Second Battle of Media

"The ship's command spaces are mine and the ship's fire has stopped."Major General Tomas Achterberg, 108th Rapid Orbital Deployment Division, signal to the Alexander from the Voor Aegis, 1902, 18 May 2334

The Second Battle of Media was fought in the Media system from 14 to 19 May 2334, with a pursuit to 23 May, between the Saolea Fleet of the Grand Armada and the largest single formation the Voor Legion brought together in the Voor War. It was one of the war's bloodiest battles and one of its most decisive. Fleet Admiral Sean Santiago held Media for four days against seven hearths with a fleet that could not win a battle of attrition. On 18 May the Voor flagship, the hearth the Navy called the Voor Aegis, drew ahead of her escorts. The 108th Rapid Orbital Deployment Division boarded her with breaching torpedoes, killed General Ahnar Varn on his bridge and took the ship. It was the first time in nine centuries that a Voor hearth had been boarded.

The battle cost the federation 41,000 dead and the Voor about 300,000. It left the Legion's Gulf strength, twelve hearths in August 2333, at four, without a General. The Voor Aegis was towed to Cirban and studied, and the Navy's warships since the 2340s carry technology read from her. On 1 June 2334 the Navy ordered the full offensive into Voor space, the Interstellar Blitzkrieg.

Background

After the Mog

The report of the Battle of the Mog reached Hiverion on 5 February 2334. The Legion had lost four hearths and General Volar Vex at the edge of Haedus, and the Grand Armada now sat one jump from the Voor capital. The High Command's first response was the one the Navy expected. It pulled assets back to defend the core. The Kastaba reserve and two of the Swur group's hearths were ordered toward Exedor to cover Hiverion. The pickets at Swur and Kastaba watched the movement through February. Grand Admiral Tyson Vol's staff at Haedus judged that the Legion had gone home to guard its capital.

The High Command's second answer

It had not. In March, on the Institute of Xenology's reading of the Voor court's record, the Legion's analysts worked through the surviving Fleet Commander's account of the Mog and the sensor records of the First Battle of Media. They understood the deception. The southern offensive Vex had sortied against had never existed. The federation's main strength had been at Cirban since November. Media, which the Legion had been taught to fear, was held by the smaller of the federation's fleets.

The High Commander drew the conclusion his doctrine allowed. The Legion had lost at the Mog because it had been divided and drawn. It would win by concentrating and by choosing its own ground. On 20 March 2334 he sanctioned a push into the Saolea sector through Media with the whole southern strength of the Gulf. Its aims were to regain the initiative, destroy the Saolea Fleet in place, and open a second front behind the fleet at Haedus that would force it home. The order recalled the two hearths bound for Exedor and added a third from the reserve. It gave the command to Ahnar Varn, who had withdrawn from Media in November with his hearths intact and meant to return with more.

The Navy's position

The move threw the Navy's planners into urgency. The Home and Binami Fleets were at Haedus, blockading Indata Mog and its surviving hearth. Haedus was three jumps from Media, and the fleets could not be there for a month. The Saolea Fleet had been positioned as the defensive reserve and was the only force in the south. On 2 April, on the pickets' report of the concentration at Swur, Vol ordered Santiago to hold Media with Charlie Fleet in support until the Home Fleet could come.

Opposing forces

Saolea Fleet

Fleet Admiral Sean Santiago, a Toussaint man of Bounty's first generation, had commanded the Saolea Fleet since 2331. He held Media with 130 hulls, the Saolea Fleet reinforced through the winter with the first of the new construction and the corvettes of the Saolea sector security command:

• the battleships Octavian and Oberon;
• the battlecruisers Bolide and Tektite;
• the carriers Gladiator and Thraex, with 1,100 strike craft;
• six heavy cruisers, ten light cruisers, thirty frigates and seventy corvettes.

The fleet was organised as a battle force under Admiral Jojin Miller and a carrier force under Admiral Xiao Qiang. It was supported by the Navy post's two defence platforms at Media's Pillai radius, half-sized Bastions with two rails each, and by the stationary outposts the Navy had built at the system's edge between 2331 and 2333. Charlie Fleet under Admiral Rawiri Smith, 24 hulls of light cruisers, Ravens and corvettes, joined on 20 April.

Santiago's plan was the plan the Navy had for a force that could not win. He would fight at the platforms, absorb the weight of the assault, trade space for time, and hold until the Home and Binami Fleets could come south. He expected to lose Media. He told Vol so on 25 April, and Vol told him to hold it anyway.

The Legion's southern force

Varn's force was the largest single Legion formation of the war. It had seven hearths, the five of the Swur group and two from the reserve. His flagship was a new hearth grown at the Swur yards during the build-up and commissioned in 2333. The linguists render her Voor name as The Hearth That Shelters the Order Against the Coming Storm. The pickets who watched her grow gave her the Navy reporting name Voor Aegis.

With the hearths came two types the Navy had not seen before the war:

• The Harbinger class. Twenty-four heavy cruisers of the Kor pattern, refitted with arrays of small projectors along their length for use against strike craft.
• The Fury class. Forty of the force's 100 destroyers were of this new class, built since 2332 with the same arrays and a faster torch.

The Legion had seen the strike-craft swarm at Nomotar and at the Mog, and had spent the interval answering it. The Harbingers and Furies were the answer: a screen built to kill strike craft in numbers, around hearths that would concentrate as the doctrine required and would not, this time, be drawn.

Battle

14 to 16 May: the platforms

Varn's force arrived at Media's edge on 14 May 2334. Its aim was to seize the system and destroy the Navy's presence in the south. It entered on a broad front. The whole formation fell inward together at 0.3 g on a wide axis, so that the platforms and Santiago's line would be engaged from end to end and overwhelmed by numbers. There was no flank for a strike fleet to find.

Santiago went onto the defensive at once. The platforms and outposts had to be reduced before the Legion could pass, and for two days they slowed the advance and drew the projectors' fire that would otherwise have gone into the fleet. The battle force held the line at the platforms with its rails. On the 15th the carriers launched their first swarm of 1,100 craft into the Harbinger screen. For the first time the swarm met a screen that could kill it. It came back with 400.

The platforms fell on the 16th. Santiago gave ground from them toward the system's core.

16 and 17 May: the slog

The battle became the slog the Navy's histories describe. Wave after wave of Voor assault struck the Saolea Fleet's lighter ships and its remaining installations. The hearths' projectors burned at the human fields, the fields failed, and the rails answered. Charlie Fleet's light cruisers and Ravens and the fleet's corvettes worked the formation's edges with hit-and-run strikes against the destroyers. The histories put the cost of that work at a corvette an hour.

Both sides bled:

• On the 16th the carrier Thraex lost her field to two hearths' projectors and was gutted. She was the first human carrier lost in the war, and 5,000 of her 8,000 crew died with her.
• On the 16th and 17th the light cruisers Evocati and Socii and eleven frigates were destroyed.
• On the 17th the battleship Oberon lost her rail and her drive. She fought the rest of the battle as a fort.
• The Voor lost 30 Furies and eight Harbingers to the rails and to the swarm's remnants.
• On the 17th a hearth's Commander closed to finish the Oberon and came inside 50,000 kilometres, a range for which the Legion's doctrine had no number. The rails of the Octavian and the Bolide killed her there.

The other six hearths held their concentration as ordered. For three days they could not be beaten.

18 May: the Voor Aegis

The turning point came from the Legion's own doctrine, applied for a fourth day. Varn's formation had pushed Santiago's fleet back toward Media's core over three days. The flagship led, as the doctrine required, and in the pushing she drew ahead. On the morning of 18 May the Voor Aegis was 30,000 kilometres in front of her nearest hearth. Her Harbinger screen was engaged on both flanks with Charlie Fleet's light cruisers and the last of the swarm. For four hours she was isolated from her escorts.

Smith saw it. Santiago saw it too, and took it.

What the Navy did next it had rehearsed for a decade and never done. Four heavy cruisers of Miller's force, the Alexander, the Argus, the Talos and the Hector, closed on the Voor Aegis with eight frigates. They came in at 0.08 g, under the last of their fields, through her projectors. At 1040, at 20,000 kilometres, they launched the boarding force.

The breaching torpedoes

The boarding force was the 108th Rapid Orbital Deployment Division, 12,000 droptroopers in 200 breaching torpedoes. Each torpedo was an 80-tonne hard-impact craft. Its nose was a shaped charge and its body held sixty Marines. The torpedoes were fired from the cruisers' cells and the frigates' tubes like missiles, and steered like them, at a hull 5 kilometres long.

Half of them reached it. In the eleven minutes of the approach the Voor Aegis's projectors and point defence killed 90 torpedoes, and 5,400 Marines died in space. The other 110 struck her upper hull between 1051 and 1054. They punched through the grown composite and put 6,600 droptroopers inside a Voor hearth.

The fight for the hearth

The 108th had been formed in 2329 in the expansion of the ROD divisions. For four years it had trained for this one task, in the hulks of the Solar War at Ceres and, since February, in the captured hearth wreck at Haedus. The task took nine hours.

The droptroopers fought across the vessel from 110 breaches along 3 kilometres of hull. They moved through a labyrinth of the Voor's own design against a Legion crew of 30,000. That crew had never been boarded in nine centuries, and the survivors' accounts agree that it fought like a people who had never been boarded. The Institute's plans of the hearth type, drawn from the Haedus wreck, had placed the bridge. The division converged on it, and the 2nd Regiment reached it at 1820.

General Ahnar Varn died on his bridge at 1835 on 18 May 2334, with his staff, in a firefight with the 2nd Regiment's 5th Battalion. At 1902 the 108th's commander, Major General Tomas Achterberg, signalled the Alexander that the ship's command spaces were his and her fire had stopped.

By the 19th the Voor Aegis was captured, with 70,000 Voor alive aboard. They were Legionaries, who had fought to the last compartment they were ordered to hold and then stopped, and families, who had not been ordered anything.

19 to 23 May: the pursuit

With the flagship silent and her General dead, the formation did what it had done at the Mog. It waited. While it waited the Navy pressed.

Santiago's remaining rails and Charlie Fleet's cruisers concentrated on the hearth nearest the flagship. Her Commander, on the Institute's reading, had asked Hiverion what to do and was three days from an answer. She lost her field at 0300 on the 19th and her hull by 0600. The fleet's last 300 strike craft, the Gladiator's, went in at close range against the Harbingers. Their arrays had killed 800 craft in five days and were by then out of the projector fuel they burned, as the Institute later established.

At 0900 on the 19th the surviving Voor Fleet Commanders began a tactical retreat without sanction. They withdrew in formation at 0.3 g toward the system's edge, with four hearths, 12 Harbingers and 40 destroyers. Charlie Fleet followed them to the Pillai radius and struck them there while their coils charged, until they jumped for Swur on 23 May.

Aftermath

Losses

The 108th lost 8,300 of its 12,000. The Navy held Media.

The Legion's position

The Legion's Gulf strength had been twelve hearths in August 2333. In May 2334 it was four, at Swur, without a General. The two Voor fleets that had been the Confederacy's whole forward power were shattered. On 20 May the Home and Binami Fleets were still at Haedus. The Voor home systems, Exedor, Ximpok and Aethos, were held by whatever the High Command had kept back, and by a reserve at Kastaba that had lost its depot, three of its hearths and its road.

The Voor Aegis

Six tugs and a battleship towed the Voor Aegis to Cirban through June and July 2334. She arrived on 22 July, and the teams of the Consortium and the Institute went aboard the same week. Her study gave the federation the third-generation drive of 2337, fields that held under plasma fire for two hours on the Republic-class battleships, and, in 2338, its first projector. She was never recommissioned. She sat at Cirban's Pillai radius through the war as the federation's largest laboratory. The 70,000 Voor taken aboard her were held at Cirban and returned to the Confederacy under the Treaty of Ximpok in 2341.

The Boarders of Media

The 108th was withdrawn to Toussaint and rebuilt. By Elliot O'Neil's order of 1 July 2334 it was given the name it still carries: the Boarders of Media. It fought again at Hiverion in 2338.

The offensive

War Plan Purple had planned a full offensive into Voor space for the war's fourth year. On 1 June 2334, after Media, it was ordered for the war's second. Its first blow was the Fall of New Indata Mog that September.

Analysis

The Legion fought Media on the lesson of the Mog. It concentrated, chose its ground and screened its hearths against the swarm, and for three days the plan worked. Santiago lost a carrier, both platforms and nearly half his escorts, and gave up most of the system. The doctrine that kept the hearths together also put the flagship in front, and the General aboard her held the formation's sanction. When the flagship was isolated, the Navy could strike the General directly, as it had at the Mog. This time it did so by boarding rather than by fire.

The Harbinger and Fury classes did what they were built for. They killed 800 strike craft in five days, and the Navy's carrier doctrine was revised after Media to send the swarm in after a screen's arrays were spent. The boarding of the Voor Aegis is taught at the Corps' school on Toussaint as the model of a ship assault, and the breaching torpedo remained in ROD service into the 2400s.

Order of battle

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.2 "Clash of Titans: The Battle of the Mog"
2. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.3 "The Second Battle of Media"
3. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.4 "Interstellar Blitzkrieg"
4. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.6 "103rd Rapid Orbital Deployment Division"