January 23rd, 2090

Galloway Supply outpost, Surveyed United Nations Territory

Penrith , the very recently-promoted head of Clan Debrektal, looked on with horror as his father's flagship was gutted like a fish by the humans' nuclear lasers. Aboard his personal light cruiser, Dirnfelthir, he and his father's vassals had watched their liege lord duel the impudent little human frigate. The young man stood there, eyes glued to the screen depicting the flagship Derithizet-his father's ship-dying in spasms of explosions. He watched the spectacle for some time until his aid cleared his throat gently.

"My lord, the fleet requires orders."

Penrith's brain rebooted, and he pushed down the part of himself that was a young man whose father had just died, and left only the experienced officer and warrior behind.

He looked to his communications officer. "Was the jamming disrupted?"

The man looked uncomfortable at the question. "It's impossible to know for certain, my lord. If it was, it wouldn't have been for more than a few fractions of a second-"

"Which is potentially long enough for a message to get out." Penrith interrupted. "We're cutting the raid short, this will be the only target we strike in this outing. I have no interest in being intercepted by human reinforcements. We're seizing that station's population as captives, and then we're leaving. Bring the fleet into-"

"Life pods launched from the enemy frigate!" The sensors officer called out.

Penrith looked back at his screen with surprise. The secondary cannons must have finished them.

"Are they signaling surrender?" Penrith asked.

"No signals so far, sir." the sensors officer replied. "Wait-...frigate is on the move! It's heading on an attack vector!"

Penrith cursed. Are they insane?

"Bring us into a defensive formation." He ordered. He had no way of confirming with certainty that the enemy was out of guided munitions, and making the assumption that they were was what had killed his father.

The fleet maneuvered into formation. One of them, House Kritizfeth's ship Ganlia, was the last to approach the formation. The human frigate saw this opportunity and seized it, charging the batarian destroyer at high speed.

Penrith looked on incredulously. They can't seriously think that they can prevail against-...by the gods!

He shouted into his flag officer's comm. "Ganlia, it's a suicide attack, get out of the way now! All ships, break formation and fire!"

The flotilla moved rapidly to follow his orders, pouring withering fire down on the human ship. The frigate was firing every gun that still functioned, accelerating well beyond safe levels. It was barely in one piece when it finally struck Ganlia. The two ships were blown apart in a terrible flash of light. Penrith could only look on in horror. It was simply too much. The facade of the professional officer evaporated, and all that was left now was the young man.

"...Bring us in to the station." He ordered, his voice barely above a whisper.

His orders were relayed, and the batarian ships reorganized themselves into a formation, and burned lightly for the station. Penrith looked at the sensor signatures of the human life pods, his hate and rage boiling below the surface. These cowards and their dishonorable tactics had gone far enough.

"Destroy the life pods." He gave the order, his voice betraying no emotion. His officers looked back at him, some trepidation written on their faces. He met each of their gazes, one at a time, until they looked away. His orders were relayed, and one of the vassal destroyers slowed slightly, and commenced its foul work.

Penrith watched as the life pod signatures vanished, one by one.

He turned back to his officers. "Send out search and rescue teams to Derithizet and search for survivors. Have Talmethritz," he said, speaking of the transport ship, "board the station and seize the captives, but tell Captain Ginritz to not waste time rooting out stragglers and hiders. If they're not willing to submit to captivity, then they die with the station."

He drew breath for his next orders and, for a single instant, he hesitated. Was this really an order he was willing to give? The image of his father's ship being eviscerated by the laser missiles flashed into his mind. Rage filled him, and he decided that yes, he very much was.

"All human military personnel found on the station are to be executed."


January 27th, 2090

Planet Robin, Nest Star System, Surveyed United Nations Territory

Penrith was awoken from fitful sleep by the ringing of his omnitool.

He answered it gruffly. "What."

"My Lord, we're coming up on the gas giant now."

He sighed. He had asked to be woken when they arrived. "Understood. I'm coming to the bridge."

"Of course, my Lord."

He killed the connection, and ran his hands over his face. His omnitool's clock said it had been six hours, but he certainly didn't feel like he'd gotten six hours' rest. When he closed his eyes, he saw his father's ship exploding before his eyes. He was filled to the brim with hate and impotent range. His father had been larger than life, and now he was nothing but motes of dust drifting in the void of space. Part of him wanted to vent the atmosphere out of the slave pens on Talmethritz, and then rampage through human space until someone finally killed him.

Ironically, it was his father's memory that spared the human captives that cruel fate. Deep down, Penrith already knew his father would've been disgusted with him. Slaughtering defenseless foes was the behavior of criminals, not warriors. Such pointless bloodshed was unbecoming of a batarian nobleman, or at least that's what his father had believed. Clan Debrektal kept the Old Way, and Lord Aderanth Debrektal had been its most ardent follower. Other batarian noble families scoffed at the scattered few who still adhered to the Old Way, and would have found the idea of getting torn up over a few dozen murdered enemies absurd (and, indeed, the wider galaxy would find the idea of a batarian with a conscience laughable), but Clan Debrektal and others like it followed a different path. There were rules, and rules applied to everyone. Not just those of low rank. His father's lectures bounced around in his head.

Those pompous, strutting fools think that they can violate our most ancient laws and tread upon our most sacred traditions without consequence, but they all end up in the grave one way or another, just like everyone else. And when Venzeeltir weighs their life upon his scales, they'll be found wanting.

Penrith was certain that Venzeeltir would find his soul very wanting indeed.

Penrith kept his eyes staring straight ahead as he entered the bridge, pointedly ignoring the many faces that hurriedly looked away. His father had been loved. It seemed his choices meant that he was destined to be feared instead. He looked to his aide and executive officer.

"Will it do?" he asked.

The XO nodded. "Yes. This will be more than adequate to discharge our drives."

"Excellent. Set up a rotation, one at a time."

His aide looked at him inquisitively. "Only one?"

Penrith nodded. "Yes. This is the closest gas giant to the relay, a perfect place to discharge our drives. If there are enemy reinforcements looking for us, they'll look here."

The XO smiled in approval. "I agree. It would be unwise to scatter ourselves by all going in at once, or to divide our forces with a larger rotation."

"Have Geg'sDar'Fit start first." Penrith ordered.


Colonel Timothy Li sat in the CO's seat of his latest command, the cruiser Hrvatska. His promotion to full bird Colonel (indicated by the golden Phoenix pins on his collar) had been the result of a negotiation between himself and Space Force High Command. There had been a dilemma: they wanted him to be a flag officer, and there was nothing that he wanted less. Tim was of the opinion that all these promotions were getting out of hand, and he also had no interest spending the war flying a desk. So, command had settled for promoting him to the highest rank of field officer, and then saddling him with a full cruiser taskforce, a fate that usually would've befallen Colonels that had spent several years in the rank rather than several weeks.

Hrvatska was accompanied by the destroyers Colorado and Goa, along with the frigates Boise, Xiamen, Glasgow, and Garissa. Together, the ships made for a very bog-standard cruiser task force. Formations like these were the bricks that UN fleets were constructed from. Gone were the days of Tim getting to command his lone ship against the stars, but at least this way he had more tools in his belt against the batarian.

He looked at the visual feed from the tiny camera drones he observed the batarian flotilla with. Thus far, he and his ships remained undetected, hiding on the far side of a small moon of the gas giant. They would not remain that way for long, as soon the batarians' own camera drones would find them. Time looked on in dismay as the batarian commander wisely chose to rotate his ships in one at a time rather than divide his forces.

So much for Plan A. he thought glumly.

The enemy outmatched him in terms of both firepower and tonnage, and he'd been rather hoping he'd be able to defeat them in detail. It seems that the batarian commander had his head on a swivel. In the right circumstances, he would just cut his losses and either flee or wait for the enemy to leave. Unfortunately, there were three thousand people aboard that slave ship, so there wasn't really a choice. He had to fight, and win. Of course, in the cold calculus of war, risking an entire taskforce of expensive warships (made all the more priceless due to how horrifyingly outnumbered the Space Force was) in exchange for three thousand civilians was at best hopelessly naive, and at worst actively stupid. The numbers did not add up.

Well, no one ever accused a Ranger of being good at math.

"Open all silos." Tim ordered.


"Contact!" the sensors officer shouted.

Penrith sighed. He hated being right.

"Two hundred plus contacts!"

"What?" Penrith had to stop himself from shouting. He hadn't expected to be this right.

"Missiles sir, by the look of them. Several flights of them, in addition to at least seven ship-sized contacts."

"Lead with that next time, yes?"

"...Aye sir."

Penrith examined the contacts on his screen. This was no haphazard swarm, it was a carefully organized formation. Larger missiles like the-...like the ones that had killed his father were the center points of flights of a dozen of the smaller torpedo weapons. Penrith's face was set. This was too perfectly arranged to be something the human commander had come up with on the fly for the battle. This had to be the product of doctrine. The humans seemed to favor high quality, long-range guided munitions. Such tactics were not unheard of in Citadel-derived militaries, but they were generally discarded in favor of more cost-effective methods. True, the nuclear lances and laser missiles humans used had a drastically higher hit probability than the disrupter torpedoes favored in the wider galaxy, but they were also drastically more expensive. Penrtih wouldn't have been surprised if a pair of fighters couldn't have been purchased for the same price as just one of the missile flights.

In the enormous, galaxy-spanning wars that had dictated the military culture of the dominant militaries of the galaxy, using such weapons would've been untenable. The weapons were potent, to be sure, but they'd last for exactly one battle. And the Rachni Hordes and Krogan armadas wouldn't wait around for their enemies to resupply. Still, the weapons gave a very potent alpha strike, and not respecting their power had cost Penrith's father his life. And he couldn't deny the anxiety in his gut as he watched the missile flights on his screen...They were moving awful slow, weren't they? Almost...loitering.

Damn them.

Already, the humans were opening up with extreme range pot shots from their mass drivers, as if they somehow knew that Penrith had figured out their tactics.

"Recall Geg'sDar'Fit immediately!" Penrith ordered, but it was likely too late. Already, two flights of missiles were flying out towards the isolated destroyer. It wasn't long before they found their target, and the destroyer was reduced to a burned out husk by the nuclear lances. He was now down to only six escorts.

"Tighten our formation! Overlap our point defense grids!" Penrith commanded. The human rounds were coming in now, missing by many kilometers due to the range, but Penrith wasn't fooled. His eyes were glued to the missile flights, drifting and loitering around his defensive formation. The human strategy was obvious: Wear him down with gunfire, and then exploit weaknesses it created in his formation with missile strikes. Penrith grinned ferally.

They want to challenge a batarian armada to a gunnery duel? I accept.

"Focus fire on their escorts." He ordered.


"Fuck!" Tim exclaimed.

Three spinal mount shots struck Goa, two destroyer grade, one light cruiser grade. The human destroyer's barriers buckled under the first two shots, and she was forced to take a direct hit to the armor. To say that the ship "shrugged it off" would be an exaggeration, as her "top" right decks were wracked with cascading explosions and many of her secondary cannons were disabled. Yet, the fact that she hadn't been completely crippled by a direct hit to her unshielded body from a cruiser-grade artillery round was convincing evidence that the Space Force was getting their moneys worth out of the armored and reinforced hulls they had so expensively procured.

Goa's gimballed engine swiveled down as her commander ordered her into a rapid dive. A follow up volley of another three rounds sailed through where Goa had just been. Goa fired its reverse thrusters and headed back out of range to lick her wounds. Hrvatska fired two rounds from its spinal mount and a few wild volleys from its secondary cannons for good measure. The first shot scored a hit on the light cruiser's barrier, but the rest went wide as the batarian fleet-still in a well-dressed formation, annoyingly-maneuvered to avoid them. No kills, but it had silenced the enemy guns for a few precious moments.

Tim frowned. This was not how he'd hoped the gunnery fight would go. The enemy had bigger guns, and thus guns more accurate at this range. His frigates could do little but lay down wildly inaccurate suppressive fire at this range, and his destroyers were outnumbered three-to-one. His only saving grace was the vastly superior accuracy of Hrvatska's spinal mount. The Space Force did not have distinct classes of light, standard, and heavy cruisers like the rest of the galaxy. Cruisers served a completely different doctrinal roll in the Space Force from their foreign cousins, and consequently they operated only a single weight-class of over gunned and oversized cruisers that were a far cry from heavy cruisers but still not quite standard cruisers either. They could likely mop the floor with any standard cruiser operated by another species, but they'd still have their ass thoroughly handed to them in a gun fight with a proper heavy cruiser.

Hrvatska's above-average fire power was keeping the fleet from being completely outranged by the superior enemy battery, but it was a stalemate. Tim's missiles still loitered, drifting and waiting to pounce at the right moment, but that moment had yet to come. He could swarm the enemy, overwhelming their point defenses with sheer numbers, but he was hesitant to do so. The overlapping point defense grids were just too substantial. His heaviest missiles would have to detonate outside of the GARDIAN engagement envelope, which would drastically reduce their power.

Tim's task force had entered the battle eighteen King missiles in their silos. The Prince torpedoes were great for softening up targets and providing valuable target saturation, but the real killers were the Kings, which could detonate with lethal effect at a much greater range from the target than the Princes. And two of them had already been burned on the isolated destroyer. The remaining sixteen were enough to do substantial damage to the enemy flotilla, totally destroying at least a third of them, but it wouldn't kill them outright. And once the missiles were off the board, there was nothing stopping the batarians from breaking formation to charge home and try to outfight the humans in a melee. Their side was composed almost entirely of destroyers, and in a close-quarters melee fight, destroyers were king.

That last thought went through Tim's head again, and as he watched Goa return to the battle line, shields recharged, the idea that struck him brought a grin to his face.

"Prep the messenger drones, I need to make some secure transmissions."


"Commander, enemy fleet is accelerating!" The sensors officer called out.

Penrith glowered at his screen. This was a strange choice on the part of the enemy commander. Surely, the better strategy would've been to soften him up with the missiles and then charge, if he intended to end the battle here? It bothered him, and he didn't figure out the enemy's game until the sensors officer called out again.

"Enemy missiles are closing distance!"

Got you, you over-eager bastard. Penrith grinned. The human commander was thinking the other way around: First attack with his ships to disrupt his enemy's formation, and then finish the fight with a missile barrage. The human wanted a melee fight? He'd give him one.

"All ships are to maintain formation and advance on the enemy." He ordered.

The batarian flotilla advanced as a unit to meet the human charge. The cruiser poured withering fire on them, but it was only one ship. Against the disciplined volley fire of the batarian formation, the comparatively loose human formation buckled. The humans began to steadily retreat, their formation tightening uncomfortably as the batarians pressed in. Penrith watched in satisfaction as the cruiser's shields began to buckle, her escorts being forced to circle behind her for protection against the onslaught. Penrith briefly considered finishing them with a torpedo run, but he discarded it as he looked at the missiles, significantly closer than before. A torpedo run would disrupt his defensive formation too much. Better to envelop the cruiser in his formation and rip it to pieces with secondary cannon broadsides.

The flotilla moved to do just that, enveloping the cruiser as its barriers crumpled, her escorts forced to retreat, firing their reverse thrusters desperately. With the cruiser gone, the humans would be completely outgunned. As Penrith prepared for the finishing blow, the the sensors officer called out, fear in his voice.

"Enemy missiles approaching at high velocity!"

Penrith nodded. It was the only play the enemy commander had left to make. Penrith had begun this battle knowing that he'd lose ships to the missiles, and he prepared now to weather those losses.

Then the human cruiser fired its engines and charged.

"What?" Penrith asked of no one in particular, incredulous.

The human ship charged his own with reckless abandon, firing every gun. The human escorts stopped the retreat and counter charged, transforming from ragged mobs into a tight formation. One destroyer led two frigates on an attack to the "left", and the other destroyer led the other two frigates on an attack to the right. Their carefully coordinated fire acted almost like terrain on the battle field, forcing the destroyer escorts away with every dodging maneuver. They split the batarian formation into three pieces, pulling apart the overlapping point defenses forcefully.

However, Penrith's real concern was the human cruiser, which showed no signs of stopping, even as its barriers finally collapsed. Penrith, having siphoned reactor output from his weapons to his shields previously to aid in absorbing the cruiser's return fire, could do little but retreat in the face of its reckless charge. Penrith gaped at such insanity, but then he saw a destroyer spinal mount round glance off the armored slope of the human cruiser's conical hull, and he understood.

The bastard planned for his shields to drop. Gods, he planned all of this! The whole retreat was a ruse.

It seemed the human commander had a good deal more faith in the protective qualities of armor than his contemporaries. It also seemed that his faith was well placed, as the cruiser simply ate the incoming rounds, not stopping its charge for anything. Its hull was scarred with laser burns and kinetic craters, but still it came. Penrith had been separated from his other four escorts by the human escorts' counter charge, but he still had two destroyers directly escorting him. One of them broke formation slightly, and tried to loose a volley of torpedoes.

"No, you idiot-" Penrith cut himself short as the destroyer was cooked alive from the inside out by sustained laser fire. From this close, the cruiser's superior GARDIAN array was within range of the destroyer itself, and it took advantage of the gap in the laser-resistant armor the opening of a torpedo silo created. Penrith wanted to direct his men, order them to target the weakened points in the cruiser's armor, to do something, but one thought was inescapable.

The missiles were still coming.

Penrith prayed to Venzeeltir and his father's shade, begging him to forgive him for all the pointless deaths-human and batarian-he had caused. He looked at the oncoming missiles on the sensors array, blinking out rapidly as the GARDIAN defenses fought back desperately.

Father was right, this war was folly. Gods curse them for calling his banners and may the gods have mercy on-

His thoughts were cut short as his ship was ripped to pieces by a half dozen spears of nuclear fire.


Tim collapsed into his chair, the sudden stillness amidst the chaotic battle was a humbling thing to behold. He looked at Hrvatska's telescope feed. A few of the batarian ships were in something resembling one piece, but they were scorched out husks of irradiated alloys now. His own ships weren't exactly pristine themselves, and as they drew back together, surveying each other with the surviving telescopes, Tim was made painfully aware that this victory had killed a lot of good astronauts. Goa had the worst of it, her already damaged hull had been perforated again in the battle. Tim would be surprised if she hadn't lost at least a third of her crew complement by now.

But, as he watched the batarian slave ship ponderously burn away in a futile attempt at escape, he found solace in the lives their deaths had saved.

"Prep a boarding team." He ordered.


Well, this one was very fun to write. Space battles are always a blast, and I find that they come together really organically every time I have the pleasure to write a complex one. This chapter has two purposes:

1.) Bring a conclusion to the previous chapter.

2.) Plant some plot seeds with the batarians for later.

And before anyone asks, no these batarians are most certainly not meant to be "the good ones", or anything like that. They're more meant to introduce the idea that the Hegemony isn't monocultural, which will be more important later. Suffice to say, we haven't seen the last of the "Old Way".

This chapter will be followed up by an epilogue of indeterminate length at some point, then we'll be on to bigger things. Until then, as always thank you for reading!