Siege of Hiverion

"To hold the hearth until the order returns or the hearth is cold."Oath of the Hearth Guard of the Krakre, as translated by the Institute of Xenology

The Siege of Hiverion was the final campaign of the Grand Armada and the Unified Solar Marine Corps against the Voor Confederacy's capital system, Exedor, and its capital world, Hiverion. It ran from the Grand Armada's arrival at Exedor on 10 March 2336 to the destruction of the First Hearth on 3 May 2338. Navy histories often call the whole campaign the Siege of Exedor, after the system.

The campaign had two stages. In the first, the fleet won the Battle of Exedor in March 2336 but could not reach the hearths under Hiverion's planetary shield. It blockaded the system, destroyed the Legion's last relief force at Leesak in June 2337, and bombarded the capital's outer defences through the winter of 2337 to 2338. In the second, 800,000 troops under General Ilse Vandermeer landed on Hiverion from 14 February 2338 and fought inward to the Krakre, the capital government complex. On 22 April the Rapid Orbital Deployment divisions dropped directly into it. On 30 April they breached the Kindling, the Krakre's inner sanctum, where the High Commander and eight of the Legion's Generals died. The First Hearth, the hearth Hiverion, came out of orbit on 3 May and was destroyed.

The ground campaign cost the Corps 230,000 dead and was the bloodiest in its history. It ended the Voor Legion as an institution. It did not end the war, which the Confederacy's High Council continued from Ximpok until December 2340.

Background

Exedor and Hiverion

Exedor is the Voor home system. Its capital world, Hiverion, is a cold steppe world under 1.3 gravities, with 6 billion Voor living in towers 2 kilometres high. The Legion had held Hiverion since the Fevarian wars, when the Fevarians burned two Voor worlds and the Voor resolved that no one would burn a third. For nine centuries it fortified the planet against the assault the Voor feared most, an assault from orbit.

The Blitzkrieg

By the end of 2335 the federation held the Confederacy's whole share of the Ciriban Gulf. The Legion had lost its forward fleets at the Battle of the Mog and the Second Battle of Media, its Gulf headquarters at the Fall of New Indata Mog, and its southern yards at Swur. Of the 52 hearths it had in 2333, twenty were pinned on the Maweer frontier, where the Maweer had massed fleets in silence since the summer of 2334, and never came south. Nine stood at Exedor: five of the home formation, the Hiverion among them, and the four that had withdrawn from Swur. Six more came from the Veil frontier in 2335 and 2336, and its last three in April 2337, on the High Command's judgment that the Fevarians beyond the Veil were the lesser danger.

Battle of Exedor, March 2336

The Grand Armada arrived at Exedor's edge on 10 March 2336 with 260 hulls. It brought the first two Republic-class battleships, the Republic and the Federation. Each was 1,500 metres long and 7.9 million tonnes, with four rails and fields read from the captured Voor Aegis. The fleet also brought six carriers with 3,500 strike craft, the largest carrier strength of the war.

The Legion met it with fifteen hearths, the largest force it would ever bring together. They were led by the Hiverion herself, the Primus-class hearth grown 900 years before contact, which had never left Exedor. The linguists render her Voor name as The First Hearth, From Which the Order Was Kindled.

The shield-and-sortie doctrine

The Legion fought Exedor on a new doctrine, the High Command's answer to the Mog and Media. The hearths did not sortie to the edge and did not hold in the open. They did not wait for sanction either, because the High Commander was with them. They fought from inside the planet's orbital defences and under its shield. They came out in pairs against the fleet's approach and withdrew under the platforms' fire, so that the fleet had to come to them.

The week

The fleet came, and the week cost it. It fought the outer system for three days, reducing the edge platforms and the Legion's forward pickets. From the 13th it closed on Hiverion's orbit. The hearths sortied two at a time behind Harbinger screens and met each approach at 200,000 kilometres with the fire of fifteen hearths. The fleet could not follow them under the platforms.

On the 14th and 15th the Navy lost the battlecruiser Comet, the light cruiser Thorax, the frigate Celebes, the corvettes Churchill and Hood, twelve other escorts, 1,400 strike craft and 19,000 dead. In the same two days it killed five hearths. A pair of hearths that sortied against 260 hulls with two Republics among them met twenty rails and a swarm at 80,000 kilometres, and not every pair went back.

The First Hearth's sortie

On 16 March the Hiverion came out with four hearths against the Republic's line. On the Institute's reconstruction of the court's record, the High Commander meant to break the line or die on it. The Republic's fields held for two hours. The rails of the Republic and the Federation put the first slugs through the First Hearth's field that anything had put through it in nine centuries. At 1500 the Hiverion withdrew under the planet's shield with her hull opened along 2 kilometres and her High Commander alive. She did not come out again until 3 May 2338.

Result

By 17 March the Navy held Exedor beyond the planet's defences: the outer system, the edge, the moons and every orbit above 200,000 kilometres. The Legion held Hiverion's low orbit, its platforms, its shield and the ten hearths under it. Neither side could reach the other. The battle was the Navy's on the count, and it was the first battle the Navy could not finish.

The blockade, 2336 to 2337

The fleet blockaded the Exedor system from March 2336. It kept a battle line at the 200,000-kilometre line, outside the platforms' reach, and its strike fleets watched the system's edge for couriers and relief. In April 2337 the Veil frontier's last three hearths came in to Aethos, outside the blockade.

Battle of Leesak, June 2337

The Legion tried once more. In June 2337 the Fleet Commander of the Aethos formation sortied from Aethos through Leesak toward Exedor. He had three hearths and the garrison ships of the Vur Duri colony, and he was joined by the three hearths that had come in from the Veil in April. His aim was to relieve the capital or, on the Institute's reading, to give the High Commander a fleet outside the shield.

Fleet Admiral Izabel Beattie's Home Fleet of 140 hulls met the six hearths at Leesak's edge on 22 June 2337. It was the war's last fleet action. Beattie fought them for two days on War Plan Purple's terms: in the open, with the hearths concentrated and the Home Fleet on three sides. She killed four of them for the loss of the corvette Firefly, five escorts, 600 strike craft and 3,000 dead. The two surviving hearths went back to Aethos and did not sortie again.

From July 2337 the Legion had no fleet. Its hearths sat at Hiverion under the shield, two at Aethos, three at Ximpok that had never moved, and twenty on the Maweer frontier that never would.

The bombardment, winter 2337 to 2338

The fleet's bombardments through the winter crippled Hiverion's outer defences. They destroyed the edge platforms, the moons' installations, the yards that had grown the hearths, and every military factory and government facility in the system beyond the shield's edge. By February 2338 the Grand Armada's whole strength, 300 hulls, sat in Exedor's orbit.

Hiverion's defences

The planet itself was beyond the fleet's reach. Its defences were three:

• The platforms. 400 orbital platforms stood inside the 200,000-kilometre line, each a projector battery and a field. The winter's fire reduced them to 90. The fleet could not reduce them further without closing to a range at which the surface projectors, the largest the Voor had built, could reach a battleship.
• The shield. A planetary field of the Voor pattern, from generators the Institute counted at sixty, covered the Legion's grounds, the cities and the polar works. It left the open steppe between them uncovered. The analysts judged it could absorb everything the fleet carried for a year.
• The ground. 4 million Legionaries held the planet in 40,000 kilometres of tunnel and fortress under the shield. Among them was the Hearth Guard of the capital. The hearths that had survived Exedor sat under the shield in low orbit as batteries that could not move and could not be reached.

The decision

Hiverion could not be reduced from orbit. It could be starved over a decade, at the cost of a decade and 6 billion Voor. Or it could be taken from the ground at the one place the Voor's own order made decisive: the Krakre, seat of the High Council and the High Command. In the Voor language it is the hearth of hearths, and its fall would end the Legion as an institution if it ended nothing else.

O'Neil, aged eighty-four, chose the ground on 10 January 2338. The Navy's histories record that Vol advised it. No one on the Navy Board or the Corps' staff said the cost would be less than a Solar War campaign.

The landing, February and March 2338

The plan

The ground commander, General Ilse Vandermeer of the Federation, had commanded the Corps' military government on Indata Mog and had walked the Legion's grounds there. Her plan put 18 divisions, 800,000 troops, on the steppe outside the shield in six landing zones around the capital. They would seize the ground the shield did not cover and fight inward under it to the Krakre, 400 kilometres from the nearest zone, before the Legion could come out and destroy the zones one at a time. The zones were chosen for the steppe's few features, ridges and dry rivers that the Voor's own histories recorded the Fevarians had used.

The force was the Corps' whole strength:

• eleven Marine divisions of 50,000, the 20th and 28th among them;
• seven ROD divisions of 12,000: the 101st, 102nd, 103rd, 104th, 107th, 108th (rebuilt after Media) and 109th;
• the Corps' armour, artillery and engineers.

The landing was to take three days from 14 February.

14 February: three divisions down

It took three weeks. On the first day only three divisions landed in their designated zones. The 20th Marine Division and the 101st ROD came down at Zone Kea, on the ridge north-east of the capital. The 103rd ROD came down at Zone Tui, to the south. The surface projectors engaged the 103rd's drop for eleven minutes, and the division lost its 11th Battalion, Taiaha, in the descent.

The other fifteen divisions were delayed or diverted:

• two by a platform the fleet had counted dead, which killed 40 landers before the Republic's rails found it;
• four by a steppe storm that grounded the Corps' heavy landers for six days;
• three by the Legion's counter-landing formations, which came out from under the shield against Zones Ruru and Weka on the 15th and 16th and made those zones untenable until the 20th and 28th fought across to them;
• six by the capacity of the Corps' lander fleet, which could put 60,000 troops on the surface a day if nothing went wrong, and by the 20th had put 150,000 down with everything going wrong.

The three divisions on the ground held their zones alone for nine days against a garrison of 4 million. The 103rd's history records that the Legion came at them "in formations that did not stop and did not spread out and did not, for nine days, leave the umbrella's edge without a sanction". That habit saved the zones.

By 8 March all 18 divisions were down, in five zones rather than six. The sixth, Zone Kāhu on the western steppe, was never opened, and its divisions landed through Kea. The Corps had lost 22,000 on the landing alone.

The advance, 8 to 20 March

The advance under the shield ran from 8 to 19 March. It was fought on the ROD doctrine of the Solar War: seize the key terrain, hold it against everything, and let the enemy spend himself on it while the fleet does the rest. The Corps took the Legion's grounds ring by ring, including the drill fields the first human envoys had walked across in 2318, the fortresses around them and the tunnel mouths. The fleet's rails could reach the shield's edge but not beneath it, and they struck every Legion formation that came out. Vandermeer's divisions reached the capital's outer towers on 19 March and the Krakre on the 20th.

Battle of the Krakre, 20 March to 18 April

The complex

The Krakre was the seat of Voor power and was built to say so. It is a complex of towers, walls and courts on a raised plateau at the capital's centre, 30 kilometres across and 3 deep. The High Council and the High Command sat there, and in the Voor telling the First Hearth was kindled there nine centuries before. It was the Legion's final line, and the Legion had never intended to give it up.

Its defences were layered:

• five rings of concrete and grown-composite barriers, each higher than the last;
• turrets, surface projectors and rail batteries in every ring, under fields of their own inside the planetary shield;
• a garrison of 200,000, the Hearth Guard. These were the Legion's elite, hereditary formations that had never served anywhere else;
• 2,000 kilometres of tunnel beneath the plateau, through which the garrison moved and the Corps could not.

The rings

For 29 days the Marine and ROD divisions made small gains against the outer works. The assaults did not pause, and the histories do not pretend they were clever. The Corps' atmospheric wings flew airstrikes, and the turrets killed them by the squadron. Every gun the Corps had landed fired on the rings, and the rings' fields absorbed it. The ground fighting went ring by ring and wall by wall:

• The 28th Marine Division took the first ring in six days, with 9,000 dead.
• The 20th and the 102nd ROD took the second in nine days, with 14,000.
• The third ring, from 6 to 18 April, took every division the Corps could put against it and did not fall.

In her dispatch of 16 April Vandermeer wrote that the complex was more than a fortress. It was the Voor's will to fight in built form, and its garrison would spend itself to the last Guard before it opened a gate. A conventional assault would take the inner rings in a year, at a cost the Corps could not pay.

The drop, 22 April

The generators

The Corps' answer was the last resort of the ROD doctrine: an orbital drop onto the complex itself, over the outer rings and inside them. The divisions had been built for it in 2229 and had never done it at this scale. The shield made it the most dangerous operation of the war. It covered the Krakre, and a drop through it was a drop into a wall.

The key was the Navy's. From the Voor Aegis's plans and the surface survey, the Institute's analysts had placed four of the sixty shield generators in the Krakre's fourth ring. The fleet's rails could not touch the shield from above. They could touch the generators from the side, through the outer rings the Corps now held, if the Corps' engineers marked them. On the night of 20 to 21 April the engineers put target designators on the four generators. The 104th's history records that it cost three companies.

At 0400 on 22 April 2338 the Republic, the Federation and every Meteor in Exedor's orbit fired through the third ring into the four generators. The shield over the Krakre's centre failed. The analysts had promised an hour. It lasted forty minutes, and the ROD divisions came down through the gap.

The descent

The 101st, 103rd and 109th ROD Divisions, with elements of the 102nd, 104th and 107th, dropped from the carriers and assault transports in low orbit. They were 50,000 droptroopers in 4,000 capsules and 300 hard-impact dropships. They landed on the Krakre's upper levels: the plateau's towers and the roofs of the fourth and fifth rings. The 101st's orders, read to the division by its commander before the drop, told the troops they faced near-certain death.

They came down onto the Hearth Guard and onto the complex's automated defences, whose turrets and projectors engaged the capsules in the air and the troops on the roofs. The first hours were a slaughter:

• The 109th's 3rd Regiment lost two battalions on the roofs of the fifth ring in the first hour.
• The 103rd's 6th Regiment, "Wailing Death", lost its 10th Battalion, Kukri, to a projector battery. The battalion's survivors then took the battery with the blade the battalion was named for.
• The 101st's 1st Regiment came down in a court the Guard had ranged and lost half its strength before it reached a wall.

The Corps' word for several ROD battalions in those hours was decimated, used in its old sense and its new. By 0500 the drop had put 38,000 troops inside the Krakre's inner rings. The shield had closed over them at 0442, and they were alone.

The Kindling, 22 to 30 April

The 38,000 fought inward for eight days. The inner rings were a labyrinth of command centres, armouries, halls, the Legion's schools and the Council's courts. The ROD divisions fought through them room by room against a Guard that did not surrender rooms. They converged on the complex's heart, the inner sanctum the Voor call the Kindling, where the High Command sat. The Institute later established that the First Hearth's flame was in fact kept there.

Outside, the Corps pressed the third ring through the same days to draw the Guard outward. It took the third ring on the 26th with 11,000 dead, and the fourth on the 29th. Vol coordinated the final strike from the carrier Glory. On the 29th the fleet's rails fired through the fourth ring into the sanctum's own field generators.

At 0300 on 30 April the ROD troops inside and the Marines outside went at the Kindling together. The 101st's 2nd Regiment and the 103rd's 8th Regiment, the Angels of Delambre, breached its walls at 0640. They fought through the High Command's halls until 1400. Then the 8th Regiment's 20th Battalion, Xiphos, reached the hall where the High Commander and the Legion's nine Generals had gathered. The High Commander, whom the court's record names Kesh Arvuun, had held the office since 2321 and had commanded at Exedor in 2336. On the Institute's reconstruction, the Legion's leaders were waiting in the hall the order had been kindled in. They were armed and unwilling to be taken.

They were not taken. The firefight in the Kindling lasted forty minutes. It ended with the High Commander and eight Generals dead and the ninth dying, and with the 20th Battalion at 200 of its 900. The Marines of the 28th came through the breach behind the ROD troops at 1500, reached the heart of the Krakre and secured it by nightfall.

The Hearth Guard's survivors, 40,000 of 200,000, stopped fighting on 1 May. The order came from the dying General, the last officer alive with the authority to give it. The Institute translates his reason as "so that the hearth would not be cold with no one to tend it".

The end of the First Hearth, 3 May

With the Krakre in the Corps' hands, control of the shield's generators passed with it, and the shield began to fail across the capital. On 3 May the Hiverion left low orbit under her own Commander's order, with the nine hearths beside her, against the Republic's line. The Institute's reading is that her Commander meant what the High Commander had meant at Exedor.

The Republic's fields held for two hours. The Hiverion's did not. She broke at 1120 on 3 May 2338 under the fire of twenty-eight rails and 3,000 strike craft, with 130,000 aboard. Four hearths broke with her. The five that survived had no High Command, no General and no sanction. They went back under what was left of the shield and stayed there until December 2340.

Casualties

The ROD divisions suffered the worst. The 101st, 103rd and 109th numbered 36,000 between them on 21 April and 11,000 on 1 May. The 108th, rebuilt after Media, lost half its strength on the third ring. Of the seven ROD divisions that landed, 84,000 strong, 41,000 were dead by May. The 20th and 28th Marine Divisions, which had landed first and fought every ring, were at a third of their establishment. The 103rd lost 8,100 of the 12,200 it had landed with.

Aftermath

The Corps' military government took the capital on 4 May 2338, and the planet's towers through May and June. Hiverion's 6 billion did what the 200 million of Indata Mog had done. They waited.

The fall of the Krakre ended the Legion's power and did not end the war. The High Command was dead, and the Legion's remaining formations had no one to sanction them. The High Council survived. Its civil members had left Hiverion for Ximpok in March 2338 on the High Command's order, over the objections of half of them. From April 2338 the Council sat at Vi Simni as the Confederacy's government. It had three hearths at Ximpok, two at Aethos, twenty on the Maweer frontier that would not come, and no Legion to speak of. It took the Council two and a half years to decide what a Confederacy without a Legion was. The Confederacy surrendered in the Krakre's court on 21 December 2340, with the 103rd ROD Division standing in it, and signed the Treaty of Ximpok.

Legacy

The Corps counts the Krakre as the bloodiest campaign in its history, and counts it in the ROD divisions' numbers first. The drop of 22 April was the largest orbital drop the Corps has made into a defended position. The Institute's observers recorded that the Hearth Guard, whose own custom is to carry ancestral blades, treated the 103rd's dead with a courtesy it showed no other division's. The Corps' memorial to the campaign stands on the Krakre's first ring, on ground the Confederacy gave for it in 2341.

Order of battle, 2338

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"
2. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.4 "Interstellar Blitzkrieg"
3. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.5 "Taking the Krakre: The Siege of Hiverion"
4. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.6 "103rd Rapid Orbital Deployment Division"
5. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.7 "Solar Ascendant: The Voor Surrender"