October 15, 2277

310 days remain

Sapphire, the jewel of the frontier. It is a blue giant star system containing no major celestial bodies, but instead a massive sea of asteroids and planetoids, rich with precious minerals of all sorts. Almost anything made of metal from outside of the core colonies began its journey under the ancient blue glow of Sapphire. In its earliest days, civilization in the system consisted of hundreds of scattered mining operations from corporations and nations of every stripe. During the internal wars of humanity's past, Sapphire, then one of the most distant colonies from earth, changed hands many times as small military expeditions were sent from a dozen nations to seize its wealth for their war effort. During the Diln Wars, the importance of Sapphire increased dramatically along with the importance of every other colony on the far side of the border with the Diln. She became mankind's hidden coin purse, enabling the construction of ships and weapons and infrastructure even when the major resource producing systems in the core of human space were under siege.

Sapphire had become more than a mining outpost in that war. Investors poured money into the system, and hordes of migrants coming for work followed. A great habitat, the largest outside of the core colonies, was built. Many of the migrants stayed, finding a new identity in their artificial home that overtook the old identity of their myriad of home systems. So, Sapphire became a new nation, a federal republic of the many stations and outposts littering the system, its seat of government being the habitat orbiting comfortably in Sapphire's habitable zone, protected by the most extensive defense network in the region. This new nation, forged in the fires of humanity's first war for survival, now found itself tested in the forge once again.

The culture that had been formed in the system was a gruff, blunt thing. Yet, there was an undertone of optimism and good humor. It's progenitor's had been workmen and soldiers, honest and unpretentious. It was a culture that believed in getting things done right the first time, and a strong sense of duty towards humanity as a whole. It was this sense of duty that was called upon once again, as the flood of refugees from the frontier colonies devastated by the Ivos poured in.

Sapphire was a young, hopeful nation. It's people's hopes would be crushed by a certain cruiser that was coming towards their home out of dark space.

---

The Pride of Nigeria appeared from nothing out of dark space. It's drive immediately fired again, as it sped towards its destination, the Sapphire habitat. Another space force cruiser burned to intercept, hailing the Pride.

"Answer the hail." Sai ordered.

On his screen appeared an older man of African features. His face bore the faint lines of scars, and the dark skin of his face was weather-beaten. While all these feature might hint at the man's origins, for Sai all it took was one look at the man's eyes to know he was a Diln War veteran. He bore the same gaze that they all did. The exhausted gaze of someone who had been exposed to the awful truth: the human race was an infinitesimally tiny fish in a gargantuan pond. The gaze of someone who had fought, not for their nation, or their culture and people, but for their entire species. It was the gaze of someone who had looked directly at the greatest threat to ever face humanity, and lived to tell the tale.

It was a gaze that Sai suspected he had now too.

The man looked at Sai for a long moment, and then he sighed. "I am Rear Admiral Iddi. I get the feeling that you're going to tell me something I don't want to hear."

Sai gave a grim half smile. "You are correct. There is an Ivo fleet heading through dark space. With their current trajectory, Sapphire is their most likely destination."

The Rear Admiral closed his eyes for a long moment, taking in the information. His eyes snapped open and he spoke. "Top off your propellant and reaction mass, and then leave immediately for Gettysburg. The fleet must have time to prepare."

Sai was taken aback. "Why not just send a courier ship? The Pride can help in the fight!"

"I know about your mission. One cruiser will not tip the scales in our favor here. However, the data from your science team has a chance, however unlikely, to tip the scales elsewhere. Top off, and then leave immediately."

Sai was numb. Once again, he was being ordered to leave comrades to die while he turned tail and ran. It was maddening. Nevertheless, Sai was still an officer of the United Nations Space Force. So, he followed orders.

As the communication link was terminated, Rear Admiral Iddi rubbed the bridge of his nose. The youth that made up the majority of the space force looked at old veterans like him and marveled at how little phased them. In truth, it was all an act. An freezing cold fear gripped the admiral's heart, a fear the likes of which he had felt only once before. It was when he was a young tactical officer in Sidney Kane's fleet, charging through volleys of hyper velocity rounds.

It was the fear of a man who was watching his death approach him.

---

Admiral Iddi looked on as hundreds of new stars appeared from nowhere in the Sapphire sky, and he knew despair. Intellectually, he'd known that the enemy ships numbered in the hundreds. His long range telescopes in dark space had seen them. However, to see the light of their drives with his own eyes was another thing entirely. Against over three hundred ships, he had two dozen automated defense platforms orbiting Sapphire Habitat, and his garrison of ten cruisers. His brain did the arithmetic, and the sums weren't in his favor.

He watched as civilian ships burned away at emergency speeds, before vanishing into dark space. It was in defiance of his orders. He'd forbidden any evacuation efforts. The Ivos had parked a half dozen frigates in dark space, and were lobbing a lazy torpedo at any ship foolish enough to attempt to retreat. In their animal panic, the people of Sapphire had decided to try their luck anyway, burning hard for the transition stations first, and then pushing, shoving, and biting their way onto the handful of ships with in-built transition drives after the stations were destroyed. Every single one of them met their end to an Ivo torpedo.

We're trapped. Rats in a cage.

Decades of discipline and an iron will reasserted itself over the terrified animal that had taken control of his brain, and Admiral Iddi began to give orders.

"Prepare to receive the enemy."

His subordinates looked upon the calm, cool face of their Admiral and the panic began to subside. They hadn't seen the internal war their leader had waged to fight down the very same panic they themselves had felt.

The Ivo ships turned over, and the new stars disappeared from the sky. Tiny puffs of light began to appear, and the sensor network of the defenders detected the swarm of torpedoes that was coming their way.

"Vampire! Vampire! Vampire! Over four hundred plus vampires inbound and closing at high G accelerations! Fifty thousand clicks out and falling!" the tactical officer called.

Iddi gave his response. "All anti-missiles away. All missiles away forty-five seconds after."

Anti-missiles were a waste of valuable mass on a mobile military asset, mass that could have been taken up by adding more offensive missiles. For defense stations, who were not shackled by the tyranny of the rocket equation, for whom the primary purpose was to intercept, rather than engage the enemy, anti-missiles were very potent indeed.

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The defense stations of Sapphire fired their maneuvering thrusters, orienting their launch tubes towards the oncoming Ivo torpedoes. Magnetic accelerators in the launch tubes sent the anti-missiles away at high speeds. A swarm of anti missiles was sent towards the oncoming threats. Forty-five seconds, later, silos opened on both the cruisers and the defense platforms, and a swarm of missiles followed after the anti-missiles.

"All birds away! Seven minutes to anti-missile intercept, eighteen to offensive missile impact." the tactical officer called.

Iddi drummed his fingers on his armrest. The waiting was far and away the worst part of space combat. In the far past, in the interplanetary wars of the early space faring days of humanity, missiles had taken hours, even days, to reach their targets. Iddi could barely stand seven minutes, he couldn't imagine a missile launch that took so long that you had to go to bed and wake up to the results.

Seven agonizing minutes later, the anti-missiles met their quarries. Conventional explosives were of little use in space warfare. The lack of any air to produce a shockwave with meant that even nuclear weapons were blunted in vacuum. Conventional explosives were quite impotent in any weapons system intended to damage ships, but for damaging missiles they had their uses. The anti-missiles closed with their enemies.

The highly advanced guidance computers of the Ivo torpedoes dueled with the comparatively brainless (and therefore cheap) anti-missile guidance systems. The torpedoes swerved in evasive maneuvers, and the anti-missiles doggedly followed them. Many of the torpedoes outmaneuvered the anti-missiles, running them out of their inferior chemical propellant with their superior anti-matter drive. Other torpedoes took a wrong turn and found themselves vaporized in an anti-matter containment breach as their anti-missile foes detonated their charges at the perfect moment, sending a scorching heat and a cloud of shrapnel into their target. Some torpedoes were only half successful, dodging their pursuers but still getting cooked battered in the detonation, flying on at a more erratic vector.

When the business was done, the tactical officer called out the toll extracted on the incoming torpedoes. "Splash three hundred plus vampires!" There was a ragged intake of breath and a few grim nods of satisfaction in the operations room. Statistically speaking, it was a commendable result for the anti-missiles.

It won't be enough. It was never going to be enough. A cold, honest voice in the depths of Iddi's mind said. The admiral ruthlessly surpressed the voice and returned his focus to the task at hand. The missiles would be impacting the Ivo fleet soon.

The majority of the human missiles were N-67 "Comet" kinetic weapons. They launched, drifted for a bit, and then burned as hard as possible in a headlong charge, adding their velocity to the kinetic energy of the depleted uranium flechettes the released when they detonated. A weapon potent enough to be a threat, yet inexpensive enough to be fired en masse. The other missiles, launched mainly from the defense platforms, were N-14 "Jupiter" heavy anti-ship missiles. They were larger, and they burned to the enemy at a steadier, but slower pace. An intentional choice, as it enabled the comets to provide cover for the more potent (and expensive) nuclear warheads of the Jupiters. It was a three stage weapon, being sent out of the magnetic accelerator launch tube by a ferrous metal jacket, the second stage discarded the jacket and fired a booster that sent it along a vector towards its target. The third stage discarded the booster and sent its four warheads out on smaller independent rockets.

Using nuclear weapons in tandem with kinetic missiles was a tactic left over from the Diln War. Outranged by the hypervelocity cannons, the humans covered their advance with a swarm of missiles. The enemy could either focus down the more dangerous nukes only to be shredded by the flechettes, or they could focus on the flechettes and take their chances against a nuclear warhead.

This tactic was being utilized once again against an even more superior enemy. Against the superior point defenses and anti-matter engines of the Ivos, the results were less effective.

The many ships of the Ivo fleet had scattered in evasive maneuvers at the incoming missiles. Large sections of the missile barrage were simply run out of fuel by the drastically more efficient engines of the Ivo ships. The missiles had been reprogrammed to compensate for this, however, and many of them still found their target. Clouds of depleted uranium flechettes flew towards waiting the Ivo ships, being rapidly melted by the point defenses. The priority targets were the battleships, and many nuclear detonations occurred around the huge ships as nukes detonated intentionally prematurely when their onboard computers detected they were about to be destroyed by point defenses. Flechettes battered and perforated the hulls of the great ships as their point defenses buckled, and some succumbed entirely to the projectiles.

The flechettes were not as potent as they could have been, as they had been launched from a stationary source and thus had not had any extra velocity added to them. The Ivo fleet had also slowed itself considerably in an effort to avoid adding their own velocity to the kinetic energy of the weapons. Nevertheless, with the aid of the nukes, the weapons extracted a toll.

"Splash six! One battleship, five escorts! Varying degrees of damage on thirty plus more targets." called the tactical officer.

It was an underwhelming number, but considering the overwhelming amount of overlapping point defense, Iddi couldn't have hoped for more.

Scarcely a minute after the human missiles met their target, the Ivo missiles reached ten thousand kilometers. The long-range UV lasers of the defense platforms and Sapphire Habitat itself opened up on them. The torpedoes had been drifting for several minutes at high velocities up to that point. When they came under fire again, they fired their engines and consumed their remaining fuel reserves in high-g burns toward their targets. Sapphire Habitat had no targets incoming, every torpedo was focusing on the defenses. A few dozen were vaporized by the UV lasers. Then the deluge of explosive flak rounds and automatic railgun fire began melting away the incoming targets. Hundreds of anti-matter explosions lit up the night sky in Sapphire Habitat. By the time the shorter range defense lasers opened up, the number of torpedoes in the sky still numbered almost one hundred.

As the torpedoes streaked in, the cruisers were already burning hard in evasive maneuvers, trying to give the point defenses as much time as possible to protect them. The defense platforms had no such luck. Their defenses buckled, at least half of them were destroyed or severely damaged.

The last of the torpedoes detonated, and the skies were clear from the exchange.

And there's still three hundred beam weapons to account for.

The ugly reality hit the Admiral like a bus, and he sank into his chair, muffling a choking sob with all his might. By the time any of his crew could glance at him, he had recomposed himself. The man named Iddi was already dead. All that was left was the Rear Admiral. This Rear Admiral looked at the situation, and did the math. Retreat was impossible. The enemy would not accept a surrender. Thus, the only contribution that the assets under his command could make to the war effort was to make the cost of mission-killing them as high as possible. The Rear Admiral looked at his officers in the operations room. Already dead.

He thought of the millions of people on the habitat, and throughout the system. Already dead.

Every single person in this system died the moment the Ivos entered the system.

The ghost of the man called Iddi drifted away, and the Rear Admiral watched the Enemy as their fleet came closer. He gave his order.

"All assets, weapons free."

The Ivos were still well beyond maximum range, but the human ships maneuvered into formation and loosed a volley of hypervelocity rounds from their spinal mounts, following it up with a deluge of gauss cannon and railgun fire. The defense platforms oriented themselves to aim their own hypervelocity cannons, and they fired them, along with their own gauss cannons and rail guns. The deluge of fire was largely ineffective, the larger rounds being vaporized by point defenses and the smaller being easily avoided.

Not enough.

"Focus all fire on the battleship...at the top of the formation!" the Rear Admiral ordered, selecting his target. Take down one high-value target with the last of their power. It was the only move to make. The deluge of kinetic energy focused down on the single battle ship. Overlapping point defense fire made it of minimal impact, but the less nimble battleship struggled to avoid the incoming hypervelocity rounds. It began to take damage.

"One minute until beam weapon range!" the increasingly strained voice of the tactical officer called.

"Do not stop firing under any circumstances." the Rear Admiral ordered calmly.

The fire grew more accurate as the range closed, and the point defenses couldn't keep up. The Battleship began to burn to slow down, but it was too late. It was cored by a hypervelocity round, and its engines cut. It drifted, falling behind the enemy ships.

"Enemy fleet in beam weapon range!" the tactical officer didn't bother to hide his fear. The battle ended in a scant few seconds. One moment, the defenses were firing with every weapon they had, the next the were all scorched into silence by beam weapons.

From the now defenseless Sapphire Habitat, the Rear Admiral died, and Iddi was resurrected for a final few moments.

"It has been an honor." Iddi said simply.

The only response was grim silence, punctuated by a few sobs of abject despair.

The man called Iddi leaned back in his chair, his entire body trembling with a primal fear that was more ancient than humanity itself.

A squadron of Ivo frigates burned ahead of the now-drifting main fleet. They took up multiple angles of fire, and ripped Sapphire habitat apart with their main guns. The massive, spinning cylinder was devastated. Those few who weren't cooked alive in the blast were flattened against the walls as the pieces of the habitat were violently jerked in half a dozen directions.

Other elements of the Ivo fleet burned for the disparate space stations and outposts that made up the rest of the former nation known as Sapphire. In less than a day the nation of Sapphire, an entire human culture, was completely destroyed by the Ivos, never to return.

It would not be the last.