For the political parties - the Lords of Sol, outside of the whole creating a noble class, is exactly the kind of thing religious fundamentalist would vote for; religion influencing the government, acts and lifestyles (abortion, gay people) being banned, parents being in charge of education, and are big fans of a small government that doesn't interfere in their lives. Being from the US, I know there is a decent chunk of the population that would love that, and I'm sure other countries have those people as well, probably some more than others.
The Free People's Party is a form of libertarianism, a small government that stays out of the economy and gives people the freedom to do whatever they want with their lives as long as it isn't negatively affecting other people's lives. The Social Labor Alliance is based on the Nordic model of government.
Just because none of those, or maybe only one of those, appeal to you specifically, doesn't mean everyone is in the same boat. The Quaestus Party is the one I wrote knowing probably no one would support, but it's also the one I don't have staying as a top party.
Chapter 14
The Systems Alliance 13th Defense Task Force, part of the 4th Fleet, slowly floated in a wide loop of a few hundred thousand miles around Borr. Ever since the slavers had started raiding human space, the fleets had been divided into individual task forces and each one assigned to a separate system. Well, each fleet besides the 1st Fleet and 2nd Fleet, which still defended the Sol System and Arcturus System respectfully. Every dockyard in Systems Alliance space was churning out new ships but even at the quickest of paces, building new ships took time; thirteen months for a frigate, seventeen months for a destroyer, twenty-three months for a cruiser or carrier, and thirty months for a dreadnought. Outside of a handful of ships that were already under construction when the First Contact War started, some of which were altered with upgraded technologies likes the SSV New York, they had only produced a handful of frigates and a dozen new corvettes. Though a trio of new destroyers were finishing final test runs.
The 13th Defense Task force consisted of thirty-five total ships - one heavy cruisers, four standard cruisers, one light cruiser, ten destroyers, eighteen frigates, and one newly developed EMC corvette, run by a three man crew and jammed full of systems with the sole purpose to mess with enemy sensors, communications, and targeting systems. Vice Admiral Hawthorn, who commanded the heavy cruiser SSV Lima, and the task force, had them moving in a loose formation, the frigates on the flanks, the destroyers in the front, with the cruisers behind them, and the corvette between the two heavy cruisers. Their job was to defend Terra Nova, and the two mining outposts in the outer asteroid belt. The loop around Borr would bring them near the asteroid belt, and one of the mining outposts, before they circled back around toward Terra Nova. As long as she kept the ships of the fleet far enough away from any gravitational forces that were stronger than the ships they could technically drift at current speeds until the heat death of the universe. Though the use of thrusters to change their direction did have an effect on their forward velocity.
The Asgard System didn't hold the mass relay in the Exodus Cluster, but it was the closest human occupied system in the cluster to both the Terminus Systems, as well as batarian held space. In Vice Admiral Hawthorn's opinion, it would have made sense to have one of the navy's two dreadnoughts patrolling either the Asgard System or at least stationed in the Utopia System by the relay, since Asgard would be the most likely one hit from the dark space between clusters and Utopia's relay connected to both the Terminus System as well as the batarian home system of Kite's Nest, but instead the SSV Everest of the 1st Fleet was stationed in Sol, and the SSV Fuji of the 2nd Fleet was stationed around Arcturus Station.
What the damn military industrial complex needed to do was work on creating some kind of orbital defense systems to defend the planets. They had the Skywalker-III ground-to-space missile batteries but those only worked when ships were in high planetary orbit, roughly 35,000 kilometers (22,000 miles) above the surface, and most moons were too far away to provide any type of defensive capabilities to the planets they orbited, especially if the attacking enemy used the one simple trick of attacking the side of the planet the moon(s) weren't on given that most terrestrial planets rarely had more than two. Missiles could only be guided for so long, and with enough time even the slowest of ships could move out of the way of something shot at them from over 100,000 miles away.
"Ma'am, drive signatures have been detected at the edge of the system."
That was odd. There were no commercial flights scheduled to come to Asgard this day and any movement of Systems Alliance ships would have beeen conveyed before hand. "Are they coming from the direction of the Utopia or Eridani systems?"
"Negative ma'am. They're coming from the direction of batarian space."
Vice Admiral Hawthorn turned to look at the haptic displays on the CIC. Based on where the signatures were detected, where her ships currently were, and where Terra Nova was, she had some time to get her task force between the enemy and the planet. She keyed the 1MC. "All hands, battle stations. Marines, ready to repel boarders." She closed the 1MC before looking at the crew around the CIC. "Bring the task force to full alert. Óscar, coordinate with the rest of the task force to get us turned around and facing the inbound ships, battle alpha formation."
"Coordinating, Vice Admiral," Óscar, who took his name and appearance off of famed Peruvian President and war hero Óscar Raymundo Benavides Larrea, responded. Óscar would be in communication with every ships pilot and navigations crew setting coordinates, calculating thrusts, and making sure there were no accidental collisions.
"How many drive signatures are there?"
"We don't have a hard number yet ma'am, but it's over a hundred."
Vice Admiral Hawthorn felt the blood drain from her face. This wasn't a simple slave raid, either every slaver in the Terminus System was coming to raid Terra Nova or the Batarian Hegemony was declaring war. "Lieutenant Commander Rawlings, drop a FTL comm buoy and send a DEFCON 2 - OMEGA alert to the relay station in the Utopia System, as well as our initial scans of the threat. Send a transmission to the Nova Defense Force and both asteroid stations, with the same. Óscar, relay that I want all task force fighters to launch and to set a screen."
Some of the frigates slowly moved from the flank of the formation, to the front, placed between the destroyers.
"Doesn't look like anymore ships are entering scanner range ma'am, total foreign drive signatures static at one-one-three. Based on heat output, I'd put two-eight of them at cruiser size."
They had almost as many cruisers as she had total ships. Based on deceleration of these unknown ships and her own speeds, it would still be about an hour until they were anywhere near maximum recommended firing range. By that time, their message should be arriving at the Utopia relay station. If she knew naval command as well as she thought she did, they wouldn't just rush in another task force given the number of unique foreign drive signatures. They'd want to send in a fleet at a minimum, and given only two fleets hadn't been divided, and those were the ones guarding Earth and Arcturus Station, it would take half a day just to gather one of the divided fleets to Utopia, and then another several hours to get to Asgard. And thats if everyone noved at top speed. Her guess at reinforcement arrival time was somewhere between nineteen and thirty-one hours.
Hawthorn could feel a slight shifting beneath her feet, a sign that the fighter bay doors had been opened. The small blips of fighters, sixty total, leaving their ships appeared on the displays in front of her, as they organized themselves into their designated squadrons at the head of the formation.
"Óscar, what's the strength of the Nova Defense Force?"
The miniature Óscar Raymundo Benavides Larrea adjusted his jacket for a moment, something the AI didn't need to do but sometimes did as a way to appear more approachable to the human crew. "Per the last reports from Governor Maliek Smalls they have a standing army of 378 soldiers with eight IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicle) M91 Cougars, eight AMPV (Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle) M1242 Rhinos, and a single A04 Pelican helicopter. On top of that they are supplemented by a company of 193 B-rated Systems Alliance marines with six IFV M29 Grizzlys, four AMPV M1242 Rhinos, three A12 Sparrow gunships, and 5 FENRIR heavy mechs."
"And air defenses?"
"The planet has twenty Skywalker-III GTS launchers - six located in each pole, placed between the major cities and the surrounding villages, and eight spread throughout the deserts that cover the majority of the planet. There are also fourteen Militia AA turrets around the two major cities."
If her task force lost the space battle, which was highly likely given the amount of ships they were up against, there were three courses of action available to the enemy ships when it came to the colony. The first, and least likely of the three, was they could just turn around and leave the system without doing anything. The second was they could bombard the planet from orbit, killing anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands, depending on how thorough they decided to be with the bombardment. The final course of action was sending down their soldiers to either capture as many people possible as slaves or to subjugate the population.
"Tell Captain Sardanis I want him to send half of the marines to Terra Nova to link up with the SA garrison to defend the planet. Relay the same orders to the other cruiser COs and their CDOs."
"Right away, Vice Admiral."
Six dozen marines might not be a huge boost to the defense of the planet but it was better than nothing. And it could potentially mean the difference in the entire planet being carried off as slaves, or the defenders holding off the attack long enough for reinforcements to arrive.
Ghorok Bamderk, Gloried Hand of the Dondegar Family, looked down upon the human world as hundreds of transports, each filled with scores of the Enlightened, descended upon it, accompanied by dozens of gunships. He had crushed the human warships in battle and would soon return to the Hegemony in glory with thousands of the primitive monkeys as slaves. He could already imagine the parades and honors that would be bestowed upon him.
The Prime Administrator, Vicar Supreme, and the Council all talked for days and weeks and months about the humans. Ever since news of the turians being engaged in a war with a new alien species right on the edge of Hegemony space, altering plans for Hegemony expansion, there had been conversations about what they were going to do with the new aliens.
It had been over a suurcycle since the manipulative asari had negotiated peace between the aggressive turians and the primitive humans, and still it was only ever conversations. Data from the battles between the Hierarchy and the Systems Alliance showed humans didn't have the technology to keep up with any of the Citadel races, and intel pointed at their fleets being only a fraction of the fleets of the Hegemony. It was clear to all that the Hegemony could easily dominate the human military and subjugate the entire race to the will of the Hegemony, giving them their own client race like the turians and asari had, except the humans wouldn't have the type of freedom the volus and elcor had.
Yet the Council did not act. The Prime Administrator did not order the fleets forward. The Vicar Supreme stuck with his same old sermons instead of declaring a Fiery Crusade against the primitive monkeys.
And why? Because of the suit rats? The largest fleet in the galaxy that wandered the Terminus Systems, afraid of bringing forth the ire of one of the Citadel races? Why should any in the Hegemony fear a race of people who allowed themselves to be bullied by the Council? The strong took what they wanted and the weak suffered what they must, and the quarians suffered because their entire species was weak. This was clear to any batarian with half a brain.
It was clear to Ghorok that someone needed to take charge; to be the one to lead the charge of Hegemony supremacy, and someone had. Adatok Dondegar, Chief of the Dondegar Family and member of the Council of Oligarchs, had approached him days ago asking him to gather the Dondegar Family's ships and to prepare them for battle. As the Gloried Hand of the Dondegar, Ghorok was the leader of their fleet and he lived to serve the family's will.
The Hegemony's navy was the combined fleets of each of the Families but unless the Prime Administrator issued a Declaration of Unity, whether it be to call the Hegemony to war or to fend of an invasion of some kind, or the Vicar Supreme declared a Fiery Crusade, the various fleets could technically act independently. Though the independent actions of the various fleets were mostly kept to patrolling and defending systems controlled by their family. But when Ghook found himself ordered by the Chief of the family he served to take the gathered ships, travel via FTL through the dark space between clusters, and attack the nearest human colony, he set out to do so without a second thought.
When the batarian race had first discovered the Citadel community there was only the asari, the salarians, and the volus. When the rachni had first threatened the galaxy, thanks to the salarians stupidly opening up deactivated mass relays, it was batarians who had first met the horde in battle. Before the ever fearful salarians had uplifted the krogan, it had been batarian blood that spilled in waves to try stem the tide. When the krogan became too greedy and violent after their victory, attacking already settled colony worlds in order to claim them as their own, the Council had first turned to the Hegemony for help but their fleets and soldiers were still crippled from holding off the rachni for so long, and so the Council had turned toward the turians, the new race in the galaxy. And what did the Council do after the Krogan Rebellions had ended? They gave the turians a Councilor, for saving them from their own stupidity. And in the process they had spurned the Hegemony, who had sacrificed hundreds of ships and hundreds of thousands of batarian lives trying to hold against the rachni hordes.
Playing by the Council's rules had brought the Hegemony nothing but death and a galactic community that didn't respect them. It was up to the Hegemony itself to earn respect, and they would do so by claiming their own client race by force.
The battle itself hadn't gone exactly how Ghorok had wanted, despite his eventual triumph. The humans might not have the barriers or firepower to go head to head with a batarian ship of the same tonnage, and they were outnumbered three ships to one, but their AI, electronic countermeasures, and cyberwarfare were hell to deal with. Losing control of Batarian Arms made missiles only for them to arc around and hit the ship that fired it, sensors pumping out nonsensical data, power fluctuations dropping shields, and comms between ships being jammed made the battle a shitshow. Hell, the fucking humans had even managed to shut down the life support on one of his frigates, killing the entire crew.
He had lost a total of seventeen ships, and had half a dozen more suffering damages of some kind, in exchange for destroying twenty-six human ships. Once the smallest of the human ships had been destroyed, hard to spot hidden in the back of their formation, most of the issues his fleet was having with their electronics improved, and the remaining human ships had accelerated out of the system.
With the space battle over with, he had moved to send the Enlightened down to the colony. His mission had been clear - defeat the human fleet in the system and destroy the colony. The whole point was to send a message and show the strength of the Hegemony. But there were thousands of humans down there, thousands who could be taken and sold as slaves. It would bring not only himself a world of wealth, but the Dondegar family as well. He had a few hours before any humans reinforcements showed up, he could capture plenty of slaves and destroy the colony before then.
Across the equator of Terra Nova, and as far as 60 degrees north and south of it, were harsh deserts. Temperatures at the equator averaged as high as 141F/60.5C during the day. Toward the poles of the planet temperatures tended to be more moderate, with a temperate climate, and it was there that the people lived. Terra Nova had two cities - Scott in the north, and Pilgrim in the south. The two cities were connected by three separate high speed rails; one for passengers, one for commercial shipping, and one for private use by the government and military.
After the First Contact War, the Alliance had started building invasion shelters on all of their colonies, places where the civilians could hold out while the defensive forces repelled the invasion. Each one was going to be dozens of meters below the ground and surrounded by meters of thick titanium with multiple redundant life support systems and stocked with enough food and rations to last twenty thousand people two months. The only problem was none of these invasion shelters were more than cordoned off construction sites with a few tons of dirt excavated. Building things like that took time, and not enough had passed for them to offer any protection.
A few miles outside the city of Scott, mines had been dug into a mountain range that scans had shown were heavy with various metals. It was to those mines that the defense forces in the northern pole had herded the northern civilians to, the process starting twenty minutes after the SSV Lima had sent the DEFCON 2 - OMEGA alert. Just inside the mine entrances, automatic turrets had been set up with VI programs to shoot anything that wasn't human. The southern pole didn't have any mines to shelter civilians, and instead had to rely on sub-basements used by warehouses and factories for storage. Power to the loading elevators were cut off, stairwells were sealed, and the main floors of the buildings themselves were set with auto defense turrets. The benefit of having such small populations was that it didn't take much to herd the fewer than 20,000 people in each city to the impromptu shelters.
The problem was the people too stubborn or ignorant to evacuate their homes, or those who lived far away, out on the commercial plantations or the corporate compounds, that would take hours to get to the shelters; hours they might not have.
While the civilians were being moved, the military on the planet dug in and set up defensive positions around the large government buildings in each city. They dragged concrete barricades and cars to act as cover, and set up a few turrets. Anti-tank and anti-personnel mines had been hidden along the roads and pathways leading to their position. On top of the GTS and AA defenses, they had a handful of MANPADS to defend against any gunships, helicopters, or jets the enemy might throw at them. There were a handful of ambush teams from the SA marines spread throughout the surrounding buildings, and the few snipers they had were set up in the handful of the taller buildings that dotted the cities.
It was one hundred and forty-seven minutes after receiving the initial alert that they received notification that the Systems Alliance Task Force in orbit had lost the battle, and the remaining ships had fled the system. Another thirty-four minutes after that before the radar systems of the Skywalker-IIIs had detected hundreds of small ships in orbit that were rapidly descending to the planet.
"Troop transports and gunships," Colonel Mosbey stated, eying the radar display on the haptic screen in front of him. Colonel Mosbey, a giant of a man with graying hair, was the leader of the Terra Nova Army. He had been in the initial waves of marines sent down to Shanxi to kick out the turians that had captured the planet. He idly wondered at the chances of being on the second human world to be invaded by an alien species.
"Do we have the Skywalkers open fire, or do we save them in case any of those warships come down into orbit?" one of the junior officers asked.
The Colonel eyed the young man who had asked the question. "If they want to bomb us from orbit, they don't need to enter Skywalker range to do so. Green light the Skywalkers to fire, full effect. They want Terra Nova they'll have to fucking bleed for it."