Battle of Spiro-108

The Battle of Spiro-108 was a major engagement during the Human-Covenant War.
==History==
===Prelude===
Several days before the battle during a classified mission, an ONI prowler tracked a Covenant battle group entering slipspace. They tracked their slipspace vector and determined that its destination was the Spiro-108 system. Local forces were notified and placed on high alert. CENTCOM gathered what ships they had in the area and a force of thirteen Gladius-class heavy corvettes, one Ulysses-class heavy cruiser, and two Gorgon-class heavy destroyers was assembled.
===The Battle===
On February 16th, 2528, four CCS-class battlecruisers exited slipspace within ONI’s estimated projections. Upon arrival, the Covenant fleet transmitted one cryptic message “Your destruction is the will of the gods”, and immediately charged up their weapons and fired their energy projectors, destroying the corvettes Tigershark, Bargreen, Volga, and Trident in quick succession. In the opening salvo the UNSC had lost a quarter of their fleet. The UNSC battle group returned fire with a full volley of MAC rounds and Archer missiles. Most of the missiles were shot down before they could hit while all MAC rounds struck the advancing ships, but nothing pierced their energy shields. 
Both fleets were now firing at will, the Covenant’s plasma torpedoes were destroying their ships in one shot and the UNSC was losing more ships to each salvo. The UNSC Derringer, Botswana, Gordon, Boulder, Yorktown, and Timbuktu were all destroyed. It quickly became apparent to the UNSC that they did not have the firepower to stop them. To make matters worse they had no nuclear weapons available to speak of. Even their MAC cannons were ineffective against the Covenant’s shields as their ships continued to shrug off their MAC rounds. Then the heavy destroyers, Tornado and Nike, were destroyed by another volley of plasma weapons, along with the corvette Geraint, bringing their total sustained combat losses up to more than 80%. 
As battle's situation turned critical, the battle group's commanding officer was about to order a retreat when the Volkov was struck by a plasma torpedo, taking its MAC cannon offline. With the situation now completely untenable, the remainder of the UNSC fleet beat a hasty retreat into slipspace.
Out of a fleet of sixteen ships, only three survived, two corvettes, the Sigrid and Zama, and the badly damaged Volkov. The Covenant suffered no significant losses in the battle and with the UNSC fleet in retreat proceeded to begin glassing the colonies in the system.
Category:Battles
Category:Battles of the Human-Covenant War
Category:Human-Covenant War