Re: The 13th Tribe Book II: A Symphony of War
Posted: 2018-06-07 06:17pm
Surprise! But not as big a one as the Covenant get....
Defying Fate
Covenant Assault Carrier Alacritous Retribution, Fleet of Sanguine Resolve
Approaching Sigma Octanus IV
Six Hours Later (July 17th, 2552, (Military Calendar)/Ninth Age of Reclamation (Covenant Date))
Sanguine Resolve was a comparatively small Fleet compared to the rest of the Covenant armada. A mere twenty-nine ships, almost exclusively frigates and destroyers with just one Assault Carrier, certainly other Fleets were much more numerous even if most did not possess one of the rare but mighty Supercarriers. Nevertheless Sanguine Resolve had a high reputation for valour and victory and they were often used by the Hierarchs as a specialist trouble-shooting force.
In this case, the Hierarchs had dispatched them to an out-of-the-way world that was not believed to be occupied by the accursed humans except perhaps in a very minor capacity – certainly it would not be defended strongly enough to overwhelm this specialist fleet. They were here to recover an artefact of the Gods that was believed to point the way to one of the legendary Halo Rings, which needed to be found before the Great Journey could begin.
In the command centre of the flagship Alacritous Retribution – which in direct contrast to human designs was buried deep inside the hull and out of reach of their weapons unless the entire ship was destroyed – stood Fleetmaster Ftek Nasanee, a towering Sanghelli warrior clad in the golden armour appropriate to his rank. This would be the first time in many years he and his force had engaged humans, they had spent the last decade dealing with minor insurrections among the Ungggoy and Kig-Yar, acting quickly and brutally to prevent the taint from spreading. They had even had to deal with a renegade Jiralhane battlecruiser when the Shipmaster had gone feral and turned on their superiors.
Despite this lack of experience, Nasanee was supremely confident they would triumph – or rather, he had been supremely confident until they had lost contact with his advance force of the Fleet’s secondary carrier, a destroyer and two frigates. That small group had been sent out ahead for two purposes; to confirm from orbital scans that the Artefact was indeed present (and where it was located) and to draw out any human ships that might be lurking.
It would seem the advance force had succeeded at the second goal a little too much. The carrier had reported a single human attack vessel in orbit, and another two had shortly arrived in the outer system. The ship in orbit had engaged and somehow eliminated the light escort ships, to the astonishment of not only the carrier’s commander but Nasanee as well. The smaller carrier had been aiming to deploy a wave of ground troops and then pull back, knowing that the presence of Covenant troops on the planet would occupy the humans until the rest of the Fleet could arrive and secure the orbital space.
Then they had lost contact completely and had not been able to re-establish it since. Nasanee could only assume the humans had a large fleet in orbit, one that had been able to attack and quickly overwhelm the other carrier. Overwhelming numbers was the only way humans had ever managed to defeat the Covenant in space engagements, which meant that had to be the case here.
Thus Nasanee had ordered all his ships to full alert as soon as they reverted to realspace in the outer system. The long-range sensors had indeed shown numerous human ships in orbit, although they were too far away to determine exact numbers and type. Nasanee had known the humans would have detected their arrival and decided on a cunning plot to exploit human weaknesses.
He knew they were safe here in the outer system – human slipspace drives were simply not accurate enough to travel such a short distance to hit his Fleet away from the planet. So his ships waited patiently, in full view of the humans while they carefully prepared their plans, knowing that the humans, with their inferior physiology, would be growing tired from the constant state of readiness they had to maintain while Nasanee’s ships were visible.
Now his plan was ready and they would attack. A precision slipspace jump would bring the Fleet into position, not to engage the human defenders but to deploy troops to the surface. Every available dropship on the Assault Carrier and her three battlecruiser escorts were loaded with ground forces and would launch in one massive wave towards the Artefact’s location. The ships meanwhile would launch a massive plasma salvo at the human fleet. The range would be long enough that some human ships would undoubtedly be able to evade the searing fire, but their formation would be broken, their crews distracted. He could then decide to press the engagement or make a withdrawal, returning later on to finish the humans.
It was a good plan, he judged, one that he expected would work. He had modified it slightly to also launch every available fighter from the Alacritous Retribution’s sizeable hangers, knowing that even the smaller plasma torpedoes and pulse lasers the fighters carried would be enough to hurt humans ships en masse, especially after being weakened by the huge plasma salvo from his combat ships.
And so the moment came. The slipspace drives pulsed and the Fleet raced forwards to emerge a few seconds later in orbit over the planet. He called for a report on the exact composition of the human forces, now that they were close enough to determine them. The Minor Sanghelli who oversaw the various sensors turned to the Fleetmaster, not flinching at all despite the disparity in rank.
“Fleetmaster, the human force contains forty-eight combat vessels. 31 Attack Vessel Class A-2, 14 Class B-1, one Class C-2, and one each of Carrier Vessels Class A-3 and A-4. There is also a large unknown vessel above the human formation which I believe to be a support vessel; it does carry any offensive weapons that I can detect. The human formation is now reorienting themselves to face us.”
Nasanee nodded. The numbers were higher than expected but hardly insurmountable. The turn towards him was also expected. “Launch all dropships and fighters, all ships to engage the humans with plasma torpedoes as planned.” The crew went to work and the assorted ship’s sides began to glow as the lateral plasma lines prepared to fire while the hanger bays spewed thousands of fighters and hundreds of drop ships.
It was at this exact moment that Fleetmaster Ftek Nasanee’s plan came undone.
Out in space, on the far side of the Fleet of Sanguine Resolve from the human formation, thirteen Kobolian warships flashed into existence. From a third direction, towards the planet, appeared another six ships seemingly from nowhere. This caused considerable consternation for the various Shipmasters as their sensor operators all reported the same astonishing fact.
That among the group between them and the planet was the massive shape of a Forerunner Dreadnought, just like the one that sat at the heart of High Charity.
Aboard the Alacritous Retribution, Nasanee could only stare at the external camera image in utter disbelief. A Dreadnought, here? Apparently siding with the humans and not the Covenant? It was unthinkable. Nasanee could have continued down that mental road for minutes at least had not the sensor operator all but bellowed at him to draw his attention to the other group of new arrivals, the ones behind them.
The camera feed switched to show those other ships. They were big, even the smallest eight vessels were twice the size of the lighter human attack vessels while the largest was bigger even than the carrier he had sent as his advance force. At the bow of that huge new ship was a claw-like structure. At the centre of those claws a brilliant blue glow could be seen. This was the last thing that Fleetmaster Ftek Nasanee ever saw.
The Warstar Nemesis had jumped into position with her superlaser armed and ready, only needing a few minor bursts from the manoeuvring thrusters to align it with the Alacritous Retribution. The weapon discharged, sending a thick electric-blue beam out at near-lightspeed to connect with the Covenant Assault Carrier. The shields that could withstand volleys from entire human fleets failed in milliseconds and the ravenous beam tore into the carrier’s aft, burning through engines, reactors, weapon mounts, hangers and a good portion of the crew in the blink of an eye.
Then came the inevitable; the Assault Carrier, the second-most feared warship to the UNSC, shattered into thousands of tiny fragments, many of which spattered harmlessly off the shields of nearby ships in a shower of sparks. This hail of small debris and radiation also all but annihilated the waves of fighters and dropships that had only barely cleared the hanger bays. The Fleet of Sanguine Resolve had just lost both its leader and its most powerful combat asset in a single shot. This sowed fear, confusion and disarray among the remaining Shipmasters, forcing them to quickly decide among themselves which was the senior and would assume command. It was a discussion that would take minutes, minutes the Sanghelli fleet simply did not have.
From the forward section of the Forerunner Keyship came another deadly beam, this one a vivid green. It was a massive hardlight beam cannon, a weapon that was larger than most UNSC warships and one that was designed with the specific purpose of overwhelming and destroying other Forerunner vessels that were under the control of the Flood or the Traitor. Against Covenant technology, which despite being derived from the Forerunners was still inferior, it had a truly devastating effect.
The beam struck the CCS battlecruiser Legacy of the Hierarchs, carving through shields, armour and internal systems in moments. The ship was cut in half amidships, cleanly and almost surgically. The two halves began drifting apart even as the main sublight engines automatically shut down once the control conduits were severed. The ship was dead, the two halves adrift and powerless, the surviving crew unable to do anything to prevent the inevitable.
A similar fate befell the second battlecruiser Charity’s Shield as the mighty HMS Dreadnought brought her guns to bear for the first time. The heavy plasma beam cannons sent a quartet of bright blue beams out to slam into the shields, followed by a quartet of smaller beams and eight heavy coilgun slugs from the forward secondary mounts. The shields collapsed quickly, exposing the aft section to a heavy punishment as the five-tonne slugs tore gaping wounds in the engineering sections.
Even as the Assault carrier and other battlecruiser had been dying the rest of the new arrivals swung into action. The four Tau’ri battlecruisers charged in at full thrust, their own plasma beams reaching out to carve even more sections out of the beleaguered Charity’s Shield. The ship was already crippled and the damage just mounted and mounted as the deadly Asgard weapons flashed out again and again.
Two 304’s, the RFS Gagarin and the USS Icarus turned sharply away towards the third battlecruiser, the Legendary Valour. They had a more insidious task than mere destruction. Working from detailed internal sensor scans of the huge Covenant vessel taken hours earlier by a cloaked spy drone, they began beaming small explosive charges to key positions within the ship, charges that simultaneously detonated: severing all of the primary power conduits leading from the plasma reactors to the engines, slipspace drive, shields and weapons. Other charges wrecked the control links as well, preventing any kind of self-destruct. A final charge exploded within the command centre, killing all of the occupants and leaving the ship leaderless. The disabled ship would be left for the moment, a potential goldmine of technology and information, until the other Covenant ships were destroyed and Legendary Valour could be boarded in relative safety.
Throughout all the this – the summary annihilation via superlaser of the Alacritous Retribution, the bisection of the Legacy of the Hierarchs by hardlight bean cannon, the systematic evisceration of the Charity’s Shield by plasma beams and coilgun rounds and the disabling of Legendary Valour – the UNSC fleet had not been ideal. The Covenant force was just within effective range of the MACs and a single staggered volley thundered forth from the guns, carefully controlled and targeting the lighter, unengaged frigates and destroyers, while their new allies did everything they promised in gutting the heavy elements. The MAC volley arrived just as the Charity’s Shield finally succumbed to the rapid-fire assault and exploded into debris.
The heavy projectiles slammed into Covenant shields with crushing force – 63 heavy rounds finding only twenty-one targets, each frigate or destroyer taking three rounds in rapid succession. In a handful of cases the shots were very slightly off target and the first heavy round caromed off the shields and out into space, the incredible velocity reduced but not spent. Those handful of cases would be the only survivors past the opening strike.
The rest of the frigates and destroyers died as quickly as the earlier vessels targeted by Iroquois – frigates were torn in half, destroyers were gutted bow-to-stern, engines and reactors exploded in sympathy, breached plasma lines burned away entire sections of the surrounding ship. Everywhere there was carnage and devastation. In a total reversal of typical casualty ratios, the UNSC’s opening salvo had claimed seventeen kills from twenty-one targets.
The four survivors, three frigates and a destroyer, were still in dire straits and would not outlive their destroyed comrades for very long. All four ships had shields that were weakened massively by the single hits they had taken and all four Shipmasters began desperately trying to evade, to run, to retreat to slipspace so they could warn the Hierarchs of these devastating new arrivals. In their haste to escape they fatally overlooked Admiral Cole and the Everest.
At Cole’s order and with Hilary’s expert marksmanship, fifteen of the new superdense plasma rounds flew unerringly towards the handful of Covenant survivors. The frigates received three shots each, the destroyer took six hits. The already-drained shields collapsed with the first hit while the rest tore gaping and mortal wounds in the hulls and skeletons of the frigates.
The single destroyer went down even more dramatically. Five plasma bolts struck the now unshielded starboard hull and detonated, completely obscuring the ship for a moment in the flare of the fusion detonations. When the glare faded, everything starboard of the ship’s centreline was just gone. From the centreline out to the port hull the damage got progressively less and less dramatic – the port hull armour was in fact completely intact, there was simply nothing left of value for the armour to protect. It looked as if the ship had been cut in half and then melted from within, which is a fairly accurate description of what occurred.
The entire engagement was the most one-sided battle of the entire war and uniquely it was the humans would were victorious. The Covenant hadn’t even managed to fire at the human ships, never mind actually score a hit. An entire Covenant Fleet annihilated in the space of five minutes, a feat only equalled by the infamous battle at Psi Serpentis, also known as Preston Cole’s Last Stand. That Admiral Cole himself was back and had a hand in this even more decisive battle would go a very long way towards eventually convincing UNSC High Command that the legend’s entire crazy story was in fact truth.
As the crews began to relax from the adrenaline rush of combat and the UNSC personnel started to embrace the euphoria of a decisive victory, another thing that would help convince High Command was taking place. The Legendary Valour was the sole intact Covenant ship and was being circled by the 304’s, the scene eerily similar to vultures circling a carcass. There was a lot else going on behind the scenes as various forms of stun weapons were being beamed into occupied compartments. With a mix of multiple unknown species it was difficult to determine which, if any, of the various Alliance non-lethal weapons would be effective. So a trial-and-error method was being used with mixed results so far. While this was happening the huge mass of the Warstar Nemesis had moved close enough that her own beaming systems could go to work.
Throughout the length and breadth of the Covenant battlecruiser, platoons of Terran Marines in full microgravity- and vacuum-rated armoured combat suits were being beamed in, their own plasma rifles and carbines armed and ready. The Covenant ship was the same size as the Battlestar Warspite, so in order to complete the seizure of the ship as quickly as possible the entire First Marine Division was being deployed en masse, flooding the Covenant decks with armoured, highly-disciplined and well-armed troops. The effect was immediate and decisive.
Despite this being a massive boarding action the Terran troops’ weapons were set exclusively to stun. Any particularly large and resistant Covenant forces, such as the Megalekgolo pair that had been guarding the now-wrecked command chamber or the battle-hardened Sanghelli squad who were trying to reach and overload the reactors were simply beamed straight into prepared and shielded holding cells on the Nemesis, minus their weapons. The assorted Unggoy, Kig-Yar and the isolated Sanghelli were brought down in a hail of stun rounds and then secured.
In just twenty minutes the entire Covenant crew had been captured and the UNSC would soon have their own CCS class battlecruiser, mostly intact, to dissect and study to their heart’s content. As gifts went it was extremely generous. Between that and the material and technological help from their new allies and the resurrected Preston Cole, the UNSC crews and commanders present felt something that had been largely unknown for years: a genuine hope that they could actually hold the line, maybe even take the offensive. The war that had been heading for an inevitable defeat in as little as six months (according to the most optimistic ONI analysts) had reached a turning point; the Covenant victory was no longer inevitable and the UNSC now had a chance for more than mere survival.
They had a chance to win. And they would seize it with both hands.
======================
Boom baby.
Now, before anyone says anything, I will repeat the comments I made in Book I when Task Force Nemesis first engaged the Wraith over Atlantis. Yes, this was a one-sided massacre, but it was intended to be. A comparatively small Covenant force that was ambushed and attacked from three sides, massively outgunned and with its strongest ship and commander obliterated in the opening shot. Also consider that the Covenant commanders were also deeply shocked by the presence of the Keyship - I imagine it would be a similar effect to, oh, Jesus appearing in the middle of the First Crusade and starting to blow away Knights with a shotgun. God just turned up and opened fire on them. It cannot be overstated just how mind-blwoing that would be.
Defying Fate
Covenant Assault Carrier Alacritous Retribution, Fleet of Sanguine Resolve
Approaching Sigma Octanus IV
Six Hours Later (July 17th, 2552, (Military Calendar)/Ninth Age of Reclamation (Covenant Date))
Sanguine Resolve was a comparatively small Fleet compared to the rest of the Covenant armada. A mere twenty-nine ships, almost exclusively frigates and destroyers with just one Assault Carrier, certainly other Fleets were much more numerous even if most did not possess one of the rare but mighty Supercarriers. Nevertheless Sanguine Resolve had a high reputation for valour and victory and they were often used by the Hierarchs as a specialist trouble-shooting force.
In this case, the Hierarchs had dispatched them to an out-of-the-way world that was not believed to be occupied by the accursed humans except perhaps in a very minor capacity – certainly it would not be defended strongly enough to overwhelm this specialist fleet. They were here to recover an artefact of the Gods that was believed to point the way to one of the legendary Halo Rings, which needed to be found before the Great Journey could begin.
In the command centre of the flagship Alacritous Retribution – which in direct contrast to human designs was buried deep inside the hull and out of reach of their weapons unless the entire ship was destroyed – stood Fleetmaster Ftek Nasanee, a towering Sanghelli warrior clad in the golden armour appropriate to his rank. This would be the first time in many years he and his force had engaged humans, they had spent the last decade dealing with minor insurrections among the Ungggoy and Kig-Yar, acting quickly and brutally to prevent the taint from spreading. They had even had to deal with a renegade Jiralhane battlecruiser when the Shipmaster had gone feral and turned on their superiors.
Despite this lack of experience, Nasanee was supremely confident they would triumph – or rather, he had been supremely confident until they had lost contact with his advance force of the Fleet’s secondary carrier, a destroyer and two frigates. That small group had been sent out ahead for two purposes; to confirm from orbital scans that the Artefact was indeed present (and where it was located) and to draw out any human ships that might be lurking.
It would seem the advance force had succeeded at the second goal a little too much. The carrier had reported a single human attack vessel in orbit, and another two had shortly arrived in the outer system. The ship in orbit had engaged and somehow eliminated the light escort ships, to the astonishment of not only the carrier’s commander but Nasanee as well. The smaller carrier had been aiming to deploy a wave of ground troops and then pull back, knowing that the presence of Covenant troops on the planet would occupy the humans until the rest of the Fleet could arrive and secure the orbital space.
Then they had lost contact completely and had not been able to re-establish it since. Nasanee could only assume the humans had a large fleet in orbit, one that had been able to attack and quickly overwhelm the other carrier. Overwhelming numbers was the only way humans had ever managed to defeat the Covenant in space engagements, which meant that had to be the case here.
Thus Nasanee had ordered all his ships to full alert as soon as they reverted to realspace in the outer system. The long-range sensors had indeed shown numerous human ships in orbit, although they were too far away to determine exact numbers and type. Nasanee had known the humans would have detected their arrival and decided on a cunning plot to exploit human weaknesses.
He knew they were safe here in the outer system – human slipspace drives were simply not accurate enough to travel such a short distance to hit his Fleet away from the planet. So his ships waited patiently, in full view of the humans while they carefully prepared their plans, knowing that the humans, with their inferior physiology, would be growing tired from the constant state of readiness they had to maintain while Nasanee’s ships were visible.
Now his plan was ready and they would attack. A precision slipspace jump would bring the Fleet into position, not to engage the human defenders but to deploy troops to the surface. Every available dropship on the Assault Carrier and her three battlecruiser escorts were loaded with ground forces and would launch in one massive wave towards the Artefact’s location. The ships meanwhile would launch a massive plasma salvo at the human fleet. The range would be long enough that some human ships would undoubtedly be able to evade the searing fire, but their formation would be broken, their crews distracted. He could then decide to press the engagement or make a withdrawal, returning later on to finish the humans.
It was a good plan, he judged, one that he expected would work. He had modified it slightly to also launch every available fighter from the Alacritous Retribution’s sizeable hangers, knowing that even the smaller plasma torpedoes and pulse lasers the fighters carried would be enough to hurt humans ships en masse, especially after being weakened by the huge plasma salvo from his combat ships.
And so the moment came. The slipspace drives pulsed and the Fleet raced forwards to emerge a few seconds later in orbit over the planet. He called for a report on the exact composition of the human forces, now that they were close enough to determine them. The Minor Sanghelli who oversaw the various sensors turned to the Fleetmaster, not flinching at all despite the disparity in rank.
“Fleetmaster, the human force contains forty-eight combat vessels. 31 Attack Vessel Class A-2, 14 Class B-1, one Class C-2, and one each of Carrier Vessels Class A-3 and A-4. There is also a large unknown vessel above the human formation which I believe to be a support vessel; it does carry any offensive weapons that I can detect. The human formation is now reorienting themselves to face us.”
Nasanee nodded. The numbers were higher than expected but hardly insurmountable. The turn towards him was also expected. “Launch all dropships and fighters, all ships to engage the humans with plasma torpedoes as planned.” The crew went to work and the assorted ship’s sides began to glow as the lateral plasma lines prepared to fire while the hanger bays spewed thousands of fighters and hundreds of drop ships.
It was at this exact moment that Fleetmaster Ftek Nasanee’s plan came undone.
Out in space, on the far side of the Fleet of Sanguine Resolve from the human formation, thirteen Kobolian warships flashed into existence. From a third direction, towards the planet, appeared another six ships seemingly from nowhere. This caused considerable consternation for the various Shipmasters as their sensor operators all reported the same astonishing fact.
That among the group between them and the planet was the massive shape of a Forerunner Dreadnought, just like the one that sat at the heart of High Charity.
Aboard the Alacritous Retribution, Nasanee could only stare at the external camera image in utter disbelief. A Dreadnought, here? Apparently siding with the humans and not the Covenant? It was unthinkable. Nasanee could have continued down that mental road for minutes at least had not the sensor operator all but bellowed at him to draw his attention to the other group of new arrivals, the ones behind them.
The camera feed switched to show those other ships. They were big, even the smallest eight vessels were twice the size of the lighter human attack vessels while the largest was bigger even than the carrier he had sent as his advance force. At the bow of that huge new ship was a claw-like structure. At the centre of those claws a brilliant blue glow could be seen. This was the last thing that Fleetmaster Ftek Nasanee ever saw.
The Warstar Nemesis had jumped into position with her superlaser armed and ready, only needing a few minor bursts from the manoeuvring thrusters to align it with the Alacritous Retribution. The weapon discharged, sending a thick electric-blue beam out at near-lightspeed to connect with the Covenant Assault Carrier. The shields that could withstand volleys from entire human fleets failed in milliseconds and the ravenous beam tore into the carrier’s aft, burning through engines, reactors, weapon mounts, hangers and a good portion of the crew in the blink of an eye.
Then came the inevitable; the Assault Carrier, the second-most feared warship to the UNSC, shattered into thousands of tiny fragments, many of which spattered harmlessly off the shields of nearby ships in a shower of sparks. This hail of small debris and radiation also all but annihilated the waves of fighters and dropships that had only barely cleared the hanger bays. The Fleet of Sanguine Resolve had just lost both its leader and its most powerful combat asset in a single shot. This sowed fear, confusion and disarray among the remaining Shipmasters, forcing them to quickly decide among themselves which was the senior and would assume command. It was a discussion that would take minutes, minutes the Sanghelli fleet simply did not have.
From the forward section of the Forerunner Keyship came another deadly beam, this one a vivid green. It was a massive hardlight beam cannon, a weapon that was larger than most UNSC warships and one that was designed with the specific purpose of overwhelming and destroying other Forerunner vessels that were under the control of the Flood or the Traitor. Against Covenant technology, which despite being derived from the Forerunners was still inferior, it had a truly devastating effect.
The beam struck the CCS battlecruiser Legacy of the Hierarchs, carving through shields, armour and internal systems in moments. The ship was cut in half amidships, cleanly and almost surgically. The two halves began drifting apart even as the main sublight engines automatically shut down once the control conduits were severed. The ship was dead, the two halves adrift and powerless, the surviving crew unable to do anything to prevent the inevitable.
A similar fate befell the second battlecruiser Charity’s Shield as the mighty HMS Dreadnought brought her guns to bear for the first time. The heavy plasma beam cannons sent a quartet of bright blue beams out to slam into the shields, followed by a quartet of smaller beams and eight heavy coilgun slugs from the forward secondary mounts. The shields collapsed quickly, exposing the aft section to a heavy punishment as the five-tonne slugs tore gaping wounds in the engineering sections.
Even as the Assault carrier and other battlecruiser had been dying the rest of the new arrivals swung into action. The four Tau’ri battlecruisers charged in at full thrust, their own plasma beams reaching out to carve even more sections out of the beleaguered Charity’s Shield. The ship was already crippled and the damage just mounted and mounted as the deadly Asgard weapons flashed out again and again.
Two 304’s, the RFS Gagarin and the USS Icarus turned sharply away towards the third battlecruiser, the Legendary Valour. They had a more insidious task than mere destruction. Working from detailed internal sensor scans of the huge Covenant vessel taken hours earlier by a cloaked spy drone, they began beaming small explosive charges to key positions within the ship, charges that simultaneously detonated: severing all of the primary power conduits leading from the plasma reactors to the engines, slipspace drive, shields and weapons. Other charges wrecked the control links as well, preventing any kind of self-destruct. A final charge exploded within the command centre, killing all of the occupants and leaving the ship leaderless. The disabled ship would be left for the moment, a potential goldmine of technology and information, until the other Covenant ships were destroyed and Legendary Valour could be boarded in relative safety.
Throughout all the this – the summary annihilation via superlaser of the Alacritous Retribution, the bisection of the Legacy of the Hierarchs by hardlight bean cannon, the systematic evisceration of the Charity’s Shield by plasma beams and coilgun rounds and the disabling of Legendary Valour – the UNSC fleet had not been ideal. The Covenant force was just within effective range of the MACs and a single staggered volley thundered forth from the guns, carefully controlled and targeting the lighter, unengaged frigates and destroyers, while their new allies did everything they promised in gutting the heavy elements. The MAC volley arrived just as the Charity’s Shield finally succumbed to the rapid-fire assault and exploded into debris.
The heavy projectiles slammed into Covenant shields with crushing force – 63 heavy rounds finding only twenty-one targets, each frigate or destroyer taking three rounds in rapid succession. In a handful of cases the shots were very slightly off target and the first heavy round caromed off the shields and out into space, the incredible velocity reduced but not spent. Those handful of cases would be the only survivors past the opening strike.
The rest of the frigates and destroyers died as quickly as the earlier vessels targeted by Iroquois – frigates were torn in half, destroyers were gutted bow-to-stern, engines and reactors exploded in sympathy, breached plasma lines burned away entire sections of the surrounding ship. Everywhere there was carnage and devastation. In a total reversal of typical casualty ratios, the UNSC’s opening salvo had claimed seventeen kills from twenty-one targets.
The four survivors, three frigates and a destroyer, were still in dire straits and would not outlive their destroyed comrades for very long. All four ships had shields that were weakened massively by the single hits they had taken and all four Shipmasters began desperately trying to evade, to run, to retreat to slipspace so they could warn the Hierarchs of these devastating new arrivals. In their haste to escape they fatally overlooked Admiral Cole and the Everest.
At Cole’s order and with Hilary’s expert marksmanship, fifteen of the new superdense plasma rounds flew unerringly towards the handful of Covenant survivors. The frigates received three shots each, the destroyer took six hits. The already-drained shields collapsed with the first hit while the rest tore gaping and mortal wounds in the hulls and skeletons of the frigates.
The single destroyer went down even more dramatically. Five plasma bolts struck the now unshielded starboard hull and detonated, completely obscuring the ship for a moment in the flare of the fusion detonations. When the glare faded, everything starboard of the ship’s centreline was just gone. From the centreline out to the port hull the damage got progressively less and less dramatic – the port hull armour was in fact completely intact, there was simply nothing left of value for the armour to protect. It looked as if the ship had been cut in half and then melted from within, which is a fairly accurate description of what occurred.
The entire engagement was the most one-sided battle of the entire war and uniquely it was the humans would were victorious. The Covenant hadn’t even managed to fire at the human ships, never mind actually score a hit. An entire Covenant Fleet annihilated in the space of five minutes, a feat only equalled by the infamous battle at Psi Serpentis, also known as Preston Cole’s Last Stand. That Admiral Cole himself was back and had a hand in this even more decisive battle would go a very long way towards eventually convincing UNSC High Command that the legend’s entire crazy story was in fact truth.
As the crews began to relax from the adrenaline rush of combat and the UNSC personnel started to embrace the euphoria of a decisive victory, another thing that would help convince High Command was taking place. The Legendary Valour was the sole intact Covenant ship and was being circled by the 304’s, the scene eerily similar to vultures circling a carcass. There was a lot else going on behind the scenes as various forms of stun weapons were being beamed into occupied compartments. With a mix of multiple unknown species it was difficult to determine which, if any, of the various Alliance non-lethal weapons would be effective. So a trial-and-error method was being used with mixed results so far. While this was happening the huge mass of the Warstar Nemesis had moved close enough that her own beaming systems could go to work.
Throughout the length and breadth of the Covenant battlecruiser, platoons of Terran Marines in full microgravity- and vacuum-rated armoured combat suits were being beamed in, their own plasma rifles and carbines armed and ready. The Covenant ship was the same size as the Battlestar Warspite, so in order to complete the seizure of the ship as quickly as possible the entire First Marine Division was being deployed en masse, flooding the Covenant decks with armoured, highly-disciplined and well-armed troops. The effect was immediate and decisive.
Despite this being a massive boarding action the Terran troops’ weapons were set exclusively to stun. Any particularly large and resistant Covenant forces, such as the Megalekgolo pair that had been guarding the now-wrecked command chamber or the battle-hardened Sanghelli squad who were trying to reach and overload the reactors were simply beamed straight into prepared and shielded holding cells on the Nemesis, minus their weapons. The assorted Unggoy, Kig-Yar and the isolated Sanghelli were brought down in a hail of stun rounds and then secured.
In just twenty minutes the entire Covenant crew had been captured and the UNSC would soon have their own CCS class battlecruiser, mostly intact, to dissect and study to their heart’s content. As gifts went it was extremely generous. Between that and the material and technological help from their new allies and the resurrected Preston Cole, the UNSC crews and commanders present felt something that had been largely unknown for years: a genuine hope that they could actually hold the line, maybe even take the offensive. The war that had been heading for an inevitable defeat in as little as six months (according to the most optimistic ONI analysts) had reached a turning point; the Covenant victory was no longer inevitable and the UNSC now had a chance for more than mere survival.
They had a chance to win. And they would seize it with both hands.
======================
Boom baby.
Now, before anyone says anything, I will repeat the comments I made in Book I when Task Force Nemesis first engaged the Wraith over Atlantis. Yes, this was a one-sided massacre, but it was intended to be. A comparatively small Covenant force that was ambushed and attacked from three sides, massively outgunned and with its strongest ship and commander obliterated in the opening shot. Also consider that the Covenant commanders were also deeply shocked by the presence of the Keyship - I imagine it would be a similar effect to, oh, Jesus appearing in the middle of the First Crusade and starting to blow away Knights with a shotgun. God just turned up and opened fire on them. It cannot be overstated just how mind-blwoing that would be.