PART I:
SLINGSHOT
L16 JUMP POINT
ANAXES
At 19:00 local time, thirty Republic ships assembled at the hyperspace jump vector. A line of Venators, Arquitens, and Acclamators as well as various combat support ships formed into a scatterplot wall at the vector, escorted and seen off by Resolute in a brief, tense ceremony held over comlink by Admiral Yularen. Ahead of them was a six-hour journey to Mygeeto.
"Group One and Group Two," Yularen called, "you are clear to jump. Good luck."
Group Two, significantly smaller in numbers than the dozen capital ships and nearly two dozen picket fighters, consisted of five ships: the Venator Resilience, the Victory, the Acclamator Blazing Hope, and the Arquitens frigates Dynamo and Regulus. The leader of the squadron was aboard the Victory, the first ship in her line, the first to see combat, and the first command of Captain Dodonna. With so many "firsts" on the line, Dodonna felt a great deal of pressure from the bridge of his new capital ship. His first goal was supposed to be to the fleet—but, in light of his new command, it was to make his old captain and mentor aboard the Guardian proud, the one who recommended him for a role commanding the first Victory-class star destroyer.
If not for the situation on Mygeeto and Dodonna's impending mission, the Victory might have had a proper launch from the Anaxes shipyard. Instead, she was taken right out of port, crewed by a staff which had been training their stations in simulators for over a month, equipped and loaded with turbolaser magazines, food, and scant else, and deployed to the fleet. While the Republic was winning the battle, the UNSC had plugged the air corridor shut again, cutting off access while they bombed the surface. The jamming made for even more severe logistical issues, cutting off the 501st, 212th, and the Galactic Marines from the fleet.
Dodonna understood the urgency of the situation. Until the battle could be won, sparing the lives of many clones and UN soldiers alike in a speedy victory, not so much as a bottle of green champagne was broken over the Victory's bow in celebration of her launch, and the culmination of a rocky star destroyer program riddled with delays.
And Dodonna knew how sorely the Republic had been missing a cruiser like the Victory throughout the war, between the Separatist fleets and the UNSC battle groups, their enemies consistently used heavy-hitters; and although Venators were excellent capital ships, carriers were simply not enough.
The stations and fighters seeing off the fleet quietly wished them well, praying for a victory—as one does with a maverick plan based on a rough gamble.
While prepping the ship to jump to hyperspace, the crew was optimistic but tense. They had planned and trained for this commission for months. They were ready—as ready as any battle-hardened crew could be. But they knew that the new cruiser-fighter doctrine was untested, and so was the reliability of the Victory. Dodonna, however, was confident the ship would hold together—for her first battle, at least.
The fleet disappeared into deep space.
Before exiting dry dock, the Victory crew ran drills non-stop, practicing ready times and maneuvers in a simulated environment. But this time, the hours spent before their last, well-rehearsed hyperspace maneuver, was utilized only preparing. Preparing equipment, bodies, and minds; maintaining gear, brushing up on manuals, and resting. Many did not sleep. To them, this was putting months of doctrinal practice to the test—but no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
And with their current enemy, there were no illusions that there would be surprises.
At H-Hour of the operation, Dodonna ordered the hyperspace shift. The ships pivoted about thirty degrees downward from the orientation of the remainder of the formation, switching the function of their hyperspace engines, and pointed in the carefully calculated trajectory, arming the FTL engines to trigger at the exact moment necessary to change directions in transit and arrive at the dark side of Mygeeto. The capacitors hummed at a high pitch, arcing with millions of volts that crackled and clicked throughout every inch of their long lines, audible even in the bridge of the Victory.
Dodonna, setting the autonav to work, prepared the bridge to make emergency maneuvers to find their bearing as soon as they discovered the nearest UNSC patrol. They would have to think on their feet, swiftly and nimbly; this was doubly true for himself.
Then, facing the swirling blue hues of hyperspace, the fleet made the second jump and vanished from the formation.
L4 JUMP POINT
MYGEETO
A baseball-sized Tracer Stealth Tactical Aerial Reconnaissance Satellite, called a STARS-T, floated in a distant orbit of Mygeeto, a thousand kilometers above the surface and well away from the UNSC fleet it reported to. It was a modified STARS unit specially calibrated to sit at a distant point near any hyperspace corridor and offer early warning of incoming Republic ships—a system the UNSC developed after just a week of fighting using the Atlas' onboard procurement deck, in lieu of the resources to manufacture and modify slipspace detection buoys.
The STARS-T had sufficient range to pick up fast-moving objects along a hyperspace lane up to one thousand lightyears, although it lacked radial detection. Any object—including an incoming comet or meteor, from outside the relatively narrow route by which the vast majority of ships in the galaxy standardly operated, would slip by undetected—at risk of being ripped apart by free-floating microdebris, of course.
At 09:47, the device detected thirty-five objects at "lightspeed"—well beyond the nominal speed of light in realspace—which were decelerating rapidly. At the rate at which they were decelerating, they would appear in Mygeeto airspace in twelve minutes and forty seconds, leaving the planetary defenses twelve minutes and thirty-nine seconds, after the STARS-T would publish its report, to prepare.
At the same moment, however, it detected a change in course. Five ships broke off the route along the hyperspace lane, winking out of existence in a trajectory that overshot Mygeeto, although the deceleration rate remained the same. Assuming it wouldn't be destroyed by microdebris and clutter in unprotected space, the formation would appear on the dark side of Mygeeto, just in time to prepare a simultaneous attack on the weaker patrolled region.
The unit sent its data to the local controller, UNSC Mind Over Matter attached to what remained of Battle Group India, in a burst, double-encoded message over the superluminal Waypoint slipspace battlenet; sensitive to time, it provided a preliminary analysis predicting incoming warships. The transmission lasted less than one thirtieth of a second.
C2 VECTOR POINT
MYGEETO
The ensign operating the comms station—responsible for signals intelligence, radar observation, and managing communications with other ships' Morse flashes and encrypted command frequencies—watched the terminal print out the burst message by his fingertips, catching the hole-punched paper, still warm in his hands with fast-drying ink.
"Realtime 141098 at vector point L4 reports Republic group to exit hyperspace at ten hundred," the ensign announced to Lieutenant Keyes. "Detection occurred at nine-forty-seven. A group of four ships broke off and will appear somewhere on this side of Mygeeto."
The first officer, in lieu of Lieutenant Commander Nareed, stood at the command board. Nareed was indisposed aboard the prowler Ghost Song, personally overseeing sensitive mission updates of a SPARTAN deployment. He left Keyes in command of the Iroquois.
"Somewhere on this side?" Keyes asked. "Clarify."
"Uncertain, Skipper," the ensign reported. He re-read the report. "Alert went to seven other patrols, just in case. Plotted trajectory wasn't precise."
Keyes nodded and pressed the alert. Klaxons blared throughout the ship, bleating six times. He picked up the phone, patching himself to the ship's public address system.
"General quarters," Keyes barked. Without so much as a shout, he pumped urgency and steel into his steady voice. "General quarters, all hands to battle stations. I want all combat stations at plus-five, missile batteries at plus-five, MAC at plus-ten, time now. Set condition zero throughout the ship. Possible enemy contact in ten minutes. This is not a drill." He closed the PA as the bridge stiffened.
"Strength of the enemy force?" Keyes asked. "Disposition?"
"Looks like one Acclamator, two Arquitens, and one unknown leading the formation. It's smaller than a Venator, bigger than a troop carrier."
"Put it on the board," Keyes said, as the ensign opened a three-dimensional model of the reported battle group's formation on the bridge's holographic centerpiece.
Keyes frowned. So far, the Acclamators were being used dual-duty as frontline picket ships to support their frigates and offer more firepower to supplement their carriers, the Venators; and troop transports, depending on their loadout. The assumption was, in lieu of a proper battlecruiser that would stand up to Halcyons or Marathons, the Republic had emptied several Acclamators of their troop complements, refitted them with guns and proton torpedoes, and used them as skeleton-crewed pit fighters.
Of course, the main fault with this strategy was that Venators, Acclamators, Arquitens, and Consulars were not particularly well-armored compared to their own counterparts in the UNSC fleet. Acclamators, despite their size, were only equal matches in firepower and hull armor with Paris-class heavy frigates, and frequently suffered to wolf-pack tactics and destroyers like the Iroquois. Arquitens and Consulars were smaller, lighter, and faster, but rarely escaped Archer missile targeting, and often succumbed to Longsword walls.
Worst of all, when engaging at long range, none of their ships had adequate point defense to counter the quantity and firepower of UNSC missiles. Without machine-assisted lasers, close-in-weapon systems, or electronic warfare suites, the earliest battles were one-sided with Archer missiles prevailing over even the most aggressive Longsword doctrines. The Republic's doctrines were built entirely around closing the distance to force the defensive fleet into a brawl.
The "Wigner wakes," theorized by Lieutenant Fhajad-084 earlier that year, were a telltale sign to measure the size, disposition, and density of incoming objects at hyperspeed—the wake itself referring to the Von Neumann-Wigner hypothesis describing superposition, partially relating to the way that space warped on a molecular level to facilitate faster-than-light travel in realspace for anything powered by a hyperdrive. The "wakes," when measured by quantum instruments, appeared like the wake of a ship in water, a subtle "trailing" effect on gravity, if the wake also extended in both directions; a spear of equal length extended forward to match the trail. Although hyperspace was undetectable to systems that worked within the confines of the speed of light, these ships violated many laws of special relativity—hard laws. These devices were violent in their own regard, in the same way slipspace was violent to instruments of reality, creating the aptly-named "ruptures," equally intense wakes of their own. There would always be a way to detect incoming ships.
The wakes on the ships surrounding the anomalous one appeared to be correct for their classifications. Based on the Wigner wakes alone, the STARS-T module automatically tagged the Acclamator and her escorts. The lead ship of the formation, however, was an aptly labeled question mark. She had a greater mass than each of the ships—and greater mass than expected for a Venator, despite being smaller.
Was this the pit fighter the Republic had sorely needed? If that were the case, why deploy her with a small squadron and not the main force?
Keyes fidgeted with his corncob pipe in his hands folded behind him.
"Helm," Keyes started, "bring us at heading 180 by 221. Ahead half. We'll hold for contact at the closest possible exit vector to our patrol zone."
"180 by 221, aye," the helmsman called. She tapped a few commands into her console and the crew felt the Iroquois turn, her lateral boosters coming to life and main engines waking up.
The acting executive officer, a lieutenant junior grade, turned to Keyes. "Skipper," he said, "Five ships, one capital ship, and one unknown. We're going to try to face it off alone?"
Keyes shook his head. "There's no guarantee they'll land in our sector. Other patrols will need to reach us to support, but we'll be alone for at least half an hour. They aren't going to just let us run."
The XO shook his head, but had nothing more to say. "Two frigates—maybe. But that carrier will rip us to pieces."
Keyes didn't like going into a fight with surprises any more than the next man, but he knew that a squadron targeting the dark side of Mygeeto, pincering with a main force assault, was not one that could be ignored or simply reported. They had to intercept; they had to delay the enemy, at least, if not defeat them.
The crew knew their odds. Iroquois could not join Battle Group India's formations as she was, effectively, a destroyer, a support ship, and a prowler all-in-one; a jack of all trades. The reduced ammunition, supplemental intelligence suite, and troop capacity aboard a frontline ship made her more of a liability to the fleet—a tactical hindrance rather than a niche role compatible with the bigger picture—so they remained on disparate patrols on the opposite face to the battle group to avoid unnecessary risks.
"We'll know more in a few seconds," Keyes said.
"Aye," the XO said. "Without the commander…"
"Agreed," Keyes said. "We're at a double disadvantage."
The comms officer interjected. "Incoming!"
The enemy contacts jumped in—five Republic ships—in visual range four hundred kilometers away.
"Put them on scopes," Keyes said. "I want tally-ho."
The viewscreen magnified and showed the formation. Two Arquitens, one Acclamator, a large, delta-shaped vessel, and what remained of the Venator.
The Venator appeared out of hyperspace offset from the trajectory of the rest of the fleet bleeding smoke, oil, and debris. Fires lit up her decks and oozed out of hull breaches like a man stabbed bloody. Her main engines flickered, cooling down and dying. Reaction-control thrusters seemed inoperable as well, as the ship bled power and individual lights across the viewports turned dim. While the rest of the squadron maneuvered to face Iroquois, the Venator remained dead in space, unable to even open the hangar doors.
The crew stood shocked for a moment. Keyes tightened his grip on the pipe.
"We might be able to do this," the XO said.
Keyes focused on the main ship in the squadron, the unknown classification. It was too different from a Venator to be another carrier, and its mass being almost twice that of a fully loaded carrier, it must have been full of armor, torpedo bays, and turbolaser batteries.
It occurred to Keyes, though he hid his doubt well, that they still might have a chance.
L4 JUMP POINT
MYGEETO
The bridge of the Victory lay in shock as the distress call patched through. The Resilience took a hit from microdebris the instant it exited hyperspace, punching through multiple decks and destroying the fighter conning tower, the engines, and hyperdrive; and she was burning. To their right, past the starboard bow of the Victory, the Venator was dead in space. To the left, Mygeeto was a quiet, dark marble of night suspended in a night beam. Whatever battle raged on with Group One and the UNSC fleets beyond were invisible to any scope, and quiet as a whisper in the back of Dodonna's mind.
Then, just as abruptly as the chaos occurred, the onboard power of their Venator in the pack died, and so did the distress call. The voice of the captain of the Resilience vanished from the Victory's bridge, leaving them alone.
"Resilience is down," Dodonna said. Thinking quickly and cutting through the bated chaos, he opened the squadron channel. "Report!"
"Dynamo on station, all systems nominal."
"Regulus nominal."
"Blazing Hope nominal."
"Captain," the sensor officer called. "Enemy ship incoming. A Halberd destroyer. They're six hundred kilometers out and closing, burning fast."
"It's just the one?" Dodonna asked.
"Yes, sir," the officer said. "Should we abort?"
Dodonna took only a second to contemplate this. Thirty minutes was a long time for a warship fighting at a disadvantage—and plenty of time for the assault force to break atmosphere and enter Mygeeto's airspace. If anything, they had already won. Without Resilience, they were without fighter support, but a single destroyer was unlikely to rout his formation.
The UNSC naval doctrines up to this point did not seem to suffer risk. He was willing to gamble the mission on the likelihood that this frigate was closing to gather information, pull back, and wait for a larger squadron—likely of the typical patrol corvettes that were spotted patrolling the dark side of Mygeeto.
"No," Dodonna said. "Continue as planned. Flag Resilience for a future search-and-rescue operation.
"Regulus, Dynamo," Dodonna called, "attack that destroyer. Clear a path for us."
The two frigates changed course, burning hard to port on an intercept course with the Solarite warship. Their turbolasers wouldn't reach the ship until they were uncomfortably close—neither would those of the Victory—and the enemy destroyer's dual spinal coilguns gave her a range advantage. He ordered two heavy proton torpedoes into their silos, and within five minutes, they had a targeting solution. Droids and clones labored to load the last of the magazine's heavy, conical three-dimensional maneuverable missiles into their conveyors along the forward decks, finalizing a semi-automated process.
"Begin evasive action," Dodonna said to his squadron. "Torpedoes fire," he told his weapons officer.
The ship rumbled as two vaporous, rosy bolts—the vaporless exhaust of stubby, conical, magnetic-propelled proton warheads—soared out of the ship and tracked their target, racing past the Regulus and Dynamo.
Dodonna liked his odds so far. If the two frigates took to a direct engagement with the destroyer, trading blows, their deflector shields could withstand an impact or even two from its magnetic accelerator cannons. Beyond that, they would need to slug out damage before the enemy's anti-ship missile swarms could overwhelm them. The two would, however, remain within the Victory's firing arcs—under protection from the main batteries of their new star destroyer. It would be a short fight, as long as the enemy destroyer made its way into their kill zone. Otherwise, it would have to double back, keep its distance, and avoid a direct confrontation.
Dodonna was forcing this confrontation with the torpedoes. The enemy ship was going to have to either dump all the chaff she had and evacuate, or slug it out with two frigates and a battleship; and the time to make this decision for her captain was dwindling.
"Maintain a dispersion of one thousand meters," Dodonna ordered his squadron. "Stay within our firing range so we can cover you. Keep it tight and force him into a kill box."
However, when the enemy ship reached five thousand kilometers, it increased speed and launched ordnance in the opposite direction of the Victory and her escorts—a lone nuclear warhead giving off a weak radiation signature, speeding away from the ship. Proton torpedoes might have been fooled by radiation, being heat-seeking in nature, but they didn't take the bait. Instead, they tightened their trace and bared down on the destroyer.
"Load six more torpedoes," Dodonna said. UNSC point defense was effective enough that the destroyer would likely destroy the first wave.
"Six torpedoes in the tubes, aye, Captain," the weapons officer answered.
"Route power to turbolasers. Let's boost our range."
Surplus power left the main engines and coursed through the turbolasers, permitting more powerful long-range shots and mitigating the dispersal of bolts up to one hundred kilometers.
"Give me data on that ship," Dodonna ordered. He stroked his beard as he read along with the sensors officer.
"Enemy ship is burning hot," the officer said. "Speeding up to twelve hundred meters per second and counting. All of their power is to engines. They're going to overtake our ship, estimate four minutes with current rate of acceleration."
A ship that big, burning a reactor enough to move that fast—and continuing to accelerate—would be melting her engines to put out that much energy. Dodonna read the trajectory charts. The trajectory was too wide. They would miss the formation by a wide margin, passing by in a daring but suicidal run with eight proton torpedoes chasing after their ship.
"Torpedo impact in thirty seconds," the weapons officer called.
Dodonna held his breath, watching the screen show a magnified image of the enemy ship, the Iroquois, a stout, angular sloop with a knife-shaped plating on her upper bow. She resembled a shark pursuing the kill. Bright flashes erupted on her starboard and port sides in sequence as emergency thrusters burned, and the ship billowed out tiny magnesium mirrors and bright-burning thermite flares into space. Her weapons remained cold.
"Enemy ship is charging her MAC guns," the sensors officer called. "She's not accelerating anymore."
Dodonna checked the trajectory with the maneuvers as the first two torpedoes barely missed, overtaking her and disappearing into the starlight. He slammed the comlink. "Evasive maneuvers now! That destroyer's going to hit you hard."
The Regulus and Dynamo, crossing each other, screened in an unpredictable way as they diverted their power to forward deflectors and pivoted their weapons toward the destroyer, opening fire at range. Because of this, they covered fewer angles. To compensate, Dodonna directed fire toward the two ships' blind spots from Victory's turbolasers.
"Weapons hot," Dodonna ordered. "This is our window. Target that ship's weapons and bridge—knock her out."
A flurry of light strobed the bridge viewscreen as the Victory turned her turbolasers and created a screen of laser fire, a grid of blue tracers igniting the frigid vacuum of space. While the Iroquois entered the screen, taking heavy fire and burning her hull—each lateral maneuver pulling her into more fire—the torpedoes regained their target and followed closely behind the ship.
Then the Iroquois powered down her MAC, re-engaged engines at full power, trailing long plumes of smoke and radiation, and zipped by the two Arquitens frigates without so much as angry words, not a single shot fired in return.
The Iroquois appeared in view of the screen, burning hard toward the Victory with only a few kilometers to bridge.
"Collision alert!" the sensors officer called.
"Hard to port," Dodonna ordered, horror seizing hold of his voice. "Intensify forward deflectors."
The Victory lurched hard to the left, making an intense emergency maneuver out of the Iroquois' flight path. Dodonna grabbed onto the console as the capital ship moved with purpose.
The immense chassis of the Iroquois emerged before the bridge shedding her chaff and countermeasures so intensely they washed static across the bridge instruments, passing by the Victory so close he could see the bridge of the destroyer, much too fast to make out the individual officers. But he imagined the captain was out that window too, watching him right back. Then the destroyer was gone, and the space was black again.
"The torpedoes—" Dodonna whispered. He turned pale.
The heavy proton torpedoes, seeking a heat source, momentarily faltered and erroneously targeted the shield generators aboard Victory. They arced down toward the bridge, slamming into the ship a few decks above the bridge and throwing the crew off their feet. Lights flickered and alerts cried throughout the ship.
Dodonna stood again, his arms jittery, and grabbed the console. "Send fire crews to upper decks. Evacuate and vent."
"Sir," another officer called, his voice quivering, "we've lost all deflectors."
Dodonna looked down to him from the captain's station. "And the enemy ship?"
He shook his head. "Out of laser range, accelerating away, toward Mygeeto."
Dodonna held his head, a throbbing ache ruling over him. "OK," he said. "Get me reports from—"
The viewports dimmed automatically as a bright flash overtook the screen in front of them. Even with the reduced flash, the entire bridge was filled with light; as though someone had pressed halogen lamps up to the bridge and activated them all at once. The nuclear device ejected by Iroquois as a pre-emptive countermeasure detonated in space a hundred kilometers in front of Regulus and Dynamo, having crept up to their formation, trailing slowly behind the destroyer. Without atmosphere to push against and carry a pressure wave, there was no immediate physical damage; but the burst of radiation fried most communication equipment immediately and shorted out circuitry on several systems.
Static washed over the screens and sparks blew out of the many stations, causing officers to recoil back or leap out of their seats. The bridge quickly smelled rank of electrical smoke. Dodonna steeled himself, holding rigid as the ship descended into pandemonium.
"Losing power across the board, Captain," one of the officers called. "Weapons, torpedoes."
"Engines and life support?" Dodonna asked. "Comlink?"
"Comlink offline," the officer replied. "Engines and life support OK."
"Scan the squadron," Dodonna said. "Get me their statuses."
The sensors officer managed to get out a few scans of the Regulus, Dynamo, and Blazing Hope. "All ships' shields are down," he called. "Weapon batteries offline. They have mobility."
Dodonna walked to the antechamber of the bridge, the flag bridge, and turned to the plotting tables and holographic battlespace display, studying the Iroquois' outbound vector. She was headed away from Mygeeto at an accelerating pace, her nose canted toward the surface, appearing to drift.
"Where's that ship going?" Dodonna asked.
One of the staff officers shook his head. "No clue, sir," he said. "Very far away."
Something wasn't right—Dodonna could feel it. They weren't out of the woods yet.
"Enemy patrol is, what, twenty minutes out?" he asked. "We can still be clear of them."
"With respect," the officer asked. "Are we leaving Resilience behind?"
Dodonna put his weight on the holographic board displaying each ship and their statuses. Resilience was now far behind them and in no better shape than before. If there were any crew left alive, it would have been impossible to conduct a timely rescue.
"We can't," Dodonna said. "There's no time. Enemy patrol will be here soon. We'd have to fight that. If we abort the mission to the surface, there won't be any ability to rescue the crew of the Resilience, as the enemy patrols won't give us an opportunity to. And the longer we stay in orbit, the more heat we'll attract."
The bridge remained silent momentarily.
"Yes, sir," the officer said, visibly distressed.
"It's my call," Dodonna said, squeezing the young officer's shoulder. "Don't let it haunt you, Lieutenant."
He returned to the Iroquois readout and noticed that her trajectory had shifted from what the plots had predicted based on speed and acceleration. The computer wasn't making much of it—only applying bad data. It was incomplete.
"Lieutenant," Dodonna said, nestling his thick brown beard between his thumb and his finger, "can you run a simulation on this flight path under Mygeeto's gravity and libration effect?"
"Yes, Captain," the officer said, punching in new variables to the holographic display.
The computer drew a new line starting with the current position of Iroquois, wrapping around Mygeeto, and ending back at where she started—the position of Group 2. The estimated time of arrival was ten minutes.
Iroquois was not speeding off into the horizon—rather, over it. She used Mygeeto's gravity well to increase her speed beyond what her engine could realistically muster, creating a carefully calculated series of burns against the gravity well to not disintegrate in re-entry nor overshoot the planet. The gravity would catch her and slingshot her back toward the Victory at almost three times her original speed.
"Battlestations!" Dodonna ordered. "Bring us back to full alert!" He returned to the bridge and ordered the communications officers to double their efforts and get their comlink back online. Same for the weapons officers. He wanted torpedoes and turbolasers back online in five minutes.
It was a tall order, but the crew of the Victory was an experienced one. He had faith in the men serving aboard his ship. He activated the shipwide PA and raced his crew against the clock.
R7 VECTOR POINT
MYGEETO
"No time to recuperate," Keyes said, immediately gripping the navigator's seat while hovering over it, as the sunlight glared off the hull of the Iroquois outside the CIC viewscreens. It was as though pure darkness had transitioned to daylight in seconds.
The plotting table showed the damaged Republic formation far behind them as the Iroquois burned to the other side of Mygeeto in a matter of minutes. "Report on emergency repairs."
The communications officer held a brief one-sided conversation with the destroyer's intercom, pausing for fifteen seconds at a time, listening to each station. While he spoke, dozens of welders labored tirelessly to patch broken seals in compartments and clear magazine lifts to Archer missile pods. Twoscore men and women fixed ten-kilogram titanium sealing clamps over hydraulic, water, and power lines. Weapon crews carted 35,000-kilogram nuclear missiles into their silos from the sensitive munitions bay, passing by eight-man teams carting forty-ton, 1.17-meter wide, ferric tungsten slugs to overfill the primary magazine.
Keyes thought over the last pass. He was careful to ensure that they'd fully countered the effectiveness of the proton torpedoes based on two doctrinal assumptions of their targeting: either that they targeted the infrared or electromagnetic signatures of their targets, or they were fed optical data—similar to contrast seekers on modern anti-ship missiles. Using chaff systems would momentarily obfuscate the Iroquois' optical signature and infrared, but not magnetic. Perhaps the torpedoes simply did not maneuver well enough to compensate when he laterally burned the ship to dodge them, but they had no trouble retargeting.
It seemed, after passing the enemy flagship, they targeted the objects emitting the strongest electromagnetic energy reading, even more so than their turbolasers and communications array: the shield generators. The targeting must have been, again, momentarily confused. This might have confirmed how they behaved. He would have to record that for a later report—if they could survive the fight first. It wasn't over yet. However, Keyes refused to change his strategy based on this data alone. There was always the possibility that the torpedoes could target based on any criteria, depending on what data is fed to them by the controller: one volley might target the heat produced by the engines of the Iroquois; the next might target the Cherenkov radiation emitted by her nuclear missiles; and the next might simply target her silhouette. If these torpedoes were truly being given programmable targeting data, then it was a different game entirely. He needed to, at each crucial moment, mask every possible signature the Iroquois might omit, including any on the visible spectrum; lest their destroyer would be gutted like a fish in the blink of an eye.
"Fore hull is severely damaged," he reported. "Basically a lost cause. Decks one through six, compartments A through F, are completely gone. Archer pods A through D are also fused shut from the burns. Parts of the hell melted and the silos warped. The turbolasers cut us up good."
Keyes squeezed the chair, taking a deep breath. He had ordered the crew to retreat deeper into the ship, which had minimized casualties—however, many of the crew abandoning their regular duty stations, the ship was at a reduced operational capacity.
"Weapons?" Keyes asked.
"Both MAC capacitors have been repaired," the comms officer answered. "Remaining Archer missile pods are still hot. SHIVA silo has been reloaded and armed. Scythes are still online, and just over half our turrets are still online.
"Life support still OK," the comms officer said. "Engines and thrusters are OK. Targeting and nav OK. However, the reactor is stressed. Engineering says we can't pull a maneuver like that again. Also says we can't take another hit like that.
"And our communications are down momentarily as a result of the EMP. Engineering is cycling ship-wide resets and replacing fuses, transistors, and capacitors. They'll be done in three minutes."
Damaged as the Iroquois was from a flash of intense fire—being under the turbolaser barrage for less than five seconds nearly melted the front of the ship off—Keyes' gamble had worked.
Keyes nodded. "I'm aware," he said. He chewed on his pipe, although he had no intention of breaking protocol and smoking on the bridge. "Weapons, keep your eyes sharp. I want both MAC guns firing off as soon as we crest the horizon and have a line of fire on the flagship."
In a few long minutes, the ship crossed the dark horizon of Mygeeto, the daylight draining from Iroquois' backend, and the remaining enemy ships appeared into magnified view, almost a thousand kilometers away.
"Target acquired," the weapons officer reported.
"Get a firing solution. Weapons free," Keyes said immediately. "Lock all armed Archer missiles on those frigates. Go to full reverse thrust as soon as we've fired."
The weapons officer pivoted the Iroquois in the direction of the commanding battleship and locked on. An error chirped at him.
"Targeting system failure!" the officer called.
"Eyeball it," Keyes ordered, returning to the command seat and strapping in again. He grabbed the PA and called for the crew to brace.
"Switching to manual, aye," the weapons officer said, turning on flight armament controls. The bridge screen displayed what he saw: a heads-up display not unlike a holographic flight overlay, showing speed, direction, and a predictive cursor. It also showed the crosshairs synchronized to an infrared bore-tracking laser on the tips of each MAC gun.
With several hundred times magnification and a dynamic deadzone modifier to the gunner's stick, he turned the ship ever-so-slightly, to such a degree that was not noticeable to any crew member aboard, until the crosshairs overlaid with the enemy ship for five seconds.
"Fire," Keyes said. "Fire one."
"Firing one," the gunner called.
The Iroquois shuddered. Keyes' teeth shook from the muzzle blast—a chattering 3.6-gigajoule earthquake—which flickered the feed of the telescoped fire with blinks of static. The recoil shook the ship, drifting the reticle by a few degrees left of her distant target.
The first shot hit its mark, punching right through the unshielded behemoth. Smoke and fire billowed out both ends.
"Reacquire and fire two!" Keyes barked.
"Firing two," the gunner said, and the ship shook once more.
The second shot punched another hole in the enemy ship, leaving a massive, charred crater.
As they approached, Keyes ordered the bridge to reboot the targeting software while the ship burned to decelerate.
"Time on target," Keyes asked. With his tone of voice, it was more like a demand for a report.
"Time on target two minutes, thirty seconds," the gunnery officer called.
"We have that long to get targeting systems back online. We're fighting those frigates with Archers and guns."
R4 JUMP POINT
MYGEETO
The impacts from the Iroquois' primary weapons ripped apart the chassis of Victory, savagely rupturing up the ship's hull and killing hundreds instantly. The violence exposed every deck from top to bottom to vacuum, spilling equipment, oil, burning hyperfuel, and clones and crewmen into a spray of cold, quick deaths.
It occurred so fast, just after the comms officer reported a restoration of the comlink. Fortunately, the Regulus, Dynamo, and Blazing Hope were on the comlink, although they struggled to return engine power to their ships while drifting in a shallow orbit of the Victory.
Rising from the floor again, now dominated by a throbbing headache and bruises along his extremities, Dodonna quickly ordered the Regulus and Dynamo to move into a tight holding pattern. As the Iroquois had finally spent her two MAC shots, she wouldn't be firing again soon enough—and she wouldn't be able to bluff her way through blitzing the formation a second time. However, without weapons on any of their ships, it might not matter at all.
"Cover Blazing Hope from that ship," Dodonna ordered. "Keep the enemy from taking out that comms delivery; that's our primary goal. Victory is dead in space. Reactor is intact, but unstable. Weapons are completely cut off. Get that ship to the surface of Mygeeto as soon as you have an opening. Leave us out here."
The bridge officers hesitated, their focus broken and lingering on Dodonna's words.
He looked them over with an upset gaze—apologetic and fearful. They reciprocated.
Dodonna knew he had harmed crew morale more than any Archer missile or MAC strike—but in his anxiety, he felt as though he might falter at any moment.
"Incoming!" the sensor officer called. "Forty-five missiles."
The screen lit up with missile warnings toward Regulus and Dynamo. 30,000-pound Archer missiles fanned out into screens, making quick lateral and vertical maneuvers on their way to their targets. They unloaded their cannons into the screen.
By the time the Iroquois had entered weapons range shortly behind the missiles, only twelve had been intercepted. Thirteen hit their marks, billowing out fireballs across their hulls. The rest passed by the formation harmlessly into space, making no more adjustments than seemingly random evasive maneuvers. The Iroquois made after Blazing Hope like a reaperfish.
Dodonna crossed his arms. Regulus and Dynamo erupted in chaotic chatter, but they were still in the fight. They had just restored their lasers and engines, but they began to protest that they needed to retreat.
"Target the destroyer," Dodonna said. "Get out of the escort pattern and hit them head-on."
The captain of Regulus protested.
"We can't take another hit like that," he said.
"Take a less predictable pattern," Dodonna said. "I don't think that ship has missile targeting. Engage at twelve thousand and orbit laterally around her missile arcs."
"Understood," the captain of the Regulus answered. "Let's do it."
The two frigates danced around Iroquois at the maximum range before their turrets suffered firepower decay—12,000 meters—as she decelerated rapidly, focusing their cannons on the ship. In response, Iroquois dumb-fired Archer missiles in half-dozen salvos at a time, missing all of her shots. But her surface guns, almost forty 64-megajoule, twin-barrel helical railguns, hit their marks along the frigates' deflectors and some punching through to her hull, almost one hundred and sixty rounds per minute. They locked on to radar returns, entire firing groups commanded only loosely by human operators—some, perhaps, not even using a screen for manual aiming; as they were guided by an advanced, predictive fire-control system. This afforded them almost ninety-percent accuracy, even without visibility.
The Iroquois dumped all of her remaining chaff and flares, knowing that the turbolasers on any ship were not automated but manned by humans or clones. The bright flashes and reflecting flickers of tiny aluminum-coated glass fibers could distract enough to obfuscate the contours of the ship, acting as its own camouflage. It did not hide her, merely disrupt her silhouette and heading from eyes tracking her. And, her countermeasures being physical ammunition, this was a temporary solution with a limited effectiveness.
But, Dodonna lamented, it was working.
It was bizarre watching these three ships slug it out, both struggling to land a hit. Iroquois' cannons chipped away at Regulus and Dynamo while the latter ships, firing from opposite angles, rarely struck the destroyer. Archer missiles flew out at strange angles, dumbly soaring past and sometimes accidentally making a lateral maneuver into the hull of Regulus, venting several decks and burning her hull.
Eventually, however, the Iroquois ran out of Archer missiles and countermeasures, succumbing to a pounding hail—terajoules of laser fire—from both frigates. Her hull warped, glowing hotter than the flares that obscured her silhouette, melting down and burning too hot to smoke. Pure plasma sublimed and glowed across the ship's hull as she angled her topside bridge away from either ship. The contours of the destroyer softened to gold, broiling smears.
Then the Iroquois turned toward the Blazing Hope, her engines burning hot with a sort of second wind, and she boosted in the opposite direction from both frigates. With both ships already engaging at their maximum range, when Iroquois disengaged their weapons immediately lost most of their effectiveness and accuracy—and the frigates struggled to pursue.
"Scan that ship again," Dodonna called. "If we have any sensors."
The sensors officer answered. "We have them, sir—what are you looking for?"
"MAC coils. Hot? Charging?" Dodonna asked.
"No, sir."
Dodonna frowned. Thinking quickly, he picked up the channel.
"Blazing Hope, take evasive. Now!"
Blazing Hope burned her engines laterally, straining the power systems aboard and draining her weapons of energy. Silent as a ghost, she drifted away, taking a grazing scrape that degloved a portion of her hull and vented atmosphere from the fiery, meteoric destroyer that glowed with hellfire. Iroquois missed her mark, barely making contact, and lost all reaction control to turn about.
"Blazing Hope, " Dodonna ordered, "go to ground. Get the hell out of here."
Succumbing to the damage from the battle—and perhaps burning her systems out—the Iroquois' engines flickered out, dying—as well as all traces of power aboard her ship. Her weapons ran cold, and her hull cooled from magmatic gold to a hot black, venting oxygen-rich steam and smoke that warped like heat rays in the desert. The destroyer drifted away, far behind the Blazing Hope, as the Acclamator took on wisps of oxygenated plasma arcing around her bow.
The Regulus and Dynamo were not without their share of damage. Their weapons cooled, having overclocked their generators, and offensive and point defenses were out of commission until their reactors could stabilize. Both ships reported fire crews working around the clock. Damage control focused on redirecting coolant back to the engine room to escape a prompt-critical reaction. The only thing they still had was life support, engines, and a hyperdrive.
The sensors officer picked up the nearing enemy patrol: three Gladius-class corvettes, ninety seconds out of range. Right on time.
Dodonna, weighing his options, felt a creeping sense of dread overcome him—and a responsibility, firstly, to safeguard his crew.
"Regulus, Dynamo, " Dodonna said, his voice empty, " Blazing Hope is through. Mission accomplished. Return to Anaxes."
"What about you?And Resilience? "
"None of you are in any shape to continue fighting," Dodonna said. He shook his head, as though they could see him. " Blazing Hope doesn't stand a chance against the enemy reinforcements. We're going to sound a surrender. Enemy will have to choose between a golden opportunity to accept our surrender or chase after her. "
"You have your orders," Dodonna said, mustering all the sternness he could. His voice stretched itself thin to restrain a ball in his throat.
A long silence overtook the bridge. Just as he reached to open the channel again and insist, the captain of Regulus answered.
"Understood," he said. "Don't die, Captain."
The two ships jumped, vanishing into deep space, and Dodonna signaled the surrender.
Lieutenant Keyes and his crew barely survived the encounter, but they had become legend the moment Captain Dodonna signaled a surrender on behalf of his squadron. Captains within the fleet studied his maneuver, and although Admiral Hood dished out a token reprimand for unnecessarily putting his ship, mission, and crew in danger, the "Keyes Loop" was a topic of brief discussion or cursory mention at every strategic meeting over Mygeeto from that point on.
Doctrinally weary of surrenders after the Callisto Incident, the patrol ships Meriwether, Sagan Blue, and Curie, offered to hospitalize and intern the crew of Victory and Resilience after they received support from at least six UNSC support ships—three for each Republic ship. In the meantime, however, Sagan Blue conducted an emergency evacuation of the Iroquois, forcibly docking and burning an opening through the portside upper airlock with a fire crew armed with a rescue oxy-jet.
The largest ship to arrive and the one to perform most of the heavy lifting in ferrying prisoners and carrying out on-site triage, the Spirit of Fire, remained to conduct a sweep of the Resilience. Without communications, the crew of the Resilience had no inclination that they should surrender, and instead noticed the enemy fleet aboard and barricaded themselves within the damaged ship with failing life support and limited supplies. Their situation appearing dire, they planned to hold out if they couldn't surrender.
Captain Dodonna informed the officers aboard Spirit of Fire that the clones aboard Resilience would be able to communicate using Dadita, a Mandalorian code language using flashes or tones similar to Morse Code. Dodonna translated the messages and transmitted to the men aboard Resilience from aboard the Sagan Blue, arranging a formal surrender after six hours of communicating with a portside window close enough that the bridge of the Sagan Blue could see the individual clones and distressed state of the ship's interior, and vice versa; while the clones used the lightswitches under emergency power as a rudimentary signal lamp. But that the clones were still alive was a good sign. If any system aboard the Resilience was still active, it was the oxygen generators and recyclers.
A battalion of Marines was assembled to clear out the ship, just in case they failed to surrender. They consulted a Beta-5 Division officer on clearing out the ship's facilities the day before making contact with the ship. The officer, a small-team-tactics coordinator named Serin Osman with experience in the Insurrection, advised them to treat it like a hostage situation where the lives of the men barricading themselves were both hostages and hostage takers.
One of Osman's "Ferrets," a counter-terrorism specialist, led two platoons of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers as the Spirit of Fire docked with the Resilience. The Spirit had conducted a refit with a newly fabricated docking mechanism that created a seal between one of her starboard hangars and the Venator's portside launch bay.
The Ferret took point, preparing to breach the massive doors with the unit of Helljumpers, until the Resilience launch bay doors opened. She took cover to see fifty clones, barricaded behind wrecked ships and deployable ballistic cover pieces, waiting, their weapons poised.
Shouts broke out as the Marines called for the clones to stand down. Clones yelled back, arguing in Basic, while some were lost in translation. Eventually, Osman and the captain of the Resilience ordered their men to stand down and quiet down.
A long stalemate held until the captain stood out of cover, arms held above his head, and stepped forward. He surrendered formally to the Ferret officer and requested permission to be interned aboard the Spirit of Fire.
It was finally over, and a relief came over the crews of both sides, as it was a rare moment of mercy at a stage of the war seeing so much unnecessary bloodshed. Some degree of irony, however, was lost on them: the critical communications infrastructure delivered by Blazing Hope led to an increase in coordination between Republic ground forces and General Kenobi's head-shed, reducing confusion and boosting the Jedi's confidence in a ceasefire agreement.
After the Marines spent two days sweeping the Resilience for booby traps and sabotage, apprehending the remaining half-thousand surviving crew and staff, the battle had been settled. The UNSC came out with a decisive victory—a costly one, and perhaps tactically insignificant, as the entire Mygeeto front would be lost within the week; but Osman's discovery aboard the Resilience's bridge was monumental. The bridge crew had failed to wipe all of the intelligence and information aboard their database, including maps, telemetry, and schematics for the many systems used by the Resilience.
They had come away with an intact Venator, an Acclamator, and the first of the Victory-class ship—and their blueprints. Impressed and inspired by Keyes' thinking, Admiral Hood began referring to Battle Group India as the "Iroquois Group;" suggesting that the ship under Keyes' command, while not holding flag over the other ships, was an exemplar of what the entire battle group represented: strength against all odds.
PART II:
THE DANCE
OUTER PLANETESIMAL CLOUDS
AZURE
On the same day as the final surrender of UNSC forces to the Grand Army of the Republic over Mygeeto, a Signal Corps stealth cruiser dropped out of slipspace in the dotted, endless night far beyond any Republic scope over Anaxes. UNSC Dusk was specially equipped for deep penetration operations, designed to elude all types of sensors; and until slipping into Anaxes airspace, she had spent more time near Fondor dry docks than some of the brand-new Victory-class battleships.
Until her crew was certain no Republic elements had detected her—their patrol and defense patterns were thick this far into their territory—Dusk held off along the celestial periphery for eight hours, the submariners watching their scopes with pregnant, tight breaths. Noise discipline doctrines from the days of submarine warfare had become superstition by the age of deep space prowlers. Even though sound didn't carry, the crew took care to whisper and avoid dropping heavy items aboard their ships. The Dusk waited silently for those eight hours. Then she crept even closer.
Over the air corridor Fleet Command had chosen during the earliest stages of planning for Operation: SIEGE ENGINE and Operation: CATAPHRACT, the prowler crew began the riskiest stage of their mission. They released 500 STARS satellites from the aft launch bay. The STARS, were there air in the microgravity of space, would have whistled as wisps of compressed air blasted from their reaction control thrusters to navigate the orbit of Anaxes to each position.
The hand-portable satellites spread out in a grid increasingly distant from one another, taking thousands of photographs of the surface, telemetry, passive radar timestamps, and comlink transmission recordings. Dusk held a steady geosynchronous orbit for two hours. Then the STARS satellites dead reckoned their way back to the ship, using only offline GPS and their mission stage timers, sending and receiving no signals.
For the duration of the deployment, the submariners aboard Dusk kept all her communications systems and active radar tracking offline. With advanced stealth buffers using plasma-coil disruption, Republic sensor waves rolled around the ship and disappeared behind the plasma fields. She was a ghost.
She left for Reach the way she came, Yularen's fleet none the wiser.
ANCHOR GROUP TRAFFIC CLUSTER
CSODASZARVAS
The information gathered from the bridge of Resilience paid off. Using the blueprints of hyperdrives and tacit knowledge of the best Separatist engineers hired directly from Raxus Secundus, it only took a month to produce an experimental slipspace drive that took advantage of the precision navigation of hyperdrives and applied it to a working Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine. After three tests, each a success, the fleet needed only to decide on a ship to refit with.
There were several candidates, but ultimately it came down to the strategy. What good would a single precision slipspace engine be for a whole fleet? In order to assault a position, be it a moon or a planetary defense line, the fleet needed to be together. To make best use of it in a combat formation, every ship in the formation would need one. However, procuring more would not be a timely affair. The Anaxes mission needed to launch immediately, before the Republic could prepare for a direct attack on an extrasolar colony—or worse, Earth.
After the Republic's display of breaking convention, and the wild success of the Keyes Loop in combat, the war planners in New Alexandria—so-called the "Blitz thinkers"—devised a very risky plan that involved the unique mission loadout of UNSC Spirit of Fire.
The Blitz thinkers could have chosen any old ship—even another Phoenix-class support vessel. They chose Spirit of Fire for her extraordinary crew complement—a battle-hardened cohort that had seen action on the frontlines of Madrigal and Eridanus Secundus against the Secessionist Union, and held their own on Mygeeto—and a highly reputable Captain Cutter, whom Admiral Hood had enthusiastically recommended to head the Anaxes playoff.
They got to the refit, working round the clock with Anchor 9 over the Anchor Group of dry docks and refit stations orbiting Reach. It took fifteen days to install the new drive to Spirit of Fire, the fastest recorded refit operation in UNSC history by an extreme margin.
To make this, thousands of workers were commissioned, and most of the work was done in microgravity. Eight to ten-hour shifts installing the FTL drive would be filled by minutes, with one worker clocking out as his cover started finishing the housing he'd worked on. Piece by piece, with over a thousand hands working on it per day, the housing was fabricated and installed, then the drive, then the power source and wiring, and then the safeguards.
Then the entire Anchor Group refit network was relocated to Csodaszarvas, as they prepared to launch. Several stress tests were then conducted over the moon, revealing the limitations of the new FTL drive: it required thirty minutes to spool up for activation, and more than four consecutive jumps invited risks of electrical malfunction; However, if the portal was manipulated to increase in volume and surface area by twice that the Spirit would already comfortably fit through, that maximum halved. For an operation like Siege Engine, however, she would only need two charges.
After several failed attempts to break through Anaxes, the lone ship jumped from her berth in Csodaszarvas to Jupiter-Troia Command Station to collect the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Armored Marine Expeditionary Brigade, and 14th Special Purpose Operations Detachment SPOD: 4,000 Army mechanized soldiers, 14,000 Marines, and 2,00 Bullfrogs. The ship was so packed with combat units that the infantry had to hot rack, sleeping in shifts; hundreds simply stood in the halls, quarters, and recreation centers when not conducting onboard work shifts, training, or sleeping—standing to pass the time and eat. At the beginning of the operation, they geared up and moved toward the launch bays, ready to board their craft.
Spirit of Fire made what would have been a three-day voyage in one hour with her advanced FTL engine.
One week was spent preparing her for her mission in the rings of Jupiter at the massive spider web-like superstructure of military transit hubs, naval microgravity refit dry docks, supply & service stations, orbital mining towns, Waypoint infrastructure cyber centers, and orbital signal boosters interconnecting Earth with her eyes and ears in the trojans. With hundreds of docking points and landing pads accessible to every UNSC ship—the only one of its kind—and the space to accommodate millions at a time, the Jupiter-Troia Traffic Cluster was the closest thing Solar humanity had to the shipyards orbiting Kuat and Ringo Vinda.
As the Phoenix-class ships were civilian colony ships pressed into service in response to the Insurrection, the facilities that originally stored decades' worth of food, water, filtration, and sustainability equipment to jump-start a colony were replaced with troop amenities including fifty new billets and enlisted quarters. Many other compartments were used to store ammunition, vehicles, and aircraft. The Spirit became one part troopship, one part aircraft carrier, and one part battleship.
But now, she was also one part dropship.
Accompanying her were six destroyers that were attached using massive docking clamps engineered and fabricated solely for the gravitational and inertial specifications of her mission. They would physically latch onto the Spirit to be deployed at any point. Halberd-class destroyers were chosen for their maneuverability, firepower, and high operational rating in atmosphere.
Additionally, the first foray of the Sabre Program began here. One supplementary air wing was afforded to the Spirit by the Air Force, the 19th Tactical Fighter Unit, "Silverback." 120 Sabres were mounted on the external hull of the Spirit, magnetized to the ship's hull by their landing gear. At H-Hour, the Silverback pilots would board their Sabres via spacewalk. Within an hour, they would be in the air, supporting one hundred Blackswords from the 1st Special Purpose Fighter Unit and three hundred Longswords and Wombats in the 87th Air Wing.
On the last day of her preparations at Jupiter-Troia, the Spirit of Fire was sent off, jumping away to Anaxes, synchronized to arrive with Iroquois Group's assault on the Alpha Air Corridor.
ALPHA AIR CORRIDOR
ANAXES
Admiral Yularen's fleet held. Three savage battles had ripped through his defense lines over Anaxes, enjoying a distinct range advantage, but the United Nations of Earth were accommodated with no victory here. Not by the Republic officer who survived and even bested Trench. Not by anyone.
When the 150-strong battle cluster pushed the outer defense line, they still enjoyed a tactical advantage with their spinal linear guns tearing up Yularen's ships from hundreds of kilometers away.
So instead, he ordered hundreds of Y-Wings to deploy and bridge the gap while two dozen frigates and a handful of star destroyers spun up their hyperdrives.
The Republic ships jumped, some directly into the railgun slugs' paths, exploding viciously, blowing debris out the backend, and burning up as they descended toward Anaxes without repulsor power.
The ones that survived the jump wound up in spitting distance from the UNSC ships, even exploiting a massive gap in the center of their formation—potentially a blind spot, potentially a trap to draw their ships in.
The UNSC pushed hard into the air corridor, facing a quarter-thousand Republic ships head-on in a slugfest. Then the fighters arrived and overtook the Longswords, joining them in dogfights and attempting to bomb the enemy ships.
However, Yularen's forces were still sitting ducks. By this point, they served as "bait"—a token resistance force to keep formation over the planet and slowly advance while two seasoned commodores held off at alternating patrols by the northern and southern poles. When the UNSC fleet maneuvered into position to attack, the two squadrons of Victory-class star destroyers and Venators would make short-range jumps to intercept, cut off, and break up the battle group's formation.
This time, two wings of the enemy battle group—fifty-strong each—turned laterally and burned toward the polar regions, firing their linear inductors as soon as they crested the horizon. Anticipating an adaptation, Yularen prepared for this. Instead of reinforcing the poles to match their formation, what awaited them were decoy droidships transmitting false radar returns that reported Venator and Victory-class radar cross sections.
When the UNSC ships crossed into range over the poles, thirty Victory-class ships each would power up beneath the thick clouds and auroral rays, unloading their turbolasers from the icy surface, cutting the wings apart, and forcing a retreat in seconds. Gutted frigates and burning cruisers were left behind by a surviving cadre of twelve capital ships and a handful of escorts.
The board turned into a mess of red dots and blue dots flickering in and out as Yularen folded his hands behind his back, ordering the fleet to shift formations and support their Y-Wings from afar. In the distance, coilgun slugs exchanged with heavy proton torpedoes, slashing through both formations and leaving sprays of red and gold in the dark, airless sky.
"New contact jumping into the center of their formation, Admiral," one of his sensor officers called.
The screen magnified. Yularen squinted, watching the chaos unfurling between a hundred UNSC ships and two hundred Republic pit fighters. The squadrons tore through the formation, rumbling around the enemy ships and maneuvering away from their linear inductors, making it a fight between torpedoes, turbolasers, cannons, and anti-ship ballistic missiles.
"Something's changed," Yularen said, as the flash glowed within the center of the battle. A Victory-class ship—the lead counterforce ship, Commodore Hare's Valorous, had crossed into it, taking advantage of the space to rout several destroyers into a retreat. "Slipspace isn't this precise."
A hulking beast of a ship, nearly three times the length of the Valorous crossing into its exit trajectory, steamed out of the portal, striking the bridge of the ship. The bridge and its connecting structures were obliterated, while the massive enemy capital ship took minimal damage to her portside weapon ports and hull. Electrical fires and bright flashes of lightning erupted from the decapitated fuselage of Commodore Hare's destroyer, and lights slowly died out deck by deck; while its gunners overheated their turbolasers, draining the disrupted power conduits of the ship drifting underneath the enemy.
While the enemy battle group moved in disarray—a mess of lateral burns, turn fights, and even retreats—the enemy behemoth pressed on a straight path out of the formation she entered, which she would continue on for half an hour. She largely ignored the Republic ships, taking advantage of a gap in the battlespace, maneuvering around clusters.
They needed to meet this ship halfway, not at the rear line where Resolute and her squadron held.
"Full ahead! Move us closer in," Yularen ordered. "We'll make them spend their new trick right here and now." So long as Resolute held her ground and Yularen her fleet, Anaxes would not fall.
L2 JUMP POINT
ANAXES
"Hard starboard!" Captain Cutter barked.
"Hard starboard, aye!" the helmsman called. Serina assisted the turn, routing power to emergency thrusters as the Spirit of Fire tumbled out of her slipspace jump directly into a collision course with an enemy ship. The enemy ship was one of the new ones, the Republic's Victory-class star destroyer, a shielded equivalent to a modern battlecruiser.
They were in the middle of a furball, matching pace with the rest of Iroquois Group—having jumped all the way from Jupiter-Troia in minute-by-minute coordination of the mission using Waypoint to connect blue-force tracking and predict where the rest of the fleet would appear by the first thirty minutes of the operation. Unfortunately, the mission planners were dead right about one thing: the battle, after analyzing Yularen's tactics and efficiency, would have descended to total chaos.
But from the CIC's dense transparent titanium windows, Cutter could see the prize: the maroonish magenta orb bathed in daylight on one end and industrial glow on the other, split by a smooth, curved line of twilight.
"Brace for impact!" Cutter called over the intercom. An alert chirped throughout the ship as the slipspace turbulence blended into the gut-rending sound of a collision. The entire ship shook violently, throwing Cutter into the holographic table. The blue-force tracking display, expressing a mess of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and corvettes engaged in a messy battle—a losing battle—flickered as power surges rolled through the ship. Lights blinked as well, feeding the chaos on the bridge.
Then, suddenly, it stopped. "OK, we're clear," Serina said, her avatar wiping a bead of digital sweat from her brow.
"Not a moment too soon, Serina," Cutter said. "Damage report."
Impacts from turbolasers—mostly from the Victory they had just slammed into—shook the hull more. Shouting within the CIC almost overtook Serina's voice. Cutter's attention was divided between every station and his conversation with the Spirit of Fire's only artificial assistant. He turned and called orders to different weapons stations, navigation and helm, damage crew stations, air wings, and power cycling groups—managing roughly forty sailors.
Although they didn't share words of it, it reminded Cutter and Serina of their very first foray into battle, the overtures of the early years of Operation: TREBUCHET, when the UNSC engaged in direct, symmetrical engagements with the Secessionist Union. Those battles were short and full of "glory," as he felt in his youth; they broke the Insurrection's military-industrial complex and sent them to grueling, deep-covered guerilla tactics, spreading their violence across the colonies, until nowhere was safe from ambush after ambush, attack after terrorist attack. Although he felt the excitement again, Cutter did not look fondly upon the years that followed the first battles.
"Several compartments on the port winglet are gone," Serina reported. "Most of our guns, three Archer pods, two dozen men. Six Herons were destroyed. Silverbacks are reporting six fighters were lost."
"It's going to get uglier before it gets better," Cutter said. "We're clear of the enemy destroyer?"
"Yes, Captain," Serina said. "Enemy ship is losing power and her turbolasers are turning non-effective."
"Order prep one," Cutter said. "Tell the Silverbacks they have thirty minutes to board, time—now."
"Prep one, aye," Serina said. Another alert rang throughout the ship.
Cutter turned to the slipspace navigation officer. "Start the clock. Engineering—start charging our FTL again."
"FTL cold," the ensign called. "Ready to go; starting."
"Helm," Cutter said.
"Yes, Skipper!" the helmsman answered, his voice wire-thin and tense.
"Ahead full. I see an opening for us. We're getting out of this furball and into the open."
Serina crossed her arms. "Drawing attention to ourselves, are we?" she asked.
Cutter nodded, leaning forward. "We're going to bait the enemy fleet into a feint. Draw them away from Iroquois Group and then jump."
"Then we should be careful not to take too many hits," Serina said. "We have a lot to deliver mounted outside our hull."
Cutter turned to the helmsman. "As soon as we're clear, burn thirty degrees high." He was going to force the enemy commander to maneuver out of his way—opening the rear line—to reach them.
They could already see the rear line advance, a squadron of twelve Venators, six Victories, and four Acclamators. They burned toward the Spirit, only half an hour away.
"We're cutting this awfully close," Serina said.
"Then let's take our time on the intercept," Cutter said. "Reverse thrust."
The ship shuddered as she decelerated to half-speed. Stray turbolaser bolts zipped by the ship, striking nearby Iroquois Group members. Missile volleys traded with proton torpedoes. Fighters swarmed and opened furballs within a furball. Longswords, ARC-170s, and Blackswords crossed past the viewscreen of the CIC, trading missile, gun, and turret fire. As the Spirit took hits along her underbelly, errors scrolled across the screens, washing in static.
The enemy squadron closed further, like Carthaginian war elephants.
It seemed, for sure, that the Anaxes air corridor was sealed shut—and they had routed the Iroquois Group. Again.
As the fighter pilots crossed the hull, dodging fire and debris in the chaos to board their Sabres, they hobbled along the flat, topside plates with nothing but magnetized boots and their EVA suits.
The squadron leader called all personnel secured and fighters powering up with only two minutes to spare.
"Enemy squadron is three minutes to turbolaser range," Serina called.
"And torpedo range?" Cutter asked, watching as they sped toward the Spirit of Fire.
"About that…" Serina said. The board lit up as proton torpedoes erupted from the Victories, and Y-wings scrambled from the open Venator decks. A wall of fighter-bombers fired ion torpedoes as well, small electromagnetic weapons that in large concentrations would wipe out all of the systems aboard the Spirit without even damaging her hull.
"Brace for impact!" Cutter called. "Put the clock on the screen."
"Captain," Serina said, her voice gentle. "I've completed jump calculations."
Cutter nodded. "Thirty seconds," he said. "Impact in forty."
A gridlike swarm of pink, red, and blueish-white bolts roared toward the Spirit of Fire, wrapping around her in a net of devastation.
The clock counted down to zero on the screen as the bolts became visible to the naked eye, glaring at them like stars as they raced toward the ship.
"Jump," Cutter ordered.
In five seconds, the Spirit of Fire was gone, and the battle raged on.
ASSEMBLY SECTOR J1
ANAXES
In ten seconds, Spirit of Fire re-emerged to realspace in a whip of high-altitude winds, deep in the clouds. The ship shuddered, this time from slipspace turbulence and drag.
"Rough jump," Cutter said. "Report."
"All systems nominal," Serina said. "Not a single torpedo hit its mark."
"OK," Cutter said. "Prep two as soon as the FTL cools down. Launch all parties."
"Launching all, aye," Serina said.
First, the six destroyers mounted to the Spirit of Fire—almost like appendages—decoupled from their housings and separated, spreading out into an escort formation surrounding the ship with a one-thousand-meter dispersion, staying clear of all aircraft launch lanes. They climbed.
The Sabres, their landing gear held with magnetizing skids locked around the wheels, demagnetized in a sort of launch sequence, while the pilots disengaged their brakes. Engines fired up, burning at a lower temperature than optimal as their air intakes struggled at high altitudes, thrusters spitting out thick black smoke for exhaust.
Then, in sequence as though launching off a runway, they rolled off the canted winglets of the Spirit into the sky below. Their nose-first descents fed the air intakes and ramjets plenty, powering their engines. They maneuvered and thrusted to higher altitude, fanning out in an array of finger-four squadrons.
Once the Sabres were clear, Longswords and Blackswords launched using interior catapults aboard Spirit, emptying her reserves of fighter complements. Behind them, a swarm of Pelicans, Falcons, Albatrosses, two dozen tankers, and D-20 Herons deployed from the lower launch bays carrying all of the Marines and Army elements, while two thousand ODSTs dropped. Smoke billowed out of every port from the ship, shrouding the Spirit of Fire in exhaust trails as she climbed to a higher altitude, breaking storm clouds.
Within ten minutes, the entire deploy-complement of the Spirit was headed for the surface to six landing zones surrounding the massive assembly facility, with a twelve-kilometer dispersion, before the enemy anti-aircraft weapons could even wake up. The destroyers formed a defensive box around the colossal support ship.
With Iroquois Group fighting tooth and nail in orbit, seeming to push harder with every minute, Yularen's fleet had no ships to spare to respond to the Spirit but the squadrons along the poles—and, given they had ambushed from within atmosphere, they could not maneuver quickly enough to reach them without first going to orbit. That left only six local ships: three Victory-class destroyers, and three Venators; low-orbital regional patrols.
They rumbled over the clouds, converging from nearly equidistant patrol routes, bearing on them. They descended rapidly, plasma wisping around their hulls. The ships wanted to engage the ground forces first—cut them off at the roots, before the Marines and soldiers could wrestle a foothold. Fighters already crossed toward the UNSC air wings.
"All conditions are right," Cutter declared on the air command frequency. "Engage three Venators, bearing 038. Same plan."
The Sabres broke off and gained altitude, while Longswords formed walls toward the Venators and launched anti-ship missiles as well as Phoenix missiles, tracking dozens of ARC-170 interceptors. The Blackswords burned fast with the Sabres, using them as escorts, and primed their laser-guided bombs.
The Longsword wall saw well over a hundred smoke trails spread out from under their wings, missiles off the rack. Then an array of flares dumped as they maneuvered apart, increasing dispersion and burning thrusters hard in zig-zagging patterns. Proton torpedoes crossed, missing some, obliterating others.
While the Venators closed on "Spirit Group"—the squadron of destroyers and the Spirit herself—a supersonic dogfight began between the Longswords and Republic fighters. The Longswords darted swiftly through the thick air, savoring their brand-new, million-credit Pratt & Whitney vectored scramjet thrusters for acceleration and maneuverability that caught up with the lethality of the ARC-170.
From behind, however, the Victories continued to bear down on them. Spirit Group burned their thrusters starboard, arcing right until they made a 180 to face the opponents.
The crew aboard Spirit of Fire scrambled in their callouts and reports, preparing for a brutal faceoff. Cutter, however, was relieved. With all their external assets released, he didn't have to avoid taking direct fire. The hull of the Spirit could tank turbolaser and torpedo hits much better than a squadron of Sabres or six destroyers mounted externally.
He ordered the squadron of Spirit Group to hold off on their slipspace drives, not to fire until they destroyed the Victories—and to trust that the fighters would overwhelm the Venators. If any one ship remained airborne before the end of the operation, before the ground forces had deployed their mobile anti-aircraft and anti-ship guns, the paratroopers, Marines, and Helljumpers on the ground were doomed to be overwhelmed.
Even though this mission was fast, the battle above Anaxes wasn't to end, either—or else Yularen might be able to maneuver his ships to take out the ground force. Iroquois Group would not receive the necessary reinforcements to prolong the fight until another twelve hours.
Only Spirit of Fire had a slipspace drive precise enough to rejoin the fight immediately. When the rest of Spirit Group made their emergency jumps, they would be jumping to deep space—somewhere far out beyond the planetesimal cloud, in the space between the stars.
"Iroquois, " Cutter ordered, "take point."
He heard Commander Keyes' voice answer. "Affirmative," he said. As the first Victory crested the mountainous horizons, the Iroquois unleashed both her MAC guns at once, following with a hailstorm of Archer missiles.
Three other destroyers opened fire, sparing one MAC round each, breaking the deflectors of the lead Victory and punching a massive hole in her starboard flap. The ship listed to the right but remained airworthy, launching a volley of forty proton torpedoes. More followed from her squadron.
"Dump chaff, dump flares," Cutter ordered. "Point-defense safeties off. Aegis authority given."
Cutter picked up the phone and opened an intercom call. "All hands, enemy torpedoes incoming—thirty seconds. Brace for impact! Brace, brace, brace."
The ships created a massive, glowing smokescreen while a hundred thousand tracers sprayed from an array of Scythe rotary autocannons, automatically targeting the torpedoes. They splashed several dozen of them, blossoming rose fire and blasts that shook the hull of the Spirit. Two torpedoes made it through the point-defense screen, striking the Minotaur and the Spirit of Fire.
The ship shook like a high-magnitude earthquake. Cutter stumbled, lurched forward into the holotable. Yelps of shock and pain broke out momentarily. Metal churned. Pipes blew out in distant corridors behind the CIC.
The Minotaur split in half from the blast, breaking open like a lobster and tumbling toward the surface of Anaxes. Secondary explosions from her magazine and reactor stung the crews' retinas, hot residual glows broiling everything nearby. The shockwaves took out a few Longswords and starfighters as they flew by too close. She was more meteor than ship, the way she burned, raining fire and oil.
Some admirals had theorized back on Reach that the proper strategy for the capital ship of a squadron was to provide support while her destroyers did the heavy hitting—to distribute her lanes of fire evenly, bolstering each wing, creating a sort of balanced approach. This minimized risk, spreading out the effects of incoming fire as well, as no flank was too well defended nor too vulnerable.
Cutter did not agree with this approach.
"See that ship in the middle, burning toward us?" Cutter asked. He pulled up the Victory on the holotable, examining her tactical readings. "Get us closer. All batteries and Archer pods targeting her."
Serina crossed her arms. "Like the defense of Meridian in '15?" she asked, referencing a battle from the Spirit's history—and Cutter's own history, his ensign days serving as a CIC gunnery officer—long before she was born.
"Exactly like Meridian," Cutter said.
"Ordering Iroquois to move out of the way, aye," Serina called. She slaved all the anti-ship coilguns to her own targeting matrices and pivoted them toward the Victory-class destroyer. The helm, a veteran under Cutter's tutelage for over eight years, burned the Spirit's engines hot toward the enemy ship as Iroquois climbed out of her path. The destroyers in Spirit Group accelerated behind, following closely.
The ship rattled as the coilguns fired in quick succession, their projectiles pockmarking the Victory; and dozens of Archer missiles streaked across the sky in an impressive display of smoke. Spirit of Fire crossed into a screen of turbolaser fire. However, the closer she got, overtaking the Victory, the more firing angles her guns scored, and the more turbolasers they knocked out. Archers slammed into her hull, ripping up the upper decks and gutting her.
Deck after deck reported hull breaches, fires just barely catching in the thin, high-altitude air. Compartments crumpled and burned. But the Spirit had more to give than her opponent. Eventually, the overwhelming repeated salvos of coilgun fire combined with deep sucker punches of anti-ship missiles were too much. Even as Spirit entered the turbolaser salvos of her starboard wingmate, the lead ship momentarily vanished in a fireball and shockwave that changed the Spirit's course by a few degrees, rocking the entire ship.
"Guns starboard!" Cutter called. "Archers starboard!"
While turbolasers melted the starboard hull of Spirit, the fight did not last long. Iroquois and Golem combine-fired their MACs in quick succession, stripping her of shields with Iroquois' first two shots and losing her engines and reactor from Golem's follow-ups.
The rest of the squadron opened fire on the last Victory before she could target them. It ended with the dagger-shaped star destroyer burning in a steep nosedive toward the canyons by the assembly sector.
Serina opened her arms. "Prep two complete," she said. "Calculations complete. We are hot, sir."
Cutter pulled up the battlespace, asking Serina to confirm what he already saw. "Air wing?"
The Venators were already off the board, burning and screaming to the surface in flames and smoke. The combined air wing had done their job and would continue to loiter or fight until the Marines erected some airstrips. The squadron leaders sounded off over the comm, sending Cutter off with cheers and compliments.
Cutter gave the order for the fleet to jump. He picked up the intercom.
"All hands," he said. "The rest of Spirit Group is jumping to a somewhat imprecise vector beyond the solar reaches of Azure. We, however, will be jumping right back to orbit, into the thick of a fierce battle with the Anaxes battle cluster. We will not have a reprieve; we will have to continue to hold their forces in combat with us, so they cannot send severe reinforcements to intercept the ground forces."
Out the starboard and port windows, the crew watched as the destroyers—one by one—jumped to slipspace at a safe altitude, vanishing into thin discs of electrified air.
"Until the ground forces have broken through, we leave the operation to them. We will fight for a prolonged time, until seventy-two hours from now, when the first relief supplies will come in. Then we will load up, jump back to Anaxes, and deliver them to the ground forces—again.
"Until then," Cutter concluded, "we leave the ground war in their hands."
He turned the slipspace key and opened the portal.
PART III:
HAT TRICK
ALPHA AIR CORRIDOR
ANAXES
Corvette 2C Heavy lurked in orbit of Anaxes out of detection from both UNSC and Republic scopes. After one successful deployment over Christophsis, she was returned to port for extensive testing and refit, particularly with upgrades meant to counter phased-array radars used by the UNSC. The cramped, tubular, needlelike sloop would be a capable stealth vessel when completed and prepared for a field test.
The proper time for a field test never came. Instead, she was deployed to the front immediately after the UNSC's invasion of Anaxes began, used as a frontline reconnaissance vessel to scry the fleet's operations in the distant clusters beyond the planetary scopes. If she could find the fleet in their holding pattern for the day, she stalked them for six hours at a time, and then jumped away.
This time, however, she was equipped with an experimental data spoofing setup attenuated to fool STARS and STARS-T sensors. Anticipating that the UNSC would deploy a network of tiny spy satellites somewhere over Anaxes, likely the assembly sectors, she waited in a distant, geosynchronous orbit, her systems quiet and at a minimal, passive sensor intake. The passive, long-wavelength sensors would pick up many objects with great precision. They might pick up STARS, or they might pick up debris; often as the STARS had similar radar profiles—size, trajectory, and velocity—the clone officers aboard Corvette 2C Heavy had to sift through sensor hits manually for hours at a time.
However, four hours into their watch, the crew of Corvette 2C Heavy found a match: a small, baseball-sized aluminum and titanium object that had inexplicably winked into a debris cloud over the planet. Then, another one. They appeared to enter through shutters that created a very interesting sensor return—a mechanical structure that didn't have many defined edges or walls, except for the interior of what appeared to be a small shaft.
The captain and intelligence liaison officers aboard analyzed this data and concluded it might have been an enemy stealth ship—a "prowler" of unknown classification—deploying these STARS. The Republic intelligence liaisons suggested to the captain not to pursue or engage the prowler, but to attempt to test the spoofing equipment, reasoning if the ship were to break concealment and attack the prowler, the prowler might escape with data of Corvette 2C Heavy's specifications; or she might be destroyed, fail to report in, and spook the UNSC mission planners. Conversely, if they failed to convincingly spoof their intelligence gathering, then the UNSC would be tipped off to an attempt to tamper—at worst. But if they succeeded, they could ensnare their enemy into a devious trap.
When they observed no change in the STARS' orbital patterns for some time—that they had stopped and moved to a standby, data-collecting mode—Corvette 2C Heavy left her orbit and quietly rematerialized on Republic scopes a hundred meters away from Admiral Yularen's vessel. Breaking flight protocol, the captain requested a priority dock, reporting a mission-critical update. He informed Yularen that they only had thirty minutes to act on the intelligence gathered by Corvette 2C Heavy.
Yularen took fifteen. When the corvette returned to her stealth protocol, transmitting an invasive data injection that overrode the STARS' sensors and painted a picture of routine, high-alert patrols; the young admiral tasked a squadron.
JUPITER-TROIA TRAFFIC CLUSTER
SOLAR TROJANS
UNSC Cradle was brought to Jupiter-Troia to service Spirit of Fire in an emergency repair operation scheduled to last exactly eight hours, while non-essential crews were rotated, another three regiments of Marines and Helljumpers were boarded, and supplies were loaded in every orifice the Jupiter-Troia loading docks could stuff with food, ammunition, replacement parts, uniforms, blankets, armor, steel, and sandbags. Most of the operation was automated using the Spirit's colony loading mechanism, a useful appendage of the Phoenix-class ship's tenure as an exploratory settler.
They finalized the microgravity repairs in ten hours, just minutes after the last supplies were loaded, and sent her back to the front.
A new squadron of ships was deployed to reinforce Iroquois Group, increasing her strength to 200, a near-match for the remaining naval forces over Anaxes. The next action was a showdown that would, ultimately, decide the fate of the planet—no officer said as much, but Cutter could feel it. He folded his hands behind his back and sighed. The formation centered around Spirit of Fire again—same strategy. They pushed into the central formation, radar alerts and alarms blaring, klaxons turning, cannons and missiles screeching, MAC barrels glowing at the tips.
ALPHA AIR CORRIDOR
ANAXES
Admiral Yularen crossed his arms as three hundred Republic ships left the rear line to meet the enemy fleet. The majority of them jumped, once they picked up the activity from the staging area behind the moon, directly to the horizon, and waited for the enemy to crest it. The six-hour reprieve from battle was over—hardly enough time for either side to lick their wounds and not enough time for Yularen to send ships to provide close air support for clones on the ground.
Yularen, however, waited for the next stage of the operation: the jump maneuver. He ordered a few of his ships to descend toward the assembly sector, but to hold off on attacking directly. The six forward operating bases the paratroopers had used in their siege created severe area denial zones from Republic ships using their brand-new "Mammoth" tanks with mass drivers that could reach orbital targets. As such, his fleet needed to maneuver out of the way, creating a small opening—still too small for the enemy fleet—in the air corridor.
The real reason, however, had little to do with it. He had laid a trap.
The fight in orbit was business as usual—his fleet ambushed the battle group, forced them into a furball that challenged their coordination and composure, and the enemy flag jumped into the atmosphere of Anaxes.
But Yularen, the moment the fleet disengaged and that ship disappeared to who knows where, he knew that the ground forces were going to need a resupply, and that ship was the only one with the means. Most likely, she had departed to resupply at a deployment station nearby and would return to do it all again, effectively resetting the progress of any GAR commander on the ground.
He had, then, ordered several Victories to the air corridor, pulling them off their posts. They descended into high altitude, immediately taking heavy fire from the Mammoths. The Mammoth guns were powerful, but not enough to take down star destroyers without extremely well-placed shots. They tried anyway, and managed to disrupt the engines of said Victories.
Yularen ordered them to make controlled detonations along the engine blocks of their ships and descend more rapidly, giving the impression that they'd been shot down and would crash. They landed far off the periphery of enemy forces, while Republic sappers got to work restoring the engines. It took four thousand sappers two days with intense logistical support from gunships and Juggernaut tugs.
ASSEMBLY SECTOR J1
ANAXES
Spirit Group completed the jump on schedule, taking minimal damage from the initial stage of the battle. She dropped out of the flashing, thundering portal that stormed over the assembly. This time, proton torpedo silos in the assembly base were online. They targeted and launched at the squadron with fury.
The attack began one hour into the ground forces' assault on the facility, an all-out reach into Republic territory from all six vectors. Marines and troopers on the ground took what armor they had and threw it at the enemy, pushing against their fortifications. Longswords launched from the provisional air stations, no longer enjoying air superiority, and skimmed the trees, launching missiles and rockets in high arcs, almost like airborne artillery.
Six destroyers launched, as well as the Spirit of Fire's new air wing, a regular complement of Longswords and Blackswords from her port and starboard side catapults. Another wave of Pelicans, Albatrosses, and Herons deployed from the launch bays, burning toward the surface, taking heavy flak, missile, and torpedo fire. Only half of the dropships made it, and one third of the Albatrosses and Herons carrying supplies.
Cutter braced as an array of heavy torpedoes ascended for the formation.
"Helm, lower altitude, five hundred meters," Cutter ordered. He reached for the squadron channel. "All ships, dump chaff and flares. Stay out of Spirit airspace."
"Flares, firing," the weapons officer called.
"Belay that," Cutter said. "We can take the hits; they can't."
Screens of fire intercepted most. A few struck the Spirit and shook her from aft to stern.
"Wedge 36," Cutter called onto the air channel. "Task for you—work with Golem and find those proton torpedo silos. Golem will use ECCM; find the sites and hit them with HARMs."
"Copy," the Longsword squad leader answered.
The Longsword formations shifted on the board.
"Captain!" Serina called. "Multiple contacts—eight star destroyers."
The Victory-class ships appeared on the board, distantly below their formation, powering up from the surface in an array around the assembly base. Their turbolasers fired upward, cutting into destroyers and blasting chunks out of the Spirit's hull.
"Ambush," Cutter called. "Ambush low."
Above them, two Venators, and two more star destroyers intercepted them, entering the atmosphere and taking potshots with their lasers. Air wing after air wing descended into high altitude, fighters and bombers alike, swarming the formation. Three destroyers broke apart, disappearing from the board.
"Abort," Cutter called. "All ships, emergency jump. Abort mission. Recall all fighters, tankers, and dropships. Prepare to jump."
"Prep two is still twenty-five minutes away," Serina said.
Cutter ordered the remaining destroyers to jump away. Iroquois, Specter, and Golem vanished into blueshifting air. At high altitude—thin air—they created small electromagnetic disruptions which washed static over their instruments. It interrupted some of the Spirit's sensors and targeting.
Cutter slapped the display as the image of Spirit's functions and damage model flickered. This gave him an idea.
"Helm," Cutter said, "ahead full. Take us further down and burn us out of the assembly's kill box. We'll kite the Venators so the Mammoths have a firing solution on them, then we'll go in close."
"Engine at maximum power, aye," the helmsman said. The ship lurched as she dove into the clouds.
"Overclock!" Cutter barked to the communications officer, who relayed the order to Engineering.
Six squadrons of Longswords took it upon themselves to launch decoys before returning to Spirit airspace, chasing down Y-wings that dared to close the gap.
"Not taking the bait, are they?" Serina said, as they each noticed no change in the enemy firing patterns.
Spirit of Fire's hundreds each of quad-barrel helical railguns and Archer missiles fired in every direction, each slug and missile with a named target—but it wasn't enough. Admiral Yularen had turned around an already worrying battle of attrition in his favor.
The hull of the Spirit of Fire began to sublime and glow, liquefying and smoking up clouds the size of her own chassis, as the fire continued to hail onto her hull. Flashes stung Cutter's eyes. The glowing heat roaring along the hull, despite the tinted glass, felt hot to the face and hands. The air conditioning failed. The bridge smelled of sweat, dry heat, and electrical smoke. A burnt copper stench floated in the air, no longer recycling from the vents.
"How much more of this can we take?" Cutter asked.
"To spare you the details?" Serina said. "Not enough."
Cutter turned. "Focus all cannon fire on the nearest destroyer. Knock it out and make an opening. Helm, hard to port."
Spirit of Fire lurched as the helmsman pulled the yoke hard, exposing the starboard broadside to the enemy star destroyer bearing down upon her. A hundred guns on her starboard topside flickered like Napoleonic line infantry as Archer missiles screamed over, creating L-shaped smoke plumes and arcing into the ship's hull.
As the star destroyer opened fire on the missiles, her forward deflectors absorbing the shots from their coilguns, Cutter could see it wasn't enough—but the closer Spirit got in darting around the enemy ship, the further the enemy pulled back, avoiding a direct confrontation.
But he pushed further, cannons overlapping their arcs of fire and continuing to strain her deflectors.
Serina's avatar crossed her arms, holding her fingers up to her chin. Cutter took notice.
"Got something?" he asked.
"Just a hunch," she said. "Perhaps if we target those structures above the bridge—they're emitting a massive energy signature that is synchronized with the deflectors."
"Do it," Cutter said. "Target them with Archers, too."
The coilguns failed to break the deflector screen, but Archers—flying too slow in atmosphere to trigger the conditions to be blocked—eventually destroyed the shield generators.
Serina closed a fist. "Shields disrupted," she called.
The blasts on the hull of the destroyer quickly turned into explosions ripping into her hull, exposing to the elements metal viscera and crew.
The destroyer pointed her nose up, burning toward orbit.
"I don't think so," Cutter said. "Cut that down. Target her engines. Reverse thrust!"
The ship entered a reverse burn that put distance between herself and the star destroyer's escort, one of the Venators. The Venator, covering the Victory's slot in the box, maneuvered underneath her to keep up the fire on Spirit with her turbolasers.
Like a focusing lens, however, the Spirit's topside coilguns exclusively targeted the destroyer as she burned away. The exposed and vulnerable engines twisted and burned, flickering out. The ship lost thrust, appearing to sink in the high altitude until she collided with the Venator, slicing through her and ripping them in half, hurtling toward the planet like meteors.
Their reactors, overloading from direct impacts and explosions, turned prompt-critical and overwhelmed the Spirit of Fire's viewscreens with a blinding light. Cutter squinted as the screens automatically dimmed, saving the crew's eyes. He held a hand up to cover his vision, blinking out tears.
"Elegant," Serina said. "But there are still eight more star destroyers directly below us, and they've been cooking our underbelly."
"How much longer will our ship last?" Cutter asked, wiping sweat from his brow. "Now that those two are gone."
"Thirty-two minutes," Serina said, "before the hull melts off and we lose a thousand immediately. But we will lose our engines sooner. Already reporting power fluctuations."
"We won't be in the air that long," Cutter said.
"No, Captain," Serina said grimly; "we won't."
"FTL?" Cutter asked.
"Fifteen minutes," Serina said.
"Orient us upside-down," Cutter ordered. "The topside of Spirit's hull is still more resilient. Evacuate all upper decks to inner compartments, any compartment closer to the core of the ship than D, C, and E. I want Decks 48 through 90 empty and vented of atmosphere."
They descended and accelerated, moving the ship out of the firing lanes of the star destroyers. This forced them to take off from the assembly, taking more time to maneuver around. The Venator, taking surface fire from the 1st Armored's Mammoths, held off and relied on air power—which battled grueling strikes from anti-air missiles and Scythe gunfire—to harass the Spirit of Fire.
It continued until there were only three minutes left on the clock. A squadron of Y-wings managed to break through their air defense cluster, dropping ion bombs onto her engines.
Power surges rolled over the ship, washing static on their systems. Serina reported engines at half-strength, rapidly losing power—and the gravity devices keeping the ship from crashing were losing power too.
Serina began to make her reports, but Cutter held a hand up.
"Do we still have our FTL?" Cutter asked.
Serina paused only to blink. "Yes, Captain," she said, her voice stretched in confusion.
"Set us a route with emergency boosters. Pivot us on a collision course with the assembly. Full reverse thrust—and make your jump calculations."
Serina protested. "With three minutes? Sir, I don't think you want to know how close we'll be cutting it."
The captain nodded. "You're right," he said:
"I don't."
AIRSTRIP 7B
ANAXES
UNSC Spirit of Fire made a radical nosedive toward the facility, seemingly going down with the combined fire of Admiral Yularen's kill box, a squadron of Victories bearing down on her like a school of angry piranhas. Cannon and torpedo fire arced up and down, swarming and biting chunks out of her hull until almost fifteen percent of the ship had been burned off, molten titanium glowing and dripping toward the surface of Yularen's home.
Within three minutes, it would be over—the supply mission partially failed, the Spirit of Fire doomed, the days of the ground forces numbered by all accounts. She fell into an uncontrolled descent, her reverse thrusters burning at half-strength, slowing the inevitable. She descended like a meteor, aiming her chassis as a weapon toward the assembly.
Observers initially speculated she intended to destroy the facility in a self-sacrificial kamikaze attack, using the mass, fuel reserves, and remaining munitions aboard to destroy the production line and military installations around it. The impact would create a pressure wave that could break bones within forty kilometers and break glass within two hundred, a fireball that would blind observers within the horizon, and a series of aftershocks that would rupture aqueducts, fuel pumps, and oil lines.
However, the potential destruction would have been insignificant compared to the radiation that might poison the lands.
Thousands of clones attempted to evacuate the facility as they saw a burning, glowing, molten wreck meteoring toward the facility above their heads, many panicking and shooting each other to break out of the underground assembly floors. They fled into UNSC Marine and Army positions, some dying to machine gun fire, some surrendering, until the UNSC forces closest to the facility broke their ranks in a disorganized retreat, defying orders to hold the line and await the next stage of the plan.
At an altitude of less than a kilometer, the Spirit of Fire emitted a massive burst of Cherenkov radiation from nuclear weapons in their silos. A slipspace portal parallel to the ground appeared in her flight path, swallowing her whole as her ship safely disappeared into thin air, just hundreds of meters above the bulbous central superstructure of the facility.
The portal closed just as quickly as it appeared, leaving behind a burst of electromagnetic radiation—and a shockwave that caved in the massive, domed superstructure and shattered the glass of every skylight, raining glass down into the stalled assembly lines. A bright, blueish white glow persisted, temporarily blinding many eyes and damaging sensors. The powerful EMP wiped out the shields and major systems on the Victories, including engines, and causing them to crash into the desolate lands, bases, or pipelines surrounding the web-like array of assembly facilities.
The unique interaction of slipspace waves and densely-packed oxygen, often only found at low altitude atmospheric pressure, was something only theorized in military academies as a catastrophic event rather than a phenomenon that could be weaponized. This was partly due to the risk involved with such a maneuver and concerns of unreliability related to too many variables. It was only a possibility, but the consensus generally agreed that a slipspace jump from under 20,000 feet at Earthlike atmospheric pressure would result in an explosion exceeding 10,000 kilotons of TNT, with a radiation burst that would fry even the most hardened of equipment.
In this case, they were proven right. The airburst swallowed the dome whole, as though it had bitten a chunk out of the skylights and left jagged edges of the ceiling; the rush of air into a vacuum ripped vehicles—cars, trucks, speeders, tanks—off the ground tumbling in the air like a tornado. Cranes swayed, crashing into the factory floor. Crates and containers disappeared into the clouds of dust and glass. The air was smeared with fragments, shrapnel, smoke, and blood. The radiation burst created the largest electromagnetic event in living memory.
Outside the facility, in the greatest concentration of surface combat, the air was instantly electrified, rancid with the smell of burnt paper and hot copper.
Hundreds of ARC-170s and V-wings, disrupted by the burst of ionizing radiation, crushing volts, and a rapidly shifting mesh of electrical fields, tumbled out of the sky. Broiling flashes of lightning arced and coiled around everything that housed copper and spark plugs, electrocuting pilots closest to the edge of the shockwave before the crashes could kill them. The airspace over the J1 assembly sector was clear of Republic influence in seconds.
UNSC armored vehicles shut down in their positions at the perimeter of the base—their engines and sparkplugs burned out from the EMP. Ammunition counters, holographic sights, ATPIAL infrared pointers, blue-force tracking, long-range and short-range radios, phased-array radars, MANPADS, Smartlink data suites, and blasters stopped. The effect was followed by a gust of heavy wind, like a wall of pressure hitting the men and women on the ground with crushing, oppressive power.
While the EMP shorted out the clones' comlink devices and weapons, and the UNSC Army and Marine infantry were heavily affected by the outage, the UNSC forces were able to continue fighting and overpower the clones, whose blasters had proven useless. UNSC troops used gas-operated firearms, even if their ammunition counters were digital and battery-powered. Clones relied on weapons utilizing tibanna gas, but they were actuated electronically by a detachable battery. In effect, they were highly susceptible to electromagnetic interference.
The majority of remaining garrisoned clones, with no functioning blasters anywhere in the base, surrendered quickly to the UNSC forces that breached their structures under a sheet of black rain.
The Iroquois Group retreated from the battle when UNSC Spirit of Fire jumped, meeting her on the dark side of the moon. Yularen's line held.
With the Spirit of Fire so severely damaged that her hull glowed in the icy vacuum of space for hours, her armor molten and red, nine out of ten weapons unable to fire any longer, and most of her Archer missile honeycombs melted shut—and worse still, the engines nearly destroyed—extensive repairs began with UNSC Arc Light and Cradle rushed to the front, refitting Spirit of Fire's hull and engines in a week before even starting on her weapons and Archer batteries. This left her and Iroquois Group, in their position around the moon, vulnerable to multiple Republic attacks. The Separatist fleet linked up with them and held emergency summits between the UNSC Navy general staff officers and General Grievous and Admiral Trench aboard UNSC Atlas.
It was on the Atlas that the Separatists were apprised of the direness of the situation: that the joint ground forces, which had infiltrated Anaxes, could no longer reliably be resupplied by the Spirit of Fire thanks to a well-placed ambush by Admiral Yularen; it was aboard the Atlas that it was divulged that Yularen was an old rival of Trench's; and it was aboard Atlas that Grievous suggested use of "super MACs" deployed from Moncton-class orbital defense platforms as weapons of mass destruction and "terror" upon the military defense fleet and civilian populations of Anaxes.
It was aboard the Atlas that Lieutenant Commander Victor Polk protested Grievous personally, claiming that his sensibilities aggravated the laws of armed conflict and the "Hood Protocol," an agreement enforced by Rear Admiral Hood, made in good faith with General Kenobi.
And it was aboard the Atlas that Grievous murdered Polk, escaped custody of the Marine personnel, and destroyed the ship in a glowing flash, leaving the general staff overseeing Operation: SIEGE ENGINE and Operation: CATAPHRACT—and historians of the decades to come—to weigh the consequences of the Battle of Anaxes, a battle that had many names: the "Blitz," the "Assembly Defense," the "Spirit Dance," or "Cutter's Hat Trick."