborn's chief, and not to the Governor. This would be yet another factor in the bloodshed to come.
THE BATTLE
Phase 1: The Angels' Landing
The first part of the Torfan Expeditionary Forces entered orbit around Torfan's superterrestrial parent planet, Jalla, at about 0500 hour local time. The A-62s of 617 Squadron carrying bomb loads immediately proceeded to their preparatory positions in low orbit of Torfan's smaller, atmosphere-lacking sister moon, Gnub. Meanwhile, the bombers acting as stealth troop transports moved into Torfan's atmosphere, bouncing off it and deploying the sixty or so assault pods while in-atmo. Vectoring towards a forest clearing that would also serve as the main landing zone for Taskforce Smaland, both the units of Major Kyle and Lieutenant-Commander Shepard made it to the surface without casualties or detection by the batarian forces present nearby. Those who saw the bombers mistook them for shooting stars, a phenomenon not uncommon on that world. Unfortunately, the noise of the pods landing did attract attention, although the investigation of the source would not begin for some hours.
Immediately, Major Kyle assigned a fireteam under one Corporal Delgado to Shepard's own squad, to aid in the sweep of the landing zone for mines, sensors and weapon emplacements. Meanwhile, the rest of his force began hiding and camouflaging the assault pods, so that they would not indicate to enemy patrols that a force had arrived. It took approximately an hour to complete the sweep and clear of the full landing zone. With their first objective successfully completed, Major Kyle was confident of pushing on to the next; the GARDIAN batteries. The warehouses thought to contain their power and aiming modules were already visible on the hilltop to the east, although the weapons themselves were retracted into their protective silos.
As daylight began stretching out over the sky, revealing the spectacular vista of planets that has become so famous now in films about the events, Shepard's expanded squad led the way through the dense evergreen forests of the area around Haven towards Hill 403. This took several hours, as the batarian militia was fond of using the forests for orienteering and combat training. On two separate occasions, only the forward presence of Shepard herself discovered patrols in time to avoid detection. On a third, a group of militiamen gone AWOL for a drink practically ran into Shepard after rising from their reverie. The Lieutenant-Commander was swiftly aided by Corporal Delgado in dispatching the threat with a minimum of noise using biotics. Fortunately for the whole operation, the drunks had no communication devices, undoubtedly to prevent their superiors from tracking them down, and the advance continued.
By about 1300 hours local time, the platoon was in place around the warehouses and the GARDIAN batteries. Shepard's team again was selected for the hardest job of entering what intelligence suggested was the main warehouse, as the attack on the facility commenced in general. The batarian guards were lifted from their feet, thrown against walls with bone-crushing force or torn apart in mid-air by gravitational pull. The full potential of a biotic commando attack was unleashed on behalf of humanity for the first time. Shepard,, Lutevenko, Farragat, Delgado, and two other soldiers from the Biotic Assault team moved inside quietly from the east. Remarkably, the attack went entirely unnoticed initially, either by militia in the town or the Firstborn in the bunker complex still further east.
What was inside the main warehouse was not what Shepard or anyone else expected to find. Entering from the roof rather than the ground, the Lieutenant-Commander's team started down what appeared to be a corridor with offices leading off of it. The process of clearing this section revealed far less tasteful uses for the rooms. The first were living quarters, temporary but well fitted for that role. Almost all of the rest were tiled torture rooms, equipped to chain prisoners on walls, in the centre of spaces, or bent over. Many still had blood and other fluids dried on the floor, the captors not bothering to have cleaned up. There were drug cabinets with a variety of hallucinogenic and addictive chems in most. The suit telemetry of Verdun Squad's entry into these spaces remains intact to this day, and the purpose of these spaces is as obvious now as it was then; the breaking and taming of new slaves.
Investigation of the main chamber of the warehouse revealed hundreds of cages, holding dozens of kidnapped Alliance citizens, the last of a batch kidnapped during a raid on Benning. That raid was a particular embarrassment to the Alliance, being the closest garden world to Arcturus Station itself. Sweeps of the other warehouses found more evidence of slaver activity, but no more slaves. Furthermore, Corporal Delgado was killed and another two soldiers injured when he attempted to open the cage for the women, a directional mine triggered as a booby trap doing the job. Although obviously intended to deter the lower caste batarians from partaking of the female prisoners, the loss was felt keenly and personally by Shepard.
Questioning the captives revealed new information. They had been paraded through towns at various times, completely naked, jeered at by crowds of armed batarians. People had been given over to privileged individuals or those 'worthy of reward', for amusement and gratification. It appeared that the entirety of the world was aware to some extent of the crimes being carried out, and many were eager participants. This changed matters entirely. High Command thought most of the world's population to be dupes rather than co-conspirators in the plot.
The reaction of the assault force to the news was one of complete disgust. Telemetry data indicates heated exchanges over the mission parameters as the captives were being freed, particularly between Lieutenant-Commander Shepard and Major Kyle. The former demanded the mission be turned towards evacuating those rescued and the annihilation of the town proper from orbit. The latter, as commanding officer of the mission, refused and wished to arm the captives. New information found on-site indicated that the AA control computers were in the command bunker, alongside two reserve GARDIAN batteries that were too well protected to destroyed by an airstrike with the available munitions. The assault would need every man and woman capable of fighting to try and storm the bunker.
In the end, the two senior officers compromised. Despite Kyle's wish to maintain the secrecy of the mission, the N7 would be allowed to use their air support against the exposed batteries and the town of Haven itself. This would deny militia reinforcements to the bunker, leaving them facing only the garrison within. Regardless of Shepard's fears about jumpy civilians being armed, even if they were from Benning's heavily militarised culture, the captives would join in on the assault against the command bunker. Those freed were generally very eager to get even with those who had abused them, and as the batarians were smart enough to keep their charges well fed, were not weakened by the experience. The strike force, swollen to about one hundred and thirty armed personnel, departed the compound as Shepard called in the bombers. 617 Squadron came from their outer markers into a low orbit, before launching the conventional suborbital laser guided bombs. Half an hour after the order was given, Haven and the AA battery on its hill was no more. Nothing but smoking craters served as the graves of ten thousand eight hundred batarian exiles, many of whom had seen their homes destroyed by the Alliance on two dozen worlds before.
Phase 2: The Killing Ground
Kyle led his expanded force towards the bunker through the forest, but made less headway than he had hoped by the time he reached their own baseline to attack. It took hours to traverse the rough terrain, pockmarked with limestone karst that rose up out of the soil seemingly at random. No small amount of time was lost pulling civilians out of holes, after they lost their footing on false ledges or weak vegetation covering over sheer drops. By the time Verdun squad was in position on overwatch and the biotics ready to assault, the troops had been awake for some eighteen hours with only two hours rest. Many had not been able to afford themselves the luxury of sleep, nightmares among the young biotics of the abuses they imagined had occurred at Haven wrecking their nerves. This led to medication among most of them, biotics requiring concentration and alertness to operate at peak. This drug-induced trance of alertness and anger would drive them onwards.
Meanwhile, the batarians were not idle. The bombing attack on Haven was a bolt of lightning, noted by everyone on the moon. All over Torfan, militia units began to gather, expecting Alliance titans and walkers to drop out of the sky at any moment. The Firstborn even sallied out of their bunker to investigate the ruins of the town, skirting around the forest on the road, finding only ashes and dust where once there had been a prosperous settlement. However, as the hours dragged on, no Alliance fleet appeared in orbit, no ultimatums for surrender were issued, and no communication from Consul Taro was received. Governor Sak'davran began to think that the bombing was the end of it, a limited use of force by a galactic power with far greater concerns to deal with. And perhaps, a warning to him, that the Alliance knew about the External Forces presence on Torfan and the slaving operation they were charged with operating.
Captain Sasko Char was under no such illusions. Any delay on the Alliance's part was tactical in his view, and the Firstborn remained on high alert in their bunker, ready to strike out at any human force landing nearby their position. His tanks and light vehicles were rearmed and refuelled for a long engagement, his troops fed and placed in firing positions around the entrance to the bunker rather than inside it. When the Governor called to inform him that the militia would be standing down to a lower alert level, the Captain threatened executions if the high alert was not maintained. This would contribute to many of the deaths to come.
The attack on the bunker commenced after nightfall. Led by the biotic troops, with both the armed prisoners and Shepard's N5 marines in support, the assault force aimed towards a perceived gap in the batarian defences across a clearing that doubled as a discreet landing pad. Unfortunately, disastrously, the area was not a gap in the defences, but rather one covered by both the entirety of the Firstborn's Verush Heavies and several machinegun nests. These were well concealed amongst the limestone outcroppings, emplacements designed to cover the evacuation of the bunker in the event of an Alliance invasion. They did their job well.
What happened next was a slaughter.
The batarians let the whole group get half way across the clearing before opening fire, beginning their own counterattack with psychological warfare. Their tanks' camouflaging was discarded and the engines roared to life, causing the force to stop dead in shock. The Alliance troops ducked for cover, as the Revenant machineguns opened up on the dazed former captives. Although well armed and armoured with looted equipment that was a match for the batarians' own, the Firstborn's arsenal eliminated them from the board in seconds. Among the dead was an injured Major Kyle, the only other person besides Shepard who would survive the encounter.
The biotics and the N5s, shell-shocked but alive, continued the advance, their abilities and training shielding them most of the way. The sheer weight of firepower was against them, and despite heroic attempts, most were cut down. A few managed to reach the batarian lines with biotic charges, or as with the N5s with sheer determination, but the enemy were already reinforcing their positions with soldiers from other sectors. They found themselves surrounded quickly and cut down at short range, sometimes with sabres and improvised maces. The batarians immediately began looting the corpses for weapons and souvenirs.
Shepard found herself alone. In front and below her, every single one of the soldiers she had arrived with and fought beside was dead, as far as she knew. Alongside them lay those who had been abused, beaten and raped, yet had decided to fight too. In this moment, she said nothing. She did not weep, she did not mourn or pray for the dead. She did not retreat, or call for immediate reinforcement from the fleet which was surely coming by this point.
She prepared to attack.
Half an hour after the massacre of Major Kyle's strike force, Sasko Char stepped out of the bunker to inspect the carnage, leaving only a handful of technicians in the bunker to monitor events elsewhere. Every single one of his soldiers was there to see it too, the platoons involved in the defence being congratulated, carried around on the shoulders of their fellows. Char was particularly interested to see the corpses of the N5s, as he had watched the entire encounter by vid-link, and had noted that they had managed to make it to his lines without the use of biotic fireworks. He bent over and picked the omnitools off of them. Suddenly, the tools flared to life, indicating an inbox receipt on both of their screens. Char stood up and opened the message.
"Smile"
Before the Captain could react, a hypervelocity slug slammed through his neck, decapitating him. The slug continued through four more men, taking one's arm off at the shoulder, before wedging itself deep in a fifth batarian's chest cavity. The bodies fell like dominos, against those still breathing as if they had simply fallen asleep. Four dead, one gravely wounded. Shepard had reaped her first harvest of batarian lives, using her Rorsch AMR as a terror weapon. The Firstborn reacted with near-complete professionalism and discipline, reactivating their kinetic barriers, falling back into cover as the Verush tanks opened up on the treeline where the shot had come from. Curses and shouting were drowned out by the screaming of the wounded batarian, until his fellows put him out of his misery with a single shot to the head.
Scans of the forest from the bunker came up empty. The remaining assailants were hiding, the batarians sneered, meaning that they were vastly outnumbered. The second-in-command, one Lieutenant Fathi Jako, ordered the Verush tanks and two platoons to advance into the forest, to search and destroy the remaining Alliance force. The five tanks rumbled forwards in a wide wave, squads of soldiers mounted on top of them, the turrets' spotlights scanning from side to side over their heads like a scorpion's stinger. It was exactly the move Shepard had hoped for. Her N5s had ditched all unnecessary equipment before joining the assault, and she now used that to her advantage.
Six roller mines activated, and once the armoured vehicles had passed through the treeline, tracked towards their targets softly. Shrouded by the darkness and the noise of the tanks' engines, none of the batarians noticed the metal balls following in their wake. The first two mines targeted the same tank in the middle of the formation, bouncing onto it before detonation, blowing the entire back half of the Verush clean off as they landed in the engine block's maintenance trench. The line came to a halt to let the troops dismount, searching for what had caused the explosion, but this allowed the other mines to catch up. The other four tanks were disabled in quick succession, either their tracks blown off or their engines crippled. The two infantry platoons assigned to protect the tanks were almost unperturbed, helping the crews clamour out of their hatches and helping those wounded by the explosions. They began to spread out, fearing artillery or grenades.
Shepard struck again, exploiting the increase in spacing. She began on the left of the formation, closing to near point blank range with her tactical cloak and opening fire on individual squads so close that their barriers were near-useless. By the time each reacted, half of its members were already dead, and the rest were easy prey either for her rifle or for her omniblade. They had no time to report that it was only a single soldier attacking them. She had chewed through two of the three squads in the first platoon by the time they realised, and had finished off the last by the time the other platoon had moved up in support. The odds growing long even for her taste, she withdrew, boobytrapping some of the batarian bodies with their own fragmentation grenades, a trick that chalked up another half dozen kills.
Fathi Jako was utterly astonished as he watched the remains of one platoon withdraw in confusion from the forest, his tanks burning behind them. Among the trees came the occasional flash of lightning, followed by a thunderclap and another hypervelocity slug chasing after the retreating troops, ploughing through them in bloody rends. Batarian blood now mixed with human blood in the soil in front of the bunker. Jako was the son of a high priest, and to him, it appeared they were not being hunted by a human, but the God of Thunder, an ancient deity, taker of those who violated the Pillars' edicts. Such superstitions had been abandoned long ago, but not forgotten.
Entirely unwilling to commit the remaining four platoons to close with Shepard, Jako ordered that the entire company break out their ML-77 missile launchers to saturate the entire forest facing towards the space. The order was simple; if it looks suspicious either on heat sensors or IRNV, light it up. If Shepard was going to ground, Jako intended to leave no ground to go to. Soon, the increasingly twitchy batarian noble warriors were streaming missiles into the forest from their foxholes and trenches seemingly at random, splintering trees and smashing rock into dust.
Increasingly, Shepard was forced to move towards the batarian positions, as the fire seemed to roll down the hill behind her. Soon, she would have been forced into the open, and her cloak would not last long enough to traverse the space unseen. Desperate, she came up with a brilliant countermeasure. She moved to the very edge of the forest, away from the great majority of the missiles' destinations, and took aim. Finding the largest concentration of enemy troops, she targeted not the troopers but their weapons. As the ML-77 was a long device, it was beyond the protections of kinetic barriers at its vulnerable tip. Shepard, a superlative marksman, waited until one batarian soldier was aiming. The shot penetrated the casing of the front missile, but set off the entire tube. The disruptor ammunition she favoured had detonated the missiles. The entire trench was cleared out, as secondary explosions from stored ammunition added to the chaos.
The Lieutenant-Commander repositioned and repeated the trick, missing as often as she struck home, targeting slung grenades or reload tubes as much as missile launchers themselves. Another four squads were destroyed or mangled in this way, all with the objective of forcing Jako's hand. Yet the batarian subcommander would not budge, out of fear. The firing continued, until during one barrage, Shepard struck him down unknowingly. Determined to break the deadlock, and needing time to cool off some of her heatsink clips, she had switched to her Rorsch once more and looked for a target in the rear. Jako just so happened to be repositioning from his command pillbox into a nearby trench. The slug hit him in the hip, sending him spinning like a top and almost cutting him in half at the waist.
With the chain of command in the Firstborn now confused, squad leaders took it upon themselves to begin issuing orders. Some ordered an advance. Others ordered a retreat into the bunker. A few decided to continue with the bombardment of the forest with the missile launchers. The result was perfect anarchy, as those in front charged, those in the middle fired, and those in the back ran away. Shepard exploited this immediately. Those charging towards her received her wrath, at first via her AMR, then her Viper, and finally, her pistol and her omniblade. Not enough soldiers had joined the movement, and a mere three soldiers made it to within spitting distance. Her cloak prevented them from finding her once they had, just long enough for her to execute them with two quick shots to the back of the head and a stab through the chest.
With the threat of being chased now ended, and the troops facing her now thinned out considerably, it was Shepard's turn to advance. She edged around the troops firing at random, and came at them from the right side, where she could deal with them one foxhole at a time. Once again, she approached cloaked until she reached point-blank range, and opened fire so close that her Viper's barrel almost touched the targets. Once they were dead, she dived in after them, leaving the others unaware of her presence save for the sudden silence from their left. Too busy firing to pay much heed, Shepard deposited her Rorsch in the foxhole and picked up one of the Firstborn's Revenant machineguns.
Using the weapon, she stormed the last of the trenches. Many have speculated that she was tempting fate, seeking death now that she had avenged her brothers and sisters in arms. More military minds have pointed out that she had pressed the batarians hard, and needed to keep up the pressure to break them completely. In this, she succeeded. Moving between trenches cloaked, she revealed herself only once she was among the batarians, ripping through them with the Revenant. Often, these had attempted to flee, climbing out of the trench only to be shot in the back on the clearing.
By hour twenty of the mission, every batarian outside the bunker was dead or dying, and Shepard stood alone in the field among the corpses, as the first units of Task Force Smaland arrived to relieve the reconnaissance force in accordance with the battle plan. The Fifth Fleet's Patrol Group 10 had entered orbit during the fight. Alliance titans were already dropping from orbit all over Torfan. The GARDIAN batteries of the bunker remained silent, those inside too terrified to care about the fleet, instead preparing to fight the demon at their door.
Phase 3: Invasion
Shepard was greeted by the Swedish 145th Mechanised Regiment of the Thirteenth Legion, under Colonel Folkesson. When the colonel asked what her combat behaviour recommendation was for the surrounding area, she answered "Kill them all. Send a message to the rest of the galaxy, that humanity will defend its people, and that those that attack us will die with certainty." A recommendation that was taken to heart. Shepard proceeded to aid in the storming of the bunker complex itself, which was taken with minimal casualties on the Alliance side. No prisoners were taken. General Petrovsky received her reports with silent reserve, but according to his personal journals, he was filled with loathing. Any chance of a merciful transition to Alliance rule was destroyed by the revelation that the kidnapping and slavery of humans was known to batarians on the world, yet that information had not made its way to Alliance ears.
Unfortunately for the residents of Torfan, Governor Sak'davran had taken Captain Char's warnings to heart. When the Alliance Army taskforces arrived, his militia were at full readiness and in no mood to surrender. He did not even attempt to issue an order to this effect. Across the moon, the population was prepared to resist. The planetary capital, Davran, built only ten years before and located only forty miles away from Haven, was besieged. The citizenry desperately attempted to halt the advance of the Swedes and Irish, levelling buildings themselves to block the advance of APCs and walkers, and using flamethrowers to cover their movements from sensors. As on Anhur, the response was swift and decisive. Heavy artillery was trained at each block of the city, before the ruins were picked over by infantry and walkers.
Casualties stacked among Torfan's militia, as the other major settlements and mining complexes were subjected to the same treatment. However, this mix of part timers, criminals, and ex-soldiers held out as long as they could. The Governor's palace fell on the third day, and Sak'davran himself surrendered at gunpoint to troops from Taskforce Ulster, his family beside him. This led to the general collapse of morale among the batarians, and soon, they began surrendering too, stacking arms. Many militia units whom had used flamethrowers found themselves shot while trying to surrender, the Alliance troops unable to believe that they were sincere, and their hostility to the batarians raised to new heights at any rate.
The holdouts would take months to clear, particularly after they fled successfully into the hills, but for the most part, Torfan fell to the Alliance after just four days of real fighting.