War for Sol

2166: Miners in the Kuiper belt find a pod lodged into an asteroid, and disturb the Explorae of the Rin Empire. They accidentally woke him up, and he reactivated a dormant stargate in the Kuiper belt to call for help. A Rin scout fleet was able to bypass the Kuiper defensive line. War for Sol begins.

2166: First portion of the War for Sol begins. Despite the fact that the Alliance’s navy was far more numerous than the Rin’s scout fleet, the Rin were able to get through the fleet defending Neptune with ease, showing the Terrans that they would definitely need to rethink their battle strategy. The Rin smashed aside the comparatively minimal defences of the Kuiper Belt, Neptune, and Uranus. The defences of the Saturn shipyard managed to barely fend off the Rin from those colonies, though the second assault managed to destroy the shipyard and allow access to the Saturn colonies, which had been evacuated. The Alliance pleaded with the Murrcioun Syndicates to send help, but the Syndicate said they had a war of their own to fight, and wished the Alliance the best of luck. The Rin fleet began to call in reinforcements from the stargate, and pushed forward toward Mars, as Jupiter was at an inopportune position in its orbit at the time. This time, the Alliance did not bother to commit fleet assets to the battle, rather relying upon surface-to-orbit cannons and missile systems to defend from the Rin fleet. The fleet took casualties, but targeted and destroyed the surface defenses with concentrated bombardments. They made landing with troops and armoured units, only to find that the Terran forces had survived the bombardment. They had expected their barracks and bases to be attacked, and so their ground assets were moved into the cities and the countryside, where they put up a valiant defense for the planet. The Terran situation was further aided by the fact that the nefarious Naval Intelligence made their base on Deimos. Even so, the Rin’s superior technology drove the Terran resistance off of Mars and into the forests and mountains. Even more worrying, the stargate had just disgorged a massive vessel, a Titan class vessel, moving toward Terra, joined by even more Rin ships. Apparently, Sol had been giving them more problems than the Rin had hoped.

2167: At this point, some people had fled Alliance space, believing the end to be nigh. Desperate to stop the influx of Rin reinforcements, Naval Intelligence elite Blackwatch Praetorians make a daring clandestine raid, in an attempt to destroy the Rin stargate. It is not entirely know how they did it (actually, aid was granted by the enigmatic Ghosts of Creuss, though they did not make it known at the time), but the stargate was not just deactivated, it actually suffered a substantial critical failure and blew up (for lack of a better term), taking the defending Rin fleet with it. Those Rin forces within Sol were stranded. That was still a lot of Rin, however. The Titan vessel, called Dies Irae, was heading to Terra with a substantial fleet. A portion of this fleet split off to attack the colonies on Jupiter. However, this fleet was defeated by the T.S.S. Valiant and the fleet it commanded. The Valiant then led its fleet toward Terra, where the Battle of Terra had begun. The orbital battle was fierce, but the Terran fleet, led by the T.S.S. Enterprise which sustained nasty damage, was forced to retreat to the other side of the planet by the inexorable force of the Rin fleet and their Titan. The Rin fleet then began to bombard the Eurasian area for a full 5 days, hoping to weaken them and take their home planet. But the Terrans were tenacious, and they did not give up. For a while, the Alliance had been constructing a new weapon in London: a long range surface-to-space laser made from bleeding edge technology given to them by the Murrcioun. When these weapons were finally complete, the repaired and upgraded Enterprise led its fleet around to attack, joined almost immediately by the Valiant and its fleet. A second fearsome battle occurred, and the fight was aided by streaking red lasers from the surface. Over the course of the battle, the Dies Irae reaped a bloody harvest, but it was eventually laid low by the Enterprise, which sacrificed itself by ramming the Titan right in the bridge. Both vessels were shattered by the attack, however the commander of the Rin forces, a man named Victor Gius Ceaser was able to escape to Mars. The Terran fleet was from that point on led from the Valiant, and it continued as the only Terran vessel that could actually match a Rin cruiser in a toe-to-toe fight. The Rin forces knew that the only chance they had to win was if they destroyed those orbital batteries, and they launched every ground asset remaining in the fleet at London. But the Alliance had prepared for this. The battle lasted only a day and a half longer, as Rin vessels were faced with esoteric Terran prism tanks, and the incredible morale of the Terran armies. The Battle for Terra lasted 6 and a half days, and at the end, the Rin forces had either been destroyed, retreated, or in the case of ground units, surrendered.

2167: The War for Sol continued. The Valiant remained in orbit around Terra, defending the last functioning Terran shipyard in the Sol system. The Rin had made landing on Luna, but were prevented from advancing on the light side of the moon by Alliance defences, including the long range surface laser batteries in London which were more than capable of targeting assets on Terra’s moon. The Alliance turned its attention to liberating Mars, where their resistance was committing many terrorist style attacks on the Rin. The Rin commander, Victor Gius Ceaser, was present on the planet, but the Naval Intelligence HQ was also there, and they made nearly 200 assassination attempts on him during his time there. He defeated or evaded each one. The Empire had acquired the infrastructure of most of the planets and moons they had captured, but industry was slow going, given Alliance resistance and the fact that Terran slaves are quite uncooperative. The Alliance had their industry… Or what was left of it. They had lost many assets and resources in the war. All they had access to was Terra, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter. As such, taking back the moons of Saturn was very high on the priority list, on par with getting help to the Resistance on Mars. The Rin had blockaded the planet, and it was very difficult to get help to the surface. It took two years for the Alliance to finally break the blockade and commit ground assets to Mars. It was named after the Roman god of war, and it is only fitting that this planet should host the deadliest fight of the entire war. It took the Terran Alliance seven years to drive the Rin off of Mars, and even then their commander managed to slip through their grasp. With the reconquest of Mars, Luna was well and truly cut off from the rest of the Rin, and the Alliance retook the dark side. They then charged onward to Saturn, only to find it surprisingly sparsely defended. Not only that, but the colonies and shipyards had been destroyed. The Rin Empire had apparently wanted to both retreat to Uranus and Neptune, and get the Alliance to show their hand while also denying them their prize. Apparently, The Rin considered Uranus and Neptune to be proper Imperial colonies, and the Alliance found this insulting in the extreme. They consolidated their ownership of Saturn and began reconstruction (after all, the Rin had not undone the terraforming), and advanced on Uranus and Neptune. However, the Alliance had rather underestimated exactly how many Rin Empire fleet and ground assets remained. The Rin now dwarfed the Terran fleet in both size and power, and the ground assets were considerable as well. But the Terrans were about to receive an unexpected boon.

2176: A fleet is detected on the edge of the Kuiper Belt, and it immediately makes for Saturn. The Terran fleet based there was shocked to find other Alliance ships. It appears that while the five systems beyond Terra had been told not to enter the Sol system, they had belayed that order. Now, none of them had much capacity to make warships or tanks, and were forced to build that first, so the fleet sent to bolster the defenders of Sol was small. However, there was one bonus: the Murrcioun had not forgotten about the Terrans, and had sent a single Murrcioun battleship in exchange for quite a lot of money, trade goods, and trade pacts which favoured the Murrcioun. Regardless, the Terran Alliance graciously accepted, and the newly bolstered Terran fleet charged into battle with the Murrcioun battleship, known as the Inu. Even with these new assets and ally, the Rin were vicious, cutthroat, and powerful. It took a full five more years of continuous battle which saw the destruction of both the Inu and the Valiant before Victor Gius Ceaser finally surrendered.

2181: The end of the War for Sol. The Rin’s surrender is accepted. The great purging begins, where the Terran Alliance scours the Sol system clean of any evidence of their enemy’s occupation. Every scrap of Rin culture is destroyed, and the damage to Terra is healed. The PoWs placed in the hands of Naval Intelligence vanish. The war lives on only in the history books, memorials to great Terran heroes, and the minds of those who witnessed it.