As hundreds of thousands of rounds saturated the sky, Colonel Ashwood, sitting in one of the many shuttles performing emergency manoeuvres, cursed Song and her entire ancestry.

She had proven to be the more ruthless of the two.

Minutes after the couple dozen shuttles began their descent, Alcyone opened fire, vaporizing seven of the transports before they even realized what was going on.

They were lucky. Had Song managed to seize control of the battlecruiser faster, they would have all been turned into a mist by now.

Ashwood felt grateful to the poor bastards that must have opposed Song, giving his forces the precious minutes needed for a chance at survival.

Yet they were far from safe. Alcyone might not have been designed for hunting shuttles, but that did not make it ineffective. Ashwood did not even have his armour on, not that it would be much help should they suffer a hit.

He watched on his implants as another shuttle winked from existence, for a total of ten, now.

“Number Seventeen bought it, sir!” The pilot shouted, more for the benefit of the soldiers seated in the back than the Colonel’s.

He stopped himself from telling the pilot to go faster. His implants were linked to the shuttle’s main computer, so he knew very well that the pilot already flew well outside of the safety parameters.

Their plan was exceedingly simple. Ashwood had simply ordered everyone to split up and go faster. Soon they would exit the range of most of Alcyone’s weapons, leaving only the anti-ship railguns and missiles.

Which would still mean death, without help. While the ship’s big guns couldn’t track the shuttles properly, they would still be very visible on its sensors. Song could simply wait for them to run out of fuel and then wipe them out when they inevitably landed.

Luckily, Ashwood was not without cards to play, even if they were all stolen.

All the shuttles were converging on the city below the Custodian’s temple. He did not think that she would let Song destroy the city.

Even if the Custodian did not act, more of Alcyone’s officers surely would. Wiping out a city of innocent civilians would be a step too far for many of them. Not to mention that in the end, they still needed to secure the shield technology.

Perhaps that would be enough, perhaps not. He could not think of anything better.

They still needed to survive the next couple of minutes for any of that to matter anyway. Not that he could do anything but think at the moment.

In a way, Ashwood even felt grateful to Song. His soldiers were rather loyal to him, but there was loyalty and then there was loyalty. Many of them would have opposed killing their fellow Terrans, and who could have blamed them?

Song had spared him that dreaded duty, so while he regretted not acting first a little, he also felt relieved.

He also thought it undeniable that Song had misstepped. The initial barrage came too late. Should they survive, their situation would be nearly ideal, strategically speaking. Firing the first shot was not a small thing. While Song was likely busy executing her own people, Ashwood’s were more united than ever. It would also give Athena a great PR boost, hopefully turning much of the public to their side, should it spread.

Tactically, it would still be a nightmare, of course. A warship was a warship, after all.

Still, the situation could be worse.

“SHIT! BRACE!” The pilot screamed, the shuttle taking a sharp dive downwards even before he finished shouting.

Ashwood gaped at the approaching missile signature.

Then it exploded and the sky caught fire.

The shockwave threw the shuttle like a ragdoll, a deafening sound following immediately after.

Six more shuttles winked out.

As the pilot struggled to regain control, Ashwood mentally retracted every bit of gratefulness he had felt.

Song had gone completely insane. Nuclear warheads were only used in space for good reason. If she fired another nuke…

“SCATTER!” He screamed over the comms, hoping it was not too late.

The shuttles might be military, but they were meant for transport. They could not reliably detect anti-ship warheads, nor of course, escape them. If they spread out more, Song would have to use a missile per transport, at least.

It would slow them down, but more would survive.

As if on cue, Alcyone’s weapons stopped firing.

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The Colonel frowned, “Did we exit their range already?”

“I don’t think so, sir,” The pilot responded, corroborating the Colonel’s own thoughts.

“Do you see anything, pilot?” Ashwood asked. He could see a great deal of the shuttle’s data, but his implants were not meant for interfacing with shuttles in such a way, nor had he the training to make sense of most of it.

“Uh, Sterope has opened fire on Pleione and Alcyone both, sir,” The pilot responded, furiously rearranging the sensor data.

Ashwood blinked. Right, that made sense. They could have started shooting faster, but he’d take what he could get.

“Stick to the plan. There is nothing we can do to help,” He said, relaying his words to the other shuttles as well.

Sterope might win. Surprise attacks from close range were devastating. Weapons technology had outpaced armour quite thoroughly. The thickness needed to provide an effective defence against railguns just wasn’t practical. Certainly not something you would find on a cruiser. That meant that getting an initial salvo into an unprepared enemy could absolutely devastate them.

“Alcyone is out! Looks like they got the engines and most of the weapons systems, sir!” The pilot said.

The soldiers cheered, but Ashwood didn’t join them, too busy watching the feed and not feeling up to celebrating prematurely. The damage to Alcyone likely accounted for much of Sterope’s initial salvo, which meant that it would be without any significant advantages in the following battle.

Imagining Song’s disbelieving face did improve his mood quite a bit though.

It did mean that their escape to Eigos’s surface would almost certainly succeed. Unless the locals rolled out some anti-air defence out of some hole they had hidden it in. The Colonel didn’t think that was particularly likely.

Ashwood suddenly frowned, trying to make sense of the data in front of his eyes.

The pilot, warrant officer Yang the Colonel belatedly recalled, provided a swift explanation, “Sterope is bleeding escape pods, sir! We lose them after their initial burst, but they are heading in our general direction.”

Ashwood frowned harder, understanding the implication of such an act but not seeing the reasoning.

Seconds after, Sterope’s signature winked out.

Officer Yang paled, “Sterope just got fucking vaporized! Uh, sir!”

Ashwood sighed. There went the easy victory. With the battle in the void apparently concluded, things were once again looking bleak.

They would make it to the surface, but what would happen after was anyone's guess.

With the imminent danger likely averted, the Colonel took stock.

Out of the twenty-three shuttles, fifteen had been lost, accounting for a little under four hundred of his people.

Sterope had been completely destroyed, though some of the crew had escaped. Reuniting with them on Eigos would be a priority, even if only to find out how they knew to jump ship. The shuttle’s sensors might not be the best, but they would have caught a nuclear explosion, which left only railgun rounds and those could not be detected before they hit.

In contrast, the enemy still controlled two cruisers, even if one was crippled and the other likely at least a little damaged. Alcyone would not be much of a threat, especially since his soldiers accounted for the vast majority of the infantry on board.

On the other hand, Pleione likely possessed infantry of its own. It would likely all come down to how many of them there were. Unless they carpet-bombed the area and the Custodian didn’t help, of course.

Ashwood thought that infantry action was more likely.

Alcyone had been filled to capacity and it would make sense if Pleione had been as well, as they were sent here to seize assets on the moon’s surface.

He’d have to hope that his own soldiers and whoever escaped from Sterope would be enough.

They would need to survive until reinforcements arrived, at which point their fate would be once again decided by chance. Or, hopefully, Athena’s intellect.

He sincerely doubted that either Song or Black, the captain of Pleione, would send any intel back to the Republic. It would be quite foolish for them to do so, with Sterope’s apparent betrayal.

Which meant that the next unlucky bastards to arrive would more or less have to decide on the spot who to side with, likely resulting in another bloodbath.

There was probably an entire battlegroup coming, if not more.

Ashwood broke from his ruminations when an alarm for a priority message blared in his head, opening with his personal code assigned to him by Athena. He read the deeply encrypted message, frowning more with each of the lines read.

‘Code Zeta

Chance of mission-relevant technology being non-existent or useless over 97%

Conflict with entity “Custodian” desirable

Retrieve/Destroy remains of Unit #09 “Phaedra” from the attached coordinates’

The Colonel read it one more time before groaning. He managed to stop himself from slumping in his seat, at least. Much of the message’s content made him feel rather perplexed.

He had expected Code Zeta, but he had no idea what to think about the rest.

Code Zeta simply meant that a peaceful takeover could no longer be achieved and that the gloves were coming off. If the message had come from someone on Sterope like he suspected then Code Zeta had likely already been in effect for weeks.

The Colonel could imagine the many hidden shipyards stirring to life, fleets of civilian ships being retrofitted with proper military weapon systems and of course, the increasingly unlikely lethal accidents that their opposition must be suffering. General Shepard probably counted among those.

The rest of the message he did not really understand.

The fact that so many people had died and would die because of something apparently non-existent did not sit well with him. Not to mention that conflict with the Eigosians made no sense without the tech as the prize.

Athena was not someone to pursue war for the sake of it, so there must be some deeper reason, but he did not see it. Maybe she intended to frame the humanist faction for it.

Lastly, he had no idea what unit zero-nine was supposed to be, nor why the coordinates pointed not only to Eigos, but straight to the Custodian’s temple. He felt pretty sure that he had not left anyone behind on the moon, so he had no clue how zero-nine had made it there.

All in all, he felt a headache coming.

At least the message did not include a timetable or some such. He needed the Custodian’s cooperation to survive the coming days, after all.