Ciriban Incident

"Nomotar is the federation's under the treaty. The Maweer fleet is under the federation's protection. The patrol is to withdraw."Rear Admiral Xi Mihau, Battle Squadron Papa, signal to the Legion's Myrum patrol, repeated every four hours from 1800 on 24 July 2333

The Ciriban Incident was the clash at Nomotar on 28 July 2333 between a patrol of the Voor Legion and Battle Squadron Papa of the Unified Solar Navy, and the crisis around it that brought the Voor War. It began when a Maweer trading fleet crossed Voor-held Myrum to reach human Nomotar against the Confederacy's trade ban of 2328. A Legion Tactical Corps patrol followed it into a human system for the first time since 2319. After a three-day approach and a twenty-hour standoff, fire broke out at 1412 on 28 July. Who fired first has never been settled.

The four-hour fight cost the Navy the light cruiser Bactria and 1,900 dead. The patrol lost a heavy cruiser and two destroyers, and withdrew under the fire of Nomotar's three starforts. The Confederacy severed relations on 2 August and declared war on 7 August 2333. It was the first declaration of war humanity had received from anyone but itself.

Some histories call the clash the Nomotar Incident, after the system where it was fought.

Background

The ban

The Voor Confederacy ended human trade through the Gulf in 2328. Its High Command used its veto in the High Council for the eleventh time. The federation kept its Exchange station at Nomotar open on the Chamber's instruction, but no one traded there. The Maweer had traded with the federation through Myrum since a transit right of 2321. They had sent nothing since the ban.

Nomotar

Nomotar was the northern of the three gate systems of War Plan Purple. In July 2333 it held three Bastion-class starforts at its Pillai radius, named Tethers, Manila and Chasma. It also held the Navy's northern station on the third planet's orbital and a strike wing of 120 drones and 40 fighter-bombers based at Tethers.

Battle Squadron Papa of the Binami Fleet had been detached from Cirban in March 2333 to cover the forts. It was commanded by Rear Admiral Xi Mihau, a Luna-born officer of fifty-one who had commanded a Thalanx-class light cruiser in the Gulf patrols of the 2320s. Her flag captain later said she spent the four months at Nomotar rehearsing what then happened.

The Maweer fleet

On 19 July 2333 a Maweer fleet of nine freighters and two escort hulls arrived at Myrum's edge from the Maweer frontier. It was bound for Nomotar under no transit licence the Voor court had issued. The Institute of Xenology had never classified the escorts' type.

The Maweer trade-master later gave the Nomotar station the only explanation the federation ever had, in the shared notation. The transit right of 2321 had been the Council's grant to the Maweer, not to the federation. The ban of 2328 had covered human goods, not Maweer ships. And the Caretakers went where they liked.

The pursuit

The Legion's Myrum patrol met the fleet. It was a Tactical Corps formation of the kind the Navy's pickets had watched run the line for a decade: a light cruiser of the Lorni class, two heavy cruisers of the smaller Kor type, which the Navy called medium cruisers, and three Vur-class destroyers. Its commander's name appears in the record as Drovak Tenn.

On 20 July the patrol stopped the Maweer fleet at Myrum's Pillai radius and ordered it, under the ban, to turn back. The Maweer did not turn back. They charged their coils for four days under the patrol's guns, which did not fire. On 24 July 2333 they jumped for Nomotar.

The patrol followed. Its Tactical Corps charter let it engage without a General's sanction, and the Institute concluded that Tenn took the Maweer transit as an infringement he was charged to prevent. The patrol arrived at Nomotar's edge at 1740 station time on 24 July, forty minutes behind the fleet it was chasing.

The standoff

The patrol outnumbered Papa in hulls and outclassed it in every one. It had six warships of 600 to 1,500 metres, each with a plasma projector and a field. Papa had three cruisers, two frigates and four corvettes, and its largest gun was the Icarus's rail. What Mihau had that Tenn did not was the forts.

Her plan, issued at 1800 on 24 July, was to stay inside them. The squadron fell back from the station toward Tethers and took position 60,000 kilometres inside the three forts' range, with the Maweer fleet behind it. The strike wing launched at 1830 and took station between the squadron and the edge. Every four hours Mihau sent the patrol the same message, in the shared notation and the trade pidgin: Nomotar was the federation's under the treaty, the Maweer fleet was under its protection, and the patrol was to withdraw.

The patrol did not answer. It fell inward at 0.3 g for three days. On 27 July it stopped at 200,000 kilometres, the edge of its projectors' range. The two formations held position for twenty hours. The Institute later read the Voor account to say that Tenn had sent for a sanction on the 25th and was waiting for it. The Navy read its own log to say that Mihau was waiting for him to leave.

Battle, 28 July 2333

The first shot

The Navy's log records, at 1412 on 28 July, a launch from the leading Maweer freighter. It was a single missile on a course that passed 40,000 kilometres from the nearest Voor destroyer and detonated at the end of its run. The Navy's analysts called it a warning shot. The Maweer called it a signal and did not explain its meaning.

The log records, at 1412 and fourteen seconds, a plasma discharge from the Voor light cruiser that struck the Bactria's field. The Voor account records the discharge as the patrol's answer to a human attack, and gives no time.

The record does not say whether the discharge was aimed at the missile, the freighter or the Bactria. It does not say whether it was ordered or was a gunner's answer to a launch, or whether the missile was a warning, a signal or a mistake. The two navies' inquiries, which sat in 2334 and 2341, agreed only that the question could not be settled.

The fields

The patrol closed at 0.3 g and fired as it came. The first ten minutes were the ones Purple's authors had feared. The Maweer-pattern fields on the Bactria, the Thorax and the Icarus held under the projectors, and then failed.

• The Bactria's field failed at 1424. She took two discharges amidships and a Voor missile in the stern, and broke in half at 1431. Of her 2,300 crew, 1,900 died.
• The Thorax's field failed at 1440, and Mihau pulled her back behind the Icarus.
• By 1445 the Icarus's field, the largest in the squadron, was the only one still standing.

The counter-attack

Mihau then did what she had rehearsed. The squadron went in under the Icarus's field at 0.08 g, straight at the patrol, with the strike wing ahead of it. The Voor had never seen strike craft in numbers, and their doctrine had no answer to them. The wing's 160 craft went into the destroyer screen. Field-piercing missiles struck two of the three destroyers in the first pass. One broke up and the other fell out of formation, holed.

While the patrol's projectors engaged the swarm, they engaged the squadron less. The Icarus's rail, at 40,000 kilometres, put six slugs into the leading Kor cruiser's field in eleven minutes and the seventh through it. The cruiser turned away with its projector mount wrecked.

The forts

By 1620 the patrol had followed the squadron 70,000 kilometres inside the forts' envelope. Tethers, Manila and Chasma opened fire with twelve mega drivers, at a range at which no human weapon had engaged a Voor ship before. The second Kor cruiser took three 1,200-millimetre slugs in a minute. It lost its field, then its drive, and in the fourth minute its hull.

Tenn withdrew at 1650. The patrol's four surviving ships fell back toward the edge under the forts' fire, towing the second damaged destroyer. They charged for a day at the Pillai radius while the squadron, with no fields left, watched. They jumped for Myrum on 30 July.

Aftermath

Losses

The federation lost the Bactria, 1,900 dead, 40 strike craft and the fields of every ship in the squadron. The Voor lost a heavy cruiser and two destroyers, one of them towed home, and 4,000 Legionaries, by the Institute's later count. The Maweer fleet lost nothing. It traded at Nomotar for two weeks and left by the route it had come, without the Voor's leave and without incident, and did not return.

The break

On 2 August the Voor ambassador at Circumstance delivered the High Council's protest. The federation's Navy had attacked a Legion patrol in the lawful exercise of the ban and had sheltered a Maweer violation of Voor space, and the Confederacy's relations with the federation were severed. The federation replied the same day. The patrol had entered a human system under the treaty's line, refused to withdraw for four days and fired on a human warship. The federation had acted in defence of its territory and its trade partners. Both statements were true.

Neither side made an offer the other could accept. On the Institute's reading, the High Command had the war it had wanted since 2324. President Elliot O'Neil had not wanted one, but he had a Chamber that voted him the emergency every January, and a Navy built for this that had just been shown to work.

Mobilisation

From 3 to 6 August the pickets reported the Legion's Gulf formations concentrating at Haedus and Swur, twelve hearths in two groups. The Grand Armada went to its war stations: the Binami Fleet at Cirban, the Saolea Fleet at Saolea, and the Home Fleet, on Grand Admiral Tyson Vol's order of 4 August, to Nomotar. The Voor envoy left Circumstance on 5 August. Ambassador Halima Rahal, aged seventy-three, was expelled from Hiverion on the 6th.

The declaration

On 7 August 2333 the High Council, on the High Command's motion, sent the United Nations of Earth a formal declaration of war. A Legion courier delivered it to the Cirban Exchange's human director, and it was read to the Chamber at New Luxor on 20 August, when the courier reached Sol. The Chamber answered the same day by 700 votes to 60.

Significance

The incident settled three questions the Navy had argued over since 2318. The Maweer field held for a first exchange and not a second. The strike swarm worked against an escort screen whose doctrine had no answer to it. And the forts did what Admiral Ruben de Haas had built them to do, which the Navy's Old School had argued for fifteen years and the New School conceded in a day.

It left open the question in the log at 1412. The federation fought a seven-year war on the answer it chose, and has never claimed to know it. The Bactria's dead are named on a memorial at the Nomotar station, unveiled in 2343, and the Navy has not given her name to another ship.

Order of battle

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.4 "The Voor Legion"
2. Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.7 "The Ciriban Incident"
3. Solar Eternal, Fleet Reference: The Grand Armada and the Voor Legion's Gulf Formations (July 2333)