THE EVE OF BATTLE

On July 3rd 2178, humanity set out to do what it had never done before; conquer another species' home cluster and bring the homeworld of that species to heel. Battlefleet Trafalgar began setting out on its two month journey to the Kite's Nest. In attempting it, the Alliance joined a very small club indeed. The krogan were the only species until that point to have successfully laid waste to the homeworld of another sentient species, namely that of the rachni. The krogan themselves were also conquered, albeit by the use of biological weapons that removed their most powerful weapon; the wombs of their mothers, and so the turians can claim membership of this most exclusive group. The turians had attempted to do the same to humanity during the First Contact War, but were stopped in their tracks.

The Consuls and their cabinet were there to see the ships off at the first station of Tower Bridge at Tango Urilla, four lightyears from the relay in the Utopia System. By that point, the Citadel Council and the three superpowers were aware of the project. To the surprise of even Nozomi Taro herself, they not only elected to allow the project to go forward but actively suppressed any attempt to leak the information. The Alliance attack was to be a grand military experiment for the entire galaxy, as well as a moment of existential validation. STG experts, not aware of modifications and tweaks for long range FTL travel being made extensively throughout Battlefleet Trafalgar, estimated as much as forty percent of the ships making the trip would not arrive at the other end. The Citadel's estimation of the effectiveness of the attack was thus revised downwards sharply, an assessment that the Alliance High Command became aware of.

But it was becoming impossible to hide the size of the manoeuvres being undertaken. Formally, the Consuls and their war cabinet were present to give the impression they were there to begin a war game, based in star clusters at the edge of known space as practice for the inevitable battle to storm the relays.

It was an important piece of theatre, and one that the galactic media bought wholesale. The invasion of Torfan had occurred less than a month before, and the controversy over the actions of Major Jonathan Kyle and Lieutenant-Commander Jane Shepard continued to rage. This was deliberately stoked by the Alliance government to cover up the preparations for the attack on the Hegemony, and the 'fleet exercises' at Tango Urilla were framed as a distraction by 'insiders' in a perfectly choreographed grey propaganda campaign by the Defence Intelligence Directorate. The exercises were dismissed as a farce by a government on the ropes due to lack of progress in the war and atrocities committed in the name of victory. Exactly what the government wanted to hear. The tune would be different in two months time.

Consul Taro was also present to do all she could towards the success of the operation. She was not a military minded person, but she understood the art of motivation, perhaps better than any living human. In particular, there was one person she wished to motivate above all others, upon whose shoulders she had placed a terrible burden.

Lieutenant-Colonel Belmont was summoned to the presence of Taro and Minister Bankole. According to the latter, she bade the soldier to sit while she remained standing. She presented him with her personal standard depicting the Siberian Tiger, with teeth bared and clawed paw ready to strike. She informed him of the full importance of his mission; the batarian outpost that he was to assault was not only the outermost point of the Hegemony's exploration, but that its silence was absolutely crucial to the success of the entire endeavour. Taro dropped to her knees, bowed with her head almost touching the floor, and begged Belmont to hold nothing back, to put himself and his troops entirely at the disposal of the mission, to take her tiger banner to the heart of the batarian facility and raise it above the first world in the Kite's Nest to be claimed by humanity. Belmont's response is not known, but it can be inferred from his later actions. He took the banner with him.

The Hegemony's own activities during this time are a mystery, records being lost both as a result of Arch-Hegemon Ar'dra's attempts to cover for the loss and due to destruction caused during the Great Upheaval and the Reaper War. It can be assumed that preparations for the defence and counterattack that Admiral Ar'dra and General Gadnalak were to lead continued apace. They would not be up to facing what was now coming.

THE BATTLE

Phase 1: Arrival

Battlefleet Trafalgar made its way through Tower Bridge on schedule, but not without losses. Ten percent of the fleets were put out of action temporarily due to maintenance issues associated with long range standard FTL travel, although the great majority of these were with the older tranches of the New York class cruisers. Tragedy struck when the Ceres-class resupply-recovery ship Messia disintegrated violently on exiting FTL at Station Nine, about a third of the way to Hegemony space. A flaw in the bow barrier systems had let a piece of space debris, most likely a microasteroid, strike the ship as it was still at hypervelocity. The other Ceres-class vessels were retrofitted in-space to fix the error, though it hung a dark pall over the rest of the journey that was well remembered by the veterans of the campaign.

As the bulk of the fleet continued at its steady pace, the frigates carrying Lieutenant-Colonel Belmont's forces pressed forward to the front of the pack. They arrived at Station Seventeen ahead of the main force, and disembarked onto the station itself to prepare for the attack. DID operatives had been dispatched months earlier to monitor the target; the batarian 'research' outpost on Planet Y-2Y. Belmont was given the most unpleasant news almost immediately that the outpost was no longer used for research purposes, and had been turned into something far more dangerous. The Batarian External Forces had taken possession of the place as a training ground.

The news was a mixed blessing, to say the least. The outpost was no longer monitoring nearby space closely, which would mean that the fleets could begin arrive undetected, for the moment. Its status as a harsh environment training facility meant that it was unlikely that there were heavy arms or significant numbers of fully capable External Forces veterans on-hand to resist. However, the soldiers of the External Forces were chosen for their strength, cunning and ruthlessness from the very beginning, and DID signal intercepts suggested that the Delta Force unit would be heavily outnumbered. Belmont faced a choice. Recommend to Admiral Hackett that the mission be scrubbed, dismissing the reduced chance of detection entirely, or commence the operation anyway.

The Colonel chose the latter option. Any chance of detection was too great, and the opportunity for cracking the batarian extranet network was too great a prize to turn down.

Delta Force boarded Navy A-62s for drop onto Planet Y-2Y on September 7th 2178, a week before the first possible arrival of light from Station Seventeen to batarian sensors. The bombers, fitted for drop-pod duty, followed a carefully plotted path. The FTL arrival was timed so that the vehicles would be behind the planet relative to the outpost. The bombers would then dive into the atmosphere and fly as low as possible to the drop point. Once this was completed, the bombers would move off to the opposite side of the planet and land to await the success or failure of the mission. The chance of detection was too great for anything else.

The drop went smoothly, and no batarian record of the insertion of Delta Force exists. Belmont and his troops were dropped five days march from the outpost. The terrain was shaped by the harsh cold of the planet, which was going through its 'snowball Earth' period. The units made good headway. On the last day of the march, the first enemy contacts were sighted. The training period on the ice had just ended, and the External Forces candidates and their handlers were themselves marching to the outpost. Belmont's soldiers shadowed them unnoticed; no Earthling was going to be outdone on the ice, and several squads got to the outpost itself undetected while the rest waited the signal to intervene outside. Belmont personally commanded the infiltration teams, the only way to know for sure when the right moment to strike would arrive.

The batarian outpost consisted of two buildings, a former modular residency converted into a barracks and an observatory that had been modified into a command station. Between them ran two reinforced corridors, curving outwards to former walls, sheltering the landing pad in the middle of the structures from the razor-cold winds that often whipped across the ice plains. The barracks was by far larger than the command building, and certainly the place where the most resistance would be met. However, it was also not where the communications nodes were located. While batarian soldiers had access to the Hegemony extranet via the barracks, the official channels of communication were only accessible via the command building. Belmont therefore opted to seize the latter and bunker down against counterattacks from the former, allowing the majority of his force to take the entire facility from the opposite direction to that of the battle.

The first part of the plan went according to expectations, perhaps even exceeding them. The command section was occupied by a skeleton crew of a mere four batarians, all of whom were taken completely by surprise, omniblades making short work of them. The only snag was that in attacking at night, the batarian commanders and the veteran drill instructors were not present in the building too. The infiltration was so stealthy that the batarians did not even notice that their enemy was in their midst until Belmont, satisfied that he had secured his part of the compound, ordered that the Hegemony's war flag be brought down and replaced with the Consul's banner atop the large flagpole on the roof. Even then, it was thirty minutes before the batarians noticed. Probing attacks against both corridors, the exterior and via the landing pad failed to breach Belmont's perimeter. However, these were conducted by the soldier-candidates in small numbers, and didn't constitute a large enough distraction for the rest of Delta Force to join the fighting.

The batarian counterattack was far less conventional. A biotic assault on the south corridor completely overwhelmed the defences, completely suicidal biotic charges allowing the bulk of the batarian veterans to close the distance and take the fight to the command building. Meanwhile, the candidates attacked from the north corridor and the landing pad, the latter covered by heavy fire. Belmont ordered the rest of Delta Force to close in and join the battle at last, and ordered his own group to not take any chances, to buy time cheaply. Just after doing so, the External Forces reached the comms room. The batarian commander, Colonel Dr'hak, was a biotic and had seen action on both Mindoir and Elysium. Flanked by five more of the Hegemony's most capable biotics, they stormed the room. Within five minutes, three of the batarians were dead, two by Belmont's own hand, but so were the six humans. Including the Lieutenant-Colonel himself.

What happened next has been the subject of no less than seven vids and sims.

The Delta Force operators within the compound, having successfully repulsed the green batarian candidates, turned their attention to the much-diminished batarian veterans. The second-in-command was one Major Franklin, and contrary to the popular myth that what occurred was the result of a common urge among the soldiers, he ordered that the comms room be retaken and the body of Belmont recovered. A suitably Homeric struggle began as a result. The Americans successfully retook the room, but could not remove the Lieutenant-Colonel's body in time before the batarians ripped the walls off, turning the entire floor into a series of ragged firing lanes. The outer walls were soon damaged too, allowing the worst of the elements in. The fight went back and forth from that point on, the superior equipment and fighting skill of Delta Force matching the natural biotic talents of the batarians head on.

Eventually, the Delta Force platoons that had advanced from the outside cleared the barracks, capturing the majority of the candidates, and the battle turned away from the batarians' favour. The veterans refused to surrender, and were killed to a man. Aside from Belmont himself, the infiltration team suffered one hundred percent casualties. One in three was dead, and the other two thirds were put out of action 'permanently', although almost all of the survivors would later return to active service after receiving clone or augmetic parts. The batarians themselves lost half their personnel, and the facility itself.

The victory was bittersweet, and not complete. Aside from the death of Belmont and a substantial number of some of humanity's finest soldiers, a batarian conscript in service to one of the Highborn managed to get a message to his family via the extranet connections in his barracks section. The Alliance remained unaware of this until the DID operators arrived to hack the comms and begin sending spoof messages.

Admiral Hackett was confronted with the possibility that the Hegemony was aware of Tower Bridge. In reality, the DID group managed to begin sending regular status reports back to batarian high command. The family of the batarian conscript who had got the message off were lowborn, and the military authorities dismissed the warning as an attempt to get reassigned to a more hospitable posting. However, this could not have been known to Hackett, who was now forced to accelerate the plan or risk allowing the Batarian Navy to gather against his forces.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Apologies for the hiatus on all my writing, I have been in the middle of moving house from one city to another. Obvious delays are to be expected. This chapter was pretty much done before I moved. The next thing out will be an Outlander chapter, despite my promise that the next release would be BF2157.

Also, Canadian real estate and rental markets are utterly insane.