Skirmish at Relay 314
From FABT
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5 November 2157 CE | ||||||||||||||||
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Relay 314 / Remembrance / Starry Steppes | ||||||||||||||||
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Pyrrhic Alliance victory
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The Skirmish at Relay 314, and sometimes as the Battle of Relay 314 by the Alliance, was a brief exchange between elements of the Alliance Second Fleet under the direct command of the German admiral Kastanie Drescher and the Relay 314 Patrol under turian commodore Tertius Umborius following the Relay 314 massacre, and is considered the first proper military action of the First Contact War. Immediately after the massacre, Commodore Umborius had his patrol remain within the Remembrance system to guard Relay 314 and to survey the wreckage of the destroyed human fleet. Umborius reported the incident to his superiors, detailing in his report that he had engaged and destroyed a large force of unidentified vessels, originating from a then-uncharted region of space. The Commune of the Armed Forces concluded that Umborious had botched a first contact situation, but that they needed to quickly end the inevitable war he had started quickly and without fuss. Septimus Oraka agreed to take personal command of the Hierarchy Twelfth Fleet as it was dispatched to Relay 314, where he would relieve Umborius of command before deciding where to go from there. Umborius' report also mentioned that only a few of the ships had been armed, leading Oraka to conclude that the force had largely been civilian, suggesting a minimal military presence. As such, a retaliatory strike was probable, but not likely, and so Umborius was instructed to maintain position and continue conducting long-range scans and to report any irregular activity.
The Alliance's response was quick, given how stretched out their forces were at the time. Able to assemble the fastest and largely already within the region, Fleet Admiral Drescher's Second Fleet was put in charge of mobilizing a rapid response to the incident. Ordered to assemble at Shanxi, the most probable location for the next attack due to its proximity to Relay 314, Drescher was to recon and monitor the enemy force, reporting back positions, enemy capabilities, and ship movements. A sizable portion of the Second Fleet arrived over Shanxi on 5 November, five days after the original incident, with the rest on the way from existing deployments. Drescher, not wanting to waste time waiting for the rest of her forces to arrive, assembled a 27 ship-strong monitoring group and leaving for the Remembrance system, which was less than three hours away by the Alliance's early FTL technology. Not wanting to leave Shanxi unprotected, Drescher left her flagship, the Everest-class dreadnought SSV Fuji, over Shanxi and transferred her command to the Saratoga-class light cruiser SSV Manzikert for the mission. Upon arriving in Remembrance, Drescher found the reported 15 strong force, but was surprised to find a lack of reinforcements, suggesting to her that the patrol was either still waiting on those reinforcements to arrive or was acting alone. Surmizing that her forces outnumbered the turians, Drescher chose to attack.
Unlike the more elaborate tactics used in later battles, the Skirmish at Relay 314 was a simplistic exchange of both sides taking turns to throw punches at each other over several thousand kilometers. Drescher's lack of experience in fighting the turians, including Umborius' arrogance in expecting the enemy force to be a pushover and that his ships could afford to take the hits, led to both sides preferring a simple exchange of gunfire over elaborate tactics or displays of strategic prowess. In the end however, Drescher's numbers also added up to twice as much firepower, leading to the superior shielding of the turians being rendered irrelevant, the overlapping fields of fire stripping them rapidly before tearing the vessels asunder. In the end, Umborius didn't realize his situation before it was too late and too many of his ships had been lost. Umborious' own ship was destroyed towards the end of the exchange, and less than 15 minutes later, the entire Relay 314 Patrol had been wiped out. However, the damage was not entirely one-sided, and Drescher's attack had led to her own forces incurring losses that far exceeded the total worth of winning the engagement. In total, Drescher's force lost 18 ships, with 4 others ranging from slightly damaged having to be towed back. As they limped back to Shanxi, an additional 2 ships were lost, having to be abandoned due to one having failing life support and another's drive core being shut down to avoid a plant meltdown. In the end, both ships were scuttled, leading to total losses from the battle being 20 ships: 74% of Drescher's force. Due to the Alliance's thinned out resources, and the forces available to Drescher, the victory was considered far too costly to have been worth it.
When the Twelfth Fleet arrived at Relay 314, Oraka discovered the aftermath of the battle, scouring the debris field for survivors and attempting to contact any surviving ships. It was here that Septimus realized that his new enemy was more resourceful than initially predicted, and with Umborious dead, his orders to arrest him were rendered void. With a mandate straight from the Primarch to win and end the war as soon and as discreetly as possible, Septimus made plans for his main offensive campaign against the humans, which would culminate with the beginning of the Shanxi campaign on 10 November, under a week later.