"The southern edge is being cleared as a main fleet clears it. The Haedus group asks leave to meet it."General Volar Vex, request for sanction to the High Command, 27 January 2334
Volar Vex was a General of the Voor Legion and a member of its High Command, who commanded the Legion's Haedus group at the outbreak of the Voor War. He was killed at the Battle of the Mog on 2 February 2334, when his flagship, the hearth the Navy called the Acheron, was destroyed at the edge of the Haedus system. His death left the four hearths under him without a General's sanction, and the Grand Armada defeated them one at a time.
The name Volar Vex is the one the Navy's reports use. In Voor usage his name was longer. Human records had no word for a Voor General who was also a member of the High Command, and they rendered his rank as Admiral.
Name and line
A Voor personal name is given by the household and followed by the clan's name. In formal Voor use it is followed by rank, command and the hearth that founded the bearer's line. The Navy's records keep the first two, as in Volar Vex and Ahnar Varn, and the human habit of shortening Voor names to two words was regarded in the High Council as a mark of human haste. The Institute of Xenology recovered Vex's full style from the Voor court's record after the war. It names him as a General of the High Command, commander of the Haedus group, and of the line of the Acheron, the hearth that had founded Indata Mog. His clan was one of the twenty-one founding clans of the colony, the houses the Voor of Indata Mog call the Acheron's houses.
Career
Vex was born on Indata Mog into one of the Legion's hereditary formations, whose families lived aboard the Gulf hearths. He served in the Gulf formations from the end of his thirtieth year and never held a command outside the Gulf. The court's record lists him as a Fleet Commander aboard the Acheron by the time of contact in 2317, and as the Haedus group's General from 2326.
In 2333 the Legion had nine Generals. Three held the Maweer frontier, two the Veil, one the interior and three the Gulf, at Haedus, Swur and Kastaba. The Gulf's formations had been built up for five years before the war, and in July 2333 they were the largest Voor force the Navy's pickets had ever counted in one place. When the war began on 7 August 2333, Vex's Haedus group held seven of the Gulf's twelve hearths. The Legion's plan, which the Navy read from the hearths' positions, was a northern offensive through Myrum into Nomotar, to begin in October, while the Swur group under Ahnar Varn held the south.
Operation Mirage
The Navy's Operation Mirage struck at Vex's rear first. On 12 September 2333 Alpha Fleet raided Myrum and Bravo Fleet raided Kastaba in the same six-hour window, destroying the anchorage and depot from which the northern offensive was to stage. The Haedus group asked Hiverion for sanction to secure its rear, and the High Command took nine days to give it. On 4 October the High Commander cancelled the northern offensive. After Varn's withdrawal from the First Battle of Media in November, the High Command judged that the federation's strength lay in the south and moved two of Vex's hearths to Swur. Through December and January Vex held five hearths at Indata Mog, one jump from a fleet of 200 hulls he did not know was there.
The Battle of the Mog
On 26 January 2334 Alpha and Bravo Fleets struck the system's southern edge, destroying the Legion's sensor nodes in a pattern the Institute's analysts had designed to look to a Voor commander like the screen of a main fleet clearing its approach. Vex had the report of the Media battle and the High Command's November judgment, and he believed what he saw. He asked Hiverion for sanction to engage on 27 January. Hiverion gave it on the 29th, and on 30 January the Haedus group left Indata Mog's orbit and fell outward toward the southern edge at 0.3 g.
The Home and Binami Fleets under Grand Admiral Tyson Vol arrived unseen at the northern edge on 31 January. The doctrine said that a formation must concentrate, and Vex did what the doctrine said. He turned the whole formation about and came back toward Indata Mog and the northern threat, which put five hearths and their escorts in the open at the system's edge on a known course. On 2 February the Grand Armada attacked from three directions: Fleet Admiral Ruben de Haas's battle force from the north, Admiral Saul Goldburg's battle force on the flank and 2,200 strike craft from above. The Haedus group's Fleet Commanders held their positions and their formation and waited for Vex's orders. Vex was giving them.
Vol's order of 0955 concentrated every rail and missile in range on the Acheron. It rested on War Plan Purple's judgment that a Legion formation under a General waited for the General, and that a formation without one waited for nothing. The Acheron's field failed at 1108. She broke at 1158 on 2 February 2334, with Vex, his staff, his Legionaries and their families aboard, 120,000 Voor in all. His body was not recovered.
With Vex dead, the four remaining hearths had no General and no sanction, and four Fleet Commanders acted on their own judgment in four different ways. One charged, one turned on Goldburg's force, one held and one turned for Indata Mog. The Navy destroyed or captured three of them by 5 February. The fourth, the Lethe, reached Indata Mog's orbit and was scuttled there on 19 August 2334.
Assessment
The Institute's study of the Legion, compiled before the war, expected that a formation which lost its General in action would not fight as one formation again until a new General reached it. The Mog confirmed the study under fire. The Voor court's record, which the Institute read after the surrender, shows a High Command that spent February 2334 unable to say how the battle had happened. On the Institute's reading, the High Command concluded that the Legion had not been concentrated enough, and its next battle, at the Second Battle of Media in May, was fought on that conclusion.
The Navy's histories do not fault Vex's handling of his formation. He did what the Legion's doctrine required at each step: he sought sanction before he engaged, concentrated when threatened and fought where he was attacked. The decoy succeeded because the High Command's judgment of November 2333 was wrong and because the sensor network that would have shown him the northern arrival had been destroyed. The court's record shows that Vex's request of 27 January asked for sanction to engage and did not ask for sanction to withdraw, which the doctrine required as a separate request.
Legacy
The Battle of the Mog was the first defeat of the Legion's hearths in a large engagement since the Fevarian wars, a thousand years before. The Navy's later operations against the Legion, at Exedor in 2336 and Leesak in 2337, were planned on the method used against Vex: draw the hearths out, find the General, and strike from more than one direction. The Voor of Indata Mog keep 2 February as the day of the Acheron, the hearth that founded their world. Vex's name is cut on the seal-stones of his clan in the old city of Indata Mog, and it was read at the Legion's rites at the turn of the Voor year 2334 with the names of the Mog's other dead.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.4 "The Voor Legion"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.1 "Operation Mirage"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.2 "Clash of Titans: The Battle of the Mog"