Battle of Sirius

Part of the First Galactic War

> Mother Russia may be gone, but her grave lies on Terra, and we will not allow mere machines to defile her resting place.
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Patriarch Adrian II

## Background

The Battle of Sirius was a decisive engagement of the First Galactic War that took place in the Sirius System, the primary shipyard and expeditionary headquarters of Fleet Command which had been seized by the NEX Network. It is one of the few battles in GTU history to be attributed to a single Terran commissariat. The seizure of Sirius cut off Earth from the outer rim, counted among which was the Aurora Commissariat, a region settled largely by slavic humans that sought to create a new home where their culture could survive. With the fall of Sirius to the NEX, access to earth was severed. With no communication possible, Commissar General Vitaly Alexandrakov invoked condition black through the commissariat. The order was approved by Admiral Robert Nyves, commander of the Fleet Command contingent in the sector.

## Campaign

With Condition Black declared, the shipyards of Rodina began an emergency construction of corvettes and destroyers to augment the garrisoned cruisers and battleships assigned to the sector. Volga, the system primary planet was largely a research and cultural world with fabrication done in nearby systems. As consequence, when the NEX Virus began to manifest the commissariat capital was unaffected, along with the garrison expeditionary fleet in orbit which had up to that point been largely unmanned as part of cost saving measures enacted by the high marshal's following the Terran-Florian War. The ships were crewed in a rushed basis by new recruits and veterans of previous conflicts that had retired to the region following their military service.

With ships in hand, Admiral Nyves moved decisively against the pockets of Nex adjacent to the commissariat capital. With the approval Alexandrakov, the great industrial nodes of Vistula, a major industrial manufacturing system that was seized by NEX was bombarded with heavy kinetic strikes after it was determined the risk of attempting to save the factory workers was too great to the rest of the sector capital. With the sector now secure, the Scratch fleet was left without an immediate mission. A fierce debate insued between senior officers as to what the next course of action should be with no conclusion reached. It was at this point the Patriarch of Novaya Moscova, Adrian Kozlovkov who held a largely ceremonial religious position tolerated by the GTU writ large decreed that the NEX were abomination upon the face of creation, and that it could not be tolerated for them to profane the sacred places of humanity. In particular, the sacred homeland of the people that had established the Aurora Commissariat in the first place.

With fierce zeal and a religious devotion that alarmed the local GTU intelligence bureau, the officers and ratings of the garrison fleet demanded an immediate "crusade" towards Earth. Admiral Nyves, bowed to the inevitable. With no orders from earth and the very real possibility of mutiny, he acceded to the demands and ordered his fleet to advance on Earth. In their path lay the great Sirius shipyards.

## Battle and Aftermath

The NEX Virus, for all its intelligence, was not imaginative. Its strategy relied solely upon the information provided to it by the ones who unleashed it, and what it managed to pick up along the way. Later forensic analysis by terran military intelligence would show that NEX had concluded that such an authoritarian and centralized state as the GTU would fall apart without access to the central authorities in its capital. The sudden arrival of what could only be described as a religious crusade in the System it had gained firm control over from a rim sector it had discounted as a secondary target to be dealt with later caused a hard crash in its logic engine. Made all the worse by the fact that most of the warships the NEX had constructed using the Sirius shipyard had been put into use to lay siege to the Sol System which remained stubbornly defended by the Terran Home Fleet.

The forces of the Aurora Commissariat tore into the lightly defended Sirius Shipyards, rapidly seizing the central control station. With its capture, the warships laying siege to Sol lost contact with the network and were rapidly destroyed by the Home Fleet. The subsequent landing on Arkadia by Land Forces from Rodina was seen as a miracle by the survivors of the planet which had endured months of ruthless extermination campaigns by NEX terminator robots. Barely stopping to take stock, the Aurora fleet made transit down the hyperlane to Sol where they encounted the massed force of the Home Fleet and their incredulous officers and sailors. The transit of the forces from Rodina to Sol was met with utter jubilation in the system, and a national holiday was declared known as salvation day. The incident also led to a huge spike in conversions to the orthodox religion, which central intelligence has been monitoring closely for any sign of potential subversive doctrine.

As for Admiral Nyves and Commisar General Alexandrakov, the Marshalls ordered them recalled to Terra for "consultations". Alexandrakov would eventually be granted a seat as a Marshall following the mass resignation of sitting Marshals in the wake of the disastrous Battle of Xukkanis. Admiral Nyves, despite the highly commendable nature of his victory was stripped of his command by a review board of his fellow Admirals. A flag officer that allowed his actions to be dictated by mere enlisted sailors could not be tolerated. The subsequent success was insufficient to be overlooked. He was assigned to the Doria System to oversee mining operations and after six months on the job perished in a tragic accident involving a mineral bore and an airlock.