A/N:

Welcome, welcome, welcome one and all!

Let me get to the part you want to hear first: Release schedule.
In a perfect world, I want to get one chapter out a week, but bare minimum will be one a month. I've got basically the whole story planned out, three chapters already written, and close to two dozen outlined, and that's about half of the story.

Cool?
Cool.

Next: This is the 'finale', of sorts, of what I've come to call The Prequel Wars. This'll be the last story set before the Reaper Saga and will be what brings us as close to 'canon' as this series will ever be. There will be twists and turns, things will be tied up and left wide open, ideas will be brought up and dropped, fun will be had, and as always, this Warverse, this grand experiment serves a grander (one could say 'originaler' were it a word) goal, one I hope to make strides toward pretty soon, and its entire point is for me to improve and entertain, so please don't hold back.

Third: It's a pipe dream at the moment, one I think I mentioned a while back, but I intend (at some point) to update, remaster and reimagine The First War. Update it to keep the plot I have carved out after it was first published, rewrite it with all the lessons I've learned since then, and reimagine some of the goings-on in the story. Tiny details, bit battles, the whole nine yards, with the eventual goal of pushing it to another website (I'm thinking Spacebattles?) to expand its reach and get some more chances to improve in general.

Buuuuut that may not be for awhile, I'm still working out exactly how I would go about it, as I don't want to outright replace what I once wrote, as I think its mere existence serves as a good metric for how far I've come since I first started this beast, back when I was fourteen/fifteen.

Well, that's all for now, folks.

So, without further ado:

We're off!

Chapter 1

"All wars are Civil Wars, because all men are brothers."

— Francois Fenelon

Formed in the decades leading up to humankind's first foray outside of their home solar system, the Human Systems Alliance had been envisioned as a governing organization meant embody all of the best of humanity. Separated from the squabbling nations that made and still make up the UN, the word often used to describe the Alliance had been 'better'. 'Better' than the UN, 'better' than any one country, 'better' than the mistakes of the past; if there was ever truly one objectively 'good' government in all of human history, it was meant to be the Alliance, and for a time, it had been good. While the young Alliance struggled under the chafing control of the Earth, in the first decades it had existed, it managed to spread humans all across the solar system, and use the paltry funds and resources the UN granted and its colonies generated to field its military and eventually even break not just the surly bonds of Earth, but to - for the first time - leave the direct light of Sol. For nearly seventy years there was nothing but peace, prosperity, and advancement for the human race. Beyond minor jabs and jokes by Earth, no one truly questioned the Alliance until First Contact, and the war that followed. Suddenly, in the year 2201, not only was mankind faced with the knowledge that it wasn't alone in the universe, but the Alliance was given its first true test of mettle.

In the eyes of many, they failed this test.

When Earth was invaded by the turians, as ready as they had been to fight, no one on either side was truly prepared for all the things that went wrong to set the stage for everything that would come after. No amount of swift action from the Alliance had been able to avoid it, and as a result, faith in the Alliance was shaken in the one place it could least afford to have it. As many believed, the Alliance existed to defend humanity - and Earth above all. It was, after all, the homeworld, its sacred status was perhaps the one thing shared by any and all humans to ever live and to have ever lived, and by allowing the Hierarchy to land troops and siege their shores, the Alliance had failed in their duty to protect it. Ever since this failure, tensions had begun to rise between it and the United Nations, and they never stopped. The Alliance could do no right in the eyes of Earth and the UN, the latter of whom, rapidly beginning to realize how little control over the Alliance they would have in the coming years, kowtowed to human nature and grew fearful of losing said control.

Nothing the Alliance did helped the ever-escalating situation, and in many cases made it worse. Refusing to join the same interstellar coalition of species that had been gearing up for full-scale war against them made many view the Alliance as too isolationist and fearful for its own good. An explosive growth in territory made the governments of Earth fear the growing disparity between Earth's economic status and the Alliance's. The functionally instantaneous and universal admission of the quarians into the Alliance was reviled by just as many as it was loved, due to its direct influence over the war it spawned with the turians. The brushfire wars with so many Hegemony-sponsored mercenary corporations, the two wars with the batarian hegemony after that, the annexation of most of their territory, and the absorption of any and all slaves off of the conquered worlds had been criticized the galaxy over as an effort doomed to fail and burn incredible amounts of time, funds, and resources that could be better spent anywhere else.

But, while their actions contributed to a nearly endless rise in tensions, nothing but a true spark could light the powder keg that the Systems Alliance had become.

This spark came in the form of Hannah Shepard, former Captain in the Navy, turned defector, and vengeful mother. Her child had been abducted from his home while she had been away on a naval deployment, and while that alone was detestable, the true horror came from the fact that his abduction, and six hundred and eleven others just like it, were all government sanctioned. The intent behind them being to create the next generation to the Alliance's nigh-unstoppable program of bio-mechanically augmented super soldiers, under the belief that, like the Spartans of old, training a child up in the ways of war would create a warrior completely unparalleled. To make matters even worse, the children weren't raised as if they were in some sort of military school, but rather as if they, none older than seven when they had been 'recruited', were full-fledged soldiers. Endless drills, physical training even veteran special forces would have trouble with, the children were pushed so hard that by the time they were ready for their first round of augmentations, they could perform on the levels of Olympic athletes.

One way the Alliance had attempted to justify the program had been that all of the children were orphans, typically of war, and were merely being given chances to serve a higher purpose. However, one of these children was not the case - that being John S2-15, who had once had the surname of 'Shepard'. The son of the still living Hannah, he had been abducted due in part to his profound genetics and his biotic potential. When she discovered this, her defection, and subsequent whistleblow, had been almost instantaneous. She ran to the Citadel and would tell everyone who would listen of the evils of the Alliance. She became a household name the galaxy over, overnight, to the point where even the lawless Omega, so far removed from galactic politics, knew of what was happening.

The first day after Hannah Shepard had blown the proverbial whistle, all of human space held its breath, the less vocal of the Alliance's supporters and detractors both fearing and wondering just which planet would be the first to erupt into full-scale riots. Already a deadly powder keg ready to blow for years, Hannah Shepard's revelations was undoubtedly the spark it needed to go off. Truly, the only thing left to do was to watch to see where the powder trail ended first.

As many predicted, Earth was the first to go up. Aside from former Hegemony space, Earth was perhaps the only force in all of the Alliance that could stand up to it. Considering the Alliance's checkered history with the UN, and Earth's people - constantly trying to break away from its influence and generally being seen as having failed to protect them during the Second Contact war, respectively - Earth was, perhaps ironically, the most anti-Alliance state this side of Palaven.

As with many things, it all began with the tiniest of offenses: A single Korean store owner hanging up a sign in his bakery, refusing to serve anyone in an Alliance uniform. A retired Marine happened across it, and raised a fuss with the owner, attracting the attention of other customers, few of which were anything approaching pro-Alliance. The fight that inevitably broke out left several hospitalized, and the Marine dead, and from there it only escalated, with riots breaking out across the entire planet. Angry mobs formed enormous militias that stormed local Alliance embassies, and since local federal forces, be they anti-Alliance who were conveniently slow to react, or pro-Alliance who had too little numbers to make any major difference, couldn't stem the tide, dozens of embassies burned to the ground in the ensuing chaos, leaving only the biggest ones and the former Alliance capital building in Vancouver.

Order was eventually restored - but only after Alliance Military Police were deployed to defuse the situations by force. It took nearly seven entire days for the riots and the fires to be put out, and for arrests to be made. Worse was that some local police forces actually worked against the Alliance, instead of alongside them, resulting in open skirmishes that left many dead and injured on both sides.

Unfortunately, Earth was only the beginning. Its riots prompted others elsewhere, and many predominantly human colonies, in the Sol System and out, erupted into chaos, raging at both Hannah Shepard's revelations and now the Alliance's handling of the situations on Earth. Anything the people could be mad at, soon became a rallying cry behind a riot. Unfortunately for them, many of these colonies were firmly under Alliance control, meaning that unlike on Earth, the Alliance could declare and enforce martial law, resulting in riots being swiftly put down and entire planets being locked down until the situation was de-escalated.

Worse, was that it wasn't only the humans that were affected by Earth's steadily increasing chaos. The shockwaves were spreading out everywhere, fracturing the Alliance in more ways than the obvious: The quarians, still shocked by the geth's sudden reappearance and subsequent admission into the Alliance, were also riding high on the idea of being able to reclaim their homeworld without even a spilling single drop of blood. While many may not harbor anything even approaching 'trust' for the geth, anti-AI sentiments had cooled significantly through exposure to the Alliance's SynthHumans, and fear of the geth had similarly slid away with the understanding that, in a pitched fight, the Alliance would win out - especially if, as many predicted, the Citadel joined the fight for fear of what an uncontained geth threat would entail. With their fears either put to rest or rationalized, almost universally the quarians began to abandon the inner Alliance colonies and make haste for the Perseus Veil, the Alliance's newfound island-like 'spike' into the Terminus Systems. More of them considered the entire brewing conflict to be more of a human affair than it was theirs: The peace with the geth and their repossession of Rannoch took precedence over the UN and the Alliance's long-overdue conflict. The only thing they felt linking them to this conflict was the Quarian servicemen in the Alliance's military.

Even the Alliance's population of AI, be they SynthHuman or geth, were affected by the exponentially increasing tensions. The geth set the precedent for all non-organics in the Alliance by declaring stark neutrality in the whole ordeal: The consensus reflecting the quarian belief that this was a human issue, and as a result had to be dealt with and solved by humans themselves. When asked to donate their military resources to assist in any military operations - be they riot suppression or, should the need arise, more open warfare - their condition was that they would only do so to replace lost ships and personnel for border patrols, not operations against other humans in the pursuit of this rapidly escalating conflict. On the other synthetic hand, the SynthHumans were starkly for intervening in the growing tensions, and to provide as many unmanned resources as were physically possible, to minimize the casualties to their organic creators, potentially leave as much infrastructure intact as they could, and end the approaching conflict as soon as possible. This was, after all, the Alliance fighting itself. All would suffer, doubly so if they destroyed themselves.

And beyond the direct reach of the Alliance was the the former territory of the Batarian Hegemony, half of which was now annexed and firmly under Alliance occupation following their wars. Many forces still loyal to the Hegemony took this opportunity of weakness as a means to launch numerous insurrectionist movements and terrorist attacks, whereas forces who had once resisted the Hegemony in response rebelled against these loyalists, leading to clashes all across former-Hegemony space that required more Alliance resources in order to be pacified.

With this pattern prevailing all across the Alliance's zone of influence, it was rapidly becoming clear that few, if any, planets could truly rebel on their own. None of them save Saltor were even remotely militarized enough to be able to put forth any kind of formidable resistance, and that planet and its denizens were largely out of the equation by sheer virtue of the fact that it hadn't even been half a year since their unintentional entrance into galactic society. Any planet that tried to rebel, or any group that tried to incite massive riots, were swiftly put down by the overwhelming might of their government. Not a single colony could truly put up any resistance, and that left only one planet that was not, and never could be, even called a colony.

Thus, as it was, the eyes of the Alliance, and indeed entire galaxy, soon turned to Earth, as more riots broke out and were contained, be it by sympathetic or apathetic local police, or Alliance forces, whose mere presence only furtherly fueled the fire. The words of the United Nations would dictate not just the fate of the growing tensions, but also that of perhaps the entire extrasolar government. Would it be peace, or would it be war?

The Sol System was where it would begin, and where it would be decided: If Earth could successfully rebel, then that meant other colonies with deteriorating opinions of the Alliance could as well.

Long before the Systems Alliance had experienced its explosive growth in territory, as a means to relieve the ever escalating tensions between the extrasolar government and its leash-holders on Earth, they had made the concession that for every two ships in the Home Fleet, one would be manned by a crew of UN-backed naval personnel. The end result ended up being that the single largest fleet in the Alliance, was actually only half ran by the Alliance itself. This was partially the reason Sol was capable of fielding such a massive defense fleet in comparison to other systems, with many of the ships and men were made and manned with resources from Earth's myriad nations, the Sol Fleet itself was as big as some Citadel race's entire navies. After all, no matter what tensions existed, more ships meant everyone on the ground felt safe, and even the UN recognized the value in that.

Unfortunately, one of the first orders given to the Home Fleet following the public reveal of Hannah Shepard's defection and of the SIGMA II's had been to raise their alert states to level three, just two steps below open warfare. The Board of Directors, the round table of politicians that lead the extrasolar government, had all but been certain that after this leak that some sort of armed conflict would be imminent, and there was only one planet in the Alliance that had the resources to mount anything even resembling a threatening resistance.

Even if joining up the navy with the intent of serving in a Planetary Defense Fleet was Alliance equivalent to the coast guard, that didn't eliminate the fact that, if other planets decided to rise against them, their defense fleets were manned by Alliance personnel. Any resistance put up by the planets they guarded could quickly be quelled by the superior positioning of the very forces the planets rebelled against. After all, orbital supremacy directly translated to aerial supremacy, which itself guaranteed domination of the ground. It was the same doctrine that had won them the Second Contact War, the Mercenary Wars, and both Batarian Wars.

Earth, however, was different. Unlike so many other planets, half of the fleets surrounding Earth and pervading the rest of the Sol System weren't manned by Alliance forces, and it had on its surface standing armies of tens of millions in the ancient nations. As a result, Earth and the Sol System was perhaps the only one truly capable of posing a direct threat in the event of a war. As such, when Hannah Shepard blew the whistle, all of the Navy ships under the command of the Alliance soon grew weary. Security conditions were raised to their maximum levels capable without open war, crews ran drills daily, the entire solar system was poised on the brink of shooting itself to death, and everyone there knew it.

Worse was that few knew exactly what would happen and when, everything happening was unprecedented. The only interstellar wars ever fought by the Alliance were against enemies whose military technology was literally alien and arguably inferior to their own. No orbital cannons, no ships bigger than a kilometer, no warp drives, no magnetic weapons capable of scarring continents, no stockpiles of WMD's just sitting in the guts of even the smallest vessels. When the attack everyone feared was coming, came, no one knew from where to expect it. Would there be naval strikes? Ship against ship? Would there be crippling shots on the engines, such that the Separatists could take the ships back for themselves and use them to further resist? Would they just try to obliterate the ships with WMD's?

As it turned out, none of these were true. While it may be somewhat true that no one knew from where to expect the attacks, they were at least prepared for them to come from space, the only logical place to launch such an attack and begin such a war. So, obviously, the best place to strike was from the ground.

Specifically, the ground-based installations that controlled the thousands of Orbital Defense Satellites, floating around the Earth. Skyscraper sized cannons capable of shooting several hundred ton magnetic slugs at ten percent the speed of light. With a kinetic energy of nearly sixty thousand megatons of TNT, the only other non-nuclear weapon that could exceed its sheer destructive power was the antimatter weaponry wired into dreadnoughts. There was not a single ship in the known universe that had, or even could, survive a shot from one of these cannons. They were the strongest conventional weapons in the galaxy, and they weren't all bite, either: Not even counting Frigates providing local support, they were all practically plastered with onboard defenses.

Equipped with hundreds of fully automated defensive measures, with everything from AA guns to drones of both an aerial and ground variety, and even capable of detonating their own onboard reactors if they were ever captured, each one was a space station and a veritable fortress unto itself, the only way for an enemy force to reach and begin damaging it was if it had direct support from their naval vessels, but to do so would be to bring them within the ODS' non-Warp firing arc, leaving them all but untouchable.

Except, however, from the ground, where laid the computers that controlled them. While not lax on the defenses by any means, comparing the defenses of the satellite to the defenses of the base was like comparing a nuclear bunker to a medieval castle. Add on the fact that they were all built in remote locations, and a prevailing anti-Alliance opinion raging across the entire planet, the high school-sized facilities may very well have had targets on their backs. While it was true that these ground bases were more of a backup option, should there not be an AI available to personally direct the satellite's fire, that didn't change the result if the installations were to be taken: For a precious few seconds, until any loyalist AI took the satellites back, the power of mankind's strongest conventional weapons could be turned right on the people who had seen fit for decades now, to give mankind a bad name.

So, the UN's solution first was to ensure no such AI could gain access to the installations, such that they would remain firmly, and indisputably, under the UN's control, and that was where their near-universal pull over the Sol System came into play. While some would argue that the first shots of the Systems Alliance Civil War would have been when the ODS satellite's ground bases were taken, the truth was that the war's beginning was heralded when Earth shut off the local Deep Space/Communications satellite, and effectively crippled FTL communications in the Sol System. With civilian communications cut off entirely, and military communications forced to rely on the slower backup options, routed through the Defense Fleet's flagship, the United Nation's best operators had only a handful of minutes to breach the ODS ground bases, kill their way to the control center, hijack the satellites themselves, and use them to obliterate the flagship before the Alliance half of the SDF would catch on to the fact that the DS/C going down wasn't an accident.

Their best estimate had put it at ten minutes from the word 'go', until the Alliance figured out what was going on. Their worst estimate gave them ninety seconds: The exact amount of time it took for an AI to do a full and thorough systems check on both itself and the ship upon which it served. That meant, all else equal, for the worst-case scenario the UN forces had ninety seconds to steal the largest network of the galaxy's strongest conventional weapons, and summarily cripple half of the single largest fleet in the most powerful military fighting force in the history of mankind. If they couldn't, perhaps the entire war would be over before it could properly begin, as the power of the ODS Network simply could not be overstated enough.

The missions had been volunteer only, and not a single person on the shortlist refused the proverbial call. They chose to act twelve minutes after six in the morning, standard Alliance time. The ships would be in the last leg of their shifts, the people working them would be too tired to react quickly, and waking up everyone else when they inevitably geared up for battle would cause a discord among the rudely awakened and the fully exhausted.

When the clock struck, so did they. In one of the most coordinated strikes in modern history, all around the world, they attacked. From the sites hidden in the jungles of the Amazon to the offshore platforms floating about the ocean, from the secret installations in less inhabitable parts of the world to even the few under the water, the best operators the United Nations had to offer stormed the greatest weakness in the Alliance's once thought-to-be ironclad defense. Surprise, stealth, and momentum were their greatest advantages. All of the attacks had two teams, the first would cause as much damage and kill as many people as possible, attracting all of the attention to them while the second would, hidden by their light-bending tactical cloaks, sprint through the bases as fast as they could, to reach the control center. Many would die, on both sides, but if successful, the ends would justify the means: Without the ODS platforms to support the separatist half of the Navy, Earth would have no chance at fighting this war for longer than a week.

One thing commonly seen in Citadel Space was that its various defense fleets were commonly clustered around two places: The planets or space stations they were defending, and the relays through which ships came. One of the primary reasons for this was that, as were they all, their ships and doctrines were designed around their FTL drives. Because their drive cores required frequent ventings in the magnetic fields of a planet, it was incredibly uncommon to see any ships breaking away from their local postings, to the point that 'patrols' typically equated to merely making brief FTL jumps, parking a ship in the orbit of a planet, and while it vented its drive core, scanning the system for anything out of the ordinary. Add on the fact that, all else being equal, the most advanced Citadel ships could only travel twelve light years in a day, and their weapons could hardly even reach a percentage of that, the end result was the iconic 'blockading' tactic, when it came to the various Council species' defense plans: The planet and the relay. As such, it wasn't uncommon to see the various defense fleets in near or outer orbit of the planet they were defending; for a time, it was thought that was the only way to do it.

Then came the Systems Alliance, who had an appropriately alien approach, when compared to their Council cousins.

The Alliance's main strengths came from the fact that they didn't require drive core venting, that they were capable of travelling exponentially more than twelve light years in a day, and that their FTL drives weren't exclusively applicable to their ships. Since human ships essentially tore open portals in spacetime, those same portals could be dropped right in front of their guns, leading to them being capable of using traditional naval tactics, aged, improved, and perfected since the age of the sail: Whichever ship had better range than the other, would inevitably win, and a single Alliance ship could blast a target on the other side of the solar system, with pinpoint accuracy, and split-second timing. Better, or worse, depending on who was asked, was that, with an onboard Warp drive, a ship, or even weapons platform, orbiting the Earth could accurately hit a target in Alpha Centauri with a high level of reliability. The Warp wasn't just fast, it was ludicrously fast.

This incontestable range advantage reflected their defense doctrine: Instead of 'blockading' their various planets and having fleets park out in orbit, the majority of every Alliance defense fleet hovered out on the edges of the solar system, only 'dipping in' for regular patrols, shore leave, emergency situations, or for supply runs. Of course, this didn't mean there weren't ships parked in planetary orbit, only that there weren't nearly as many as other species may have, and the result was that one would be lucky if they saw a naval vessel while descending Earth's atmosphere.

However, there was one glaring flaw in this doctrine, one that the Citadel didn't suffer from nearly as bad. While it was true that, from a tactical sense, Alliance vessels and their defense plans were superior, if only because they could be whole light-minutes out of an enemy's effective range and still able to operate with unimpinged efficiency, they thusly had to rely on their advanced sensory suites, and high-speed local Deep Space/Communications satellites as a means of keeping everything up to date, and all of the ships in the fleet on the same page. Without those FTL comms, they fell back on Flagships, which could perform the same tasks, albeit not as efficiently, due to needing to serve as a naval vessel as well as a communications hub.

To compare a flagship to any other vessel's FTL comms would be like comparing a jet to a rocket; they both would get the job done, and fast, but it was clear who would get it done first. Without a Flagship, or a DS/C, to piggyback their signals and increase their transmission speed, that meant a fleet was effectively in the blind; an AI couldn't even access the cloud without a reliable means of high-speed FTL comms. The fleet would thus either have to send a message 'the slow way' with their own FTL communications suite, which could result in updated orders being anywhere from hours, to even days away; or, perhaps just as dangerous, they would need to send volunteers out to find the closest DS/C and link up to it for updated orders. Truly, without the ability to communicate to the ships stationed inside the solar system, an Alliance defense fleet was blind, deaf, and dumb, and would subsequently be forced to inspect the situation personally.

Which was exactly the situation the Sol Fleet found itself in when, at 6:12 in the morning on an otherwise quaint September day, all fifteen of the Sol System's DS/C satellites failed, and the Icarus Wings, the fleet's flagship, went completely silent. The fleet was practically plunged into the middle of a city, surrounded by people, and was unable to speak or hear, or be spoken to or heard by, any of them.

The only shining light in what was otherwise a very dark situation was that they were all inside the confines of the Sol System. As a result, even without the DS/C or the flagship, communications, while delayed, were still possible, if on the bleeding edge of viable. So, with that knowledge in mind, the Rear Admiral felt it most prudent to send out a scout. One volunteer out of his battle group would warp through the solar system to the Icarus Wings' last known location, and if it was a bad coincidence, it would come back and they could work on fixing the issue; but if it was something more sinister, then there would be problems, and it was in light of the very real potential for these problems, that he decided to break protocol.

Standard doctrine when communications went down was for the fleet to either act on their previous orders if it was an assault situation, or in the case of defense fleets, for the ships in the blind to lock down and stay put. Having ships seemingly go missing simply because they tried to cruise around the solar system trying to figure things out was a surefire way to panic a great deal of people; but, that was under normal circumstances. Now? With Earth trying like mad to set itself on fire and one out of every three planets in the Alliance wanting the Board's heads on a platter? These were not normal circumstances, and added onto the suspect nature of the entire Sol System going dark almost instantaneously, there was some breathing room to break protocol, and for that reason, the Rear Admiral ordered his ship to drift, he wanted to be two light minutes away from his last reported position, just in case something happened, and he sent that same order out to all of the ships closest to him that he knew to be manned by Alliance personnel.

After ten minutes of nothing, the Rear Admiral's apprehension turned to anxiety. Compounded with the ship's AI confirming that it wasn't a problem on their end, nor a problem on any of the other ships within easy communications' distance, his anxiety turned to worry. After fifteen minutes, the distress calls began pouring in, turning his worry to fear.

All across the Sol System, any ships flying Alliance Colors were finding their main thrusters shot out and obliterated by ODS fire, and were fending off boarding attempts while they tried to get any kind of maneuverability back online. Any ships lucky enough to have naturally drifted too far from their last position, or that had had a Captain savvy enough to get the same idea as the Admiral, soon found themselves hounded and under assault by the ships that flew UN colors.

The Icarus Wings, however, hadn't simply been crippled, and there had been no attempts whatsoever to board it. While it was true that Flagships were made from the same materials as Mass Relays, and as such were nigh-indestructible, that in no way meant that their crews were as well. Anything that got shot by a several hundred ton slug moving at ten percent the speed of light got hurt, and got hurt bad. It was why it was such a deadly weapon: Even if, by some miracle, a ship's shields could take the shot without breaking, or the ship's armor was strong enough to take the impact, all of that energy had to go somewhere. To say nothing of the kinetic energy transferring from the outside in upon impact, the heat alone was enough to liquify anyone either not in cryo, or not in an EVA suit, and that was just from one shot.

The Icarus Wings had been enclosed in a 'cage' of Warp exits and shot seventy eight times. There just was no ship left, only streams of molten slag, detritus, and the occasional leftover remnants of a carbon-based lifeform.

This lightning-fast attack would set the tone for the rest of the Sol System's morning. The blitzkrieg was exceptionally well executed, turning what should have been an even split, eight thousand loyalist ships and eight thousand separatist ships, into something closer to three thousand loyalists still in any shape to fight and run, whereas the remaining ships on the Alliance's side were too crippled to run, and were fending off boarding parties on top of that. Worse was that, with the conclusion foregone that the UN would capture and repair the ships they stole, now they didn't only have a fighting force on the ground, they had a full-blown navy to defend their skies.

The Rear Admiral didn't take long to figure out a plan of attack: To do the opposite and retreat. Even if the enemy didn't have a two-to-one numerical advantage on them, they had control over the all of the ODS platforms in the system, and were amped up and fully ready for a counter attack, to boot. The only option that didn't lead to more ships and more men dying was to retreat, and the only way to do that without being hounded endlessly by the UN's navy, was to leave the system entirely. The moment they switched back on the DS/C's, if the loyalist forces were anywhere inside the solar system, they'd be found in an instant; and beyond that, contact had to be reestablished with the Alliance. Going to Arcturus personally, at warp-speed, was the easiest way to get it done as expeditiously as possible.

In less than an hour, the largest fleet of warships in human history had been cut in half, and had one half taken apart again by the same fraction. Earth and the Sol System had gone from the single most heavily defended system in human space, to the most heavily contested, to the first solar system to have ever been conquered by an enemy force and stolen from Alliance control.

The once unbeatable Alliance had just had their decades and wars-long winning streak halted wholesale.

Earth was lost, stolen by the very people they were sworn to protect.

The Alliance Civil War had begun, and the entire galaxy would hinge upon, and dread its outcome.