The Celestial Host’s strategy was simple. Host forces, led by an Umael, would defold into the target system, annihilate their defensive fleet, and disgorge a regiment or more of troops.
A typical Celestial Host soldier was equipped with heavy armor and good weapons, and were well-trained and motivated. Their elites were equipped with powered armor and what would be crew-served weapons for unenhanced men, with absolutely top-end training and experience and unshakeable morale. They marched proudly across the battlefield killing everything that opposed them like avenging angels of death.
Lower-end Host troops weren’t so well off. They usually had a rifle and pistol, light armor, and were given the most rudimentary of training – some units of questionable loyalty like recent converts were lucky if they were allowed to expend a few magazines in training before being dropped into a hot zone at the leading edge of the front line.
Essentially, the fanatical Host Guard would advance behind a mass of disposable cannon fodder. Trapped between the enemy forces and their own troops, they were in an unenviable position. Things weren’t quite as grim as the battle of Stalingrad with every other man being issued a rifle with the second man expected to pick it up when the first was killed, but it was close. It was little comfort when their Host Guard were about as bloodthirsty as Soviet commissars though.
This worked well against most planetary defense forces and their soldiers drawn from the general population, often poorly trained at best. In order to preserve secrecy of their most useful advances, the Alliance kept their most important technologies in elite Patrol units rather than distributing them to the rank and file, which contributed to the poor performance of planetary defense forces.
Once a planet was conquered, the Host would set up factory satellites as they had on Sonoziel, each replenishing the supplies used to take the planet and equipping reinforcements. Most of the surviving PDF troops were placed in slave companies led by specially-trained Host Commanders who were known for extreme brutality in punishing even the most minor offenses. Corporal punishment and summary execution were common, and these troops feared their new leaders more than the Alliance forces they fought. While there were a few incidents of former PDF troops rebelling successfully or surrendering after their leader was killed by Alliance forces, standard procedure called for an orbital strike if a slave company’s commander was incapacitated.
Host factory satellites also produced starships. While it took thirty years to build an Umael from the keel up and their manufacture was limited to Sonoziel’s shipyards as a result, smaller starships could be produced quickly enough to replace losses and increase the fleet’s overall size. This was especially true of planetary defense satellites. Ironically, these factory satellites would be the key to the Alliance’s long-term victory.
Celestial Host forces succeeded in conquering nearly half of the colonized worlds that then formed the Alliance, slaughtering millions and converting millions more into brainwashed janissaries.
The Patrol was almost annihilated in the process, losing hundreds of ships and thousands of men. One Captain famously said to a reporter “Decimated? I wish they were merely decimating us! This is genocide!”
Then the first purpose-built Patrol craft appeared on the scene. Combining the best technology the surviving Alliance worlds could produce (most notably, the first 1,200c drives and the reactors to power them), the lessons learned by their early defeats (among other things, the value of organic fighter and gunboat support) with the best surviving Patrol officers and crews, they were eventually able to turn things around. Having seen firsthand what the Celestial Host’s ships were capable of, these Patrol groups used their superior mobility to attack lone Host vessels with packs of their own ships.
Despite the Umael’s legendary durability, the Patrol figured out how to make them stay dead. After the third time they thought they had destroyed the Tiphareth, Patrol Captains typically finished off a crippled Umael by setting off nuclear scuttling charges. Failing that, they would tow the hulk into a collision course with a star or planet, preferably a Jupiter-type gas giant or greenhouse like Venus. Once a ship was destroyed and they were sure it was, they would reform and head for the next sighting, often making extensive repairs while in warp space.
Where the Host had superior manufacturing and numbers, the Alliance was smarter and more flexible. The Host was fielding nearly-indestructible starships full of fanatically loyal genetically-engineered and well-equipped troops versed in basic infantry tactics. The Alliance had vastly superior stealth and computer technology as well as scientists largely free of ideological constraints on their research.
Two technologies would turn the tide of the war, stealth and computer science.
After a few Patrol ships were heavily damaged attempting an attack on a Host manufacturing hub, their Captains worked with their sponsors to make their ships as stealthy as possible. What they didn’t realize was the Host’s planners had placed so much emphasis on superior firepower and superheavy armor, they had nothing but contempt for stealth. It’s easy to overlook its importance when your main fleet assets are enormous nearly-indestructible bricks bristling with weapon emplacements and your infantry are largely bulletproof and operate in numbers capable of razing a city. These Captains took their newly-invisible ships back to that manufacturing hub and much to their surprise flew right up to it. A quick barrage of anti-station nuclear torpedoes later, and that hub was no more. Later, they boarded one of these factories and made a copy of its mainframe’s software before overloading its reactor. Analysis of this software revealed several exploitable holes in its security.
After these discoveries were made, special Patrol units would use stealthed ships to sneak into Host-controlled systems and break into their factory satellites. These satellites were largely computer-controlled, with only a relatively small number of technical staff aboard to keep things running. Once aboard, Patrol boarding parties would make short work of these technicians and quickly hack the main computer to patch in a new Alliance operating system, repurposing the factory to produce materiel for the Patrol. This included the Host’s own automated planetary defense ships, which were used to great effect destroying the Host’s defenses in that system.
Once they had a way to retake systems without prohibitive losses, the Alliance could shift its focus to the offensive. Every factory hacked slowed down the Host’s resupply and allowed the Patrol to replace lost ships and other equipment. Every factory so repurposed also produced the means to retake the system it occupied and defend it from recapture. Every system retaken invariably yielded former Host slaves ready and eager to take their revenge as ground forces or starship crew.
The Patrol took almost no prisoners, preferring to reduce a Host ship to a cloud of fist-sized wreckage and incandescent vapor, then shoot any escape pods they saw; most attempts to take prisoners turned into a Patrol ship being boarded by the people they were attempting to capture, and the Host’s elite infantry were some of the best human troops ever fielded. Losses on both sides were horrendous, but in the end the Patrol beat them back to Sonoziel.
The Battle of Sonoziel
In AY 342, the Patrol finally succeeded in driving the Celestial Host back to their homeworld. Unfortunately, the Patrol had been doing most of its fighting in or from space – they were destroying Celestial Host assault ships and performing orbital bombardments against Host ground forces. They were almost completely unequipped to deal with a protracted land war. So they didn’t.
During the battle of Sonoziel, the Patrol served almost entirely as a blockading and escort force. Patrol ships escorted the troop transports loaded with PDF troops and the cargo ships full of PDF materiel. Patrol ships also provided devastating support fire for these same troops once they landed.
At first, the Alliance tried everything they could to end the war with minimal casualties among Sonoziel’s population. Orbital strikes were limited to targets away from population centers, and nuclear weapons were almost completely eschewed except when it involved making sure an Umael understood dead meant dead. Conventional ground forces were used in attempts to take strategic points. They made some significant inroads, until the Sonoziel commanders started placing their military assets in the middle of cities. This stopped most of the Patrol’s close-support fire, but it still allowed the ground forces to do their work.
It worked until the Host started using suicide bombers. Every time Alliance ground troops entered a city, they would be attacked by civilians carrying more explosives than an artillery shell. The Alliance troops couldn’t fire indiscriminately on civilians, especially since some were trying to surrender, often carrying surgically implanted bombs.
The battle raged for two years and finally ended when the leaders detonated the stardrives of the last five assault craft, leaving only a hemispherical hole nearly two hundred kilometers in diameter where the capitol had been. In the space of a few seconds, the capitol and surrounding area simply disintegrated, followed by massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Refugee camps were hastily set up to deal with the survivors. Rescue operations were severely hampered by suicide attacks, both bombers (some unwilling with surgically implanted bombs) and conventional troops. Between the existing ill will toward the people of Sonoziel, constant attacks, and the conditions on the planet, they only managed to get a few million people off the planet. When the transport Lao Tzu was destroyed under mysterious circumstances in the upper stratosphere, the rescue operations ended. All that is known of the Lao Tzu’s final moments is that it seemed to be a perfectly routine liftoff, an explosion crippled the engines, and it broke up with no survivors.
Centuries later the planet has still not recovered.
Sonoziel Today
Between the Patrol’s savage bombardment and the aftereffects of the capitol’s suicide, Sonoziel is a dead world. The atmosphere is full of radioactive dust, oxygen levels are too low to support humans and drop every year, what topsoil wasn’t burned away is contaminated with fallout, and the oceans are poisoned. Since the planet itself was never very resource-rich to begin with and most of the Alliance has an almost superstitious dread of the planet, it was abandoned. The only people who go there are archaeologists and treasure hunters looking to loot what remains of the Host’s cities or installations. Every few years someone throws together an expedition, but aside from piles of raw data and failed hypotheses never get much of anything useful.
Notable surface features include the crater where the Capitol had been and its radial crust cracks, some reaching into the mantle, and assorted wreckage of cities and beached Umaels. Almost no surface structures of any note remain standing.
None of the Umael wrecks are salvageable, the Patrol made sure of that with repeated nuclear strikes and kilotons of conventional ordnance. A few of them could have holds full of ancient Celestial Host equipment in varying states of repair. Any surviving equipment would also be highly-contaminated, as salvage teams have discovered on several occasions. Between its relatively primitive technology and the expense of finding, transporting and decontaminating it, very few paramilitary forces have attempted to equip themselves in such a manner – even the most impoverished void pirate cartel can do better. It is appreciably cheaper and easier simply to purchase better equipment from one of the many suppliers in the Alliance than organize an expedition. Even collectors aren’t willing to pay very much for it; so much equipment was salvaged during the war it is common enough to be barely worthy of antique status. This volume of salvage also resulted in Celestial Host equipment entering automated factory databases across the Alliance; why risk the conditions on Sonoziel when you can download the plans and plug them into your mechanic’s parts fabricator?