Chapter 6: Attack with full Force

According to Salen Kotch, Mars should have built a blockade of Earth, leaving the planet without food or water and without the resources to build guns and warships. But it didn't work out that way. First, Earth's orbital defences were not shut down as planned, leading to a firefight in Earth's high-altitude orbit between the Martian fleet and his lunar raid, which was thwarted by the Retribution with its Damage Control skill point.

Salen Kotch wanted to grab whoever it was by the collar and ask why his plan had failed, but he couldn't because he was the supreme commander of the Eighth Fleet and he could just shoot a few senior generals to pay for the previous failure, but what happened after that?

Lamenting the fact that his men were a bunch of reckless men full of fighting and killing, Salen Kotch could only turn his attention to the screen in front of him.

In less than two days, the Eighth Fleet had lost more than 100,000 men, but many good men had emerged from those who had survived, especially during the moon raid, when nearly sixty ace pilots had been added to the Eighth Fleet.

These ace pilots could provide ample backup for a fleet command that had suffered heavy losses, and with some training in a military academy could become very good captain candidates.

Of course, this is in wartime, so don't even think about training or anything, just award a rank and move on to the front lines!

.... ...... ...... ...

Saturn Domain

After Titan, which had been an important source of fuel for Earth, had changed its surname to Mars two years ago, Earth had been losing control of the Saturn domain, and the methane produced by Titan had become the catalyst for the Martian war machine.

Ethan stood by the bridge of the Poseidon carrier, staring down at the thick cloud of air masses below the ship, tens of millions of volts of lightning streaking through the clouds from time to time, mapping out the tawny light.

Below the clouds was a completely different scene from the calm Ethan had seen before, lightning fell from the sky in long trails, and a fierce wind laced with tawny ammonia puffed and almost clung to the surface of the battleship.

On the ground, steep valleys and strange rocks stood out, and there was hardly a plain in sight, only a curtain of ammonia rushing down the slopes, and a thick pipe sticking out of it like a giant snake weaving through these valleys.

Titan is currently the most important energy base on Mars, producing the methane fuel that supplies every aspect of the planet and, because of its harsh environment, is also an important experimental base for the Mars Institute for Space Research.

Not long ago, Ethan had met Salen Kotch as he had hoped, except that the latter had merely gathered a group of outstanding officers together for a few words of the ceremony and then after one had an extra star on his shoulder, these newly promoted new bloods were sent to Titan.

Because of the successive defeats at the hands of the Punishment's elite flight squadron, Salen Kotch had to order the labs on Titan to mass-produce the new experimental Super Gale, coupled with ace pilots, expecting to use this against the UNSA, and Ethan had the honour of being one of the first pilots to receive the fighter.

"Sir, we're here!" Just as Ethan was still looking out the window at the rain of ammonia that had formed a line, a squad of heavily armed assault soldiers walked in outside the bridge and saluted the captain on the semi-floating bridge.

"Very well Captain, we will be receiving a shipment of classified information later and I need you and your marines to stand guard at the depot every inch of the way until we reach Mars! Understood?"

"Yes, sir! We'll be at the warehouse to the death!" The Marines replied loudly.

And Ethan, after the Marines had left, walked up to the Captain as if he hadn't noticed, and made his own request to go down and have a look.

Because of Ethan's own status as a pilot, the captain didn't think much of it, assuming that the other man just wanted to see the new fighter sooner, and nodded in agreement to Ethan's request.

As soon as Ethan was dressed, he went straight to the hangar and watched as the flatbed trucks brought in several of the more sci-fi looking Super Rapids, but what none of the soldiers there noticed was that Ethan's eyes were fixed on the dark green safe that was being carried into the hangar by some robots on the other side and then sent to the next warehouse.

It was not clear what was in there, but Ethan knew that it must be something good, because during the handover from the lab personnel, Ethan had also heard instructions about moisture-proofing and such, indicating that what was in the safe was probably classified documents, paper documents that only the Institute had, and as to why they were being transported via warships, there was a good chance that these classified documents would be intercepted by Earth's deep space sensors if they were transmitted via signal. And the thick gas cloud map on Titan would also intercept the signal transmission.

Determined to find out what was inside, Ethan stayed in the hangar after the handover, surveying the fighters and chatting with a few of the new ground crew on board.

A few cigarettes and a mind wash later, the ground crew immediately befriended Ethan, and Ethan found out exactly what was in that box.

A batch of handmade drawings for the Berserker and hyperspace engines, all of which were highly classified and should have been sent back to Mars to be sealed at the beginning of the war, but the transport was two days late because Salen Kotch had withdrawn all the combat ships to carry out the battle plan.

Having obtained specific information about the materials, Ethan immediately had a daring plan to seize the classified documents.

Once he had confirmed his target, Ethan immediately began to formulate a plan, there was less than a thousand personnel on the carrier, and less than two hundred combatants, and even less than twenty marines guarding the warehouse. The recharge was complete, and the supplies he carried on himself would be perfectly fine to last through that time.

The carrier would only take a day to reach Mars from Titan, so Ethan decided to do it while the crew rested for the night, only, to his surprise, he didn't seem to be the only one with his eye on the carrier!

A sudden burst of dazzling electric arcs burst into the empty and endless space of the universe, spreading more and more densely until a few seconds later, a huge object suddenly appeared in this universe.

This behemoth was the carrier Poseidon, which had just come out of its leap state for a routine check, as the leap technology on Mars was not yet mature and the cooling system needed some time to recover, i.e. the new engines of the Olympus Mountain could make long or multiple short leaps, for example from Mars straight to Earth and then back again from Earth directly to Mars.

The captain of the Poseidon, also a veteran of the last great war, was familiar with the emergency procedures of the battleship, and just after Poseidon had jumped out of the leap, he ordered the marines to leave the ship with their jetpacks and search the meteorite belt that strayed to the sides of the battleship.

"Anything?"

"Report sir, this is Marine One, no emergencies at this time!"

"Very well, remain alert, we need to conduct another ten minutes of detection!"

"Yes!"

Only neither the alert Marine soldiers nor the sensors on the battleship noticed that two very small meteorites were slowly breaking away from the meteorite belt and flying towards the battleship, perhaps they noticed something was wrong but didn't get suspicious because it was so common to see meteorites floating around in meteorites.

.........

The captain of the USS Punishment and commander of the scar team, Colonel Reyes, was currently holding his breath as he watched the huge shadow approaching overhead, next to him was his good buddy Captain Sautel and his little fanboy codename Ethan the E3N tactical droid and Staff Sergeant Omar of the Marines, a small team that had been lurking in the meteorite belt for over three hours, just a short time ago, just after the siege of the moon They had received a report from Earth that a Martian carrier would be passing through the area with prototype weapons, so the Punishment arrived first, dropped the team off and left, waiting for the four Reyes men to successfully board the ship, Ethan would give the signal, then the Punishment would jump into the airspace, complete the raid, grab the prototype weapons and leave quickly.

The plan went so smoothly that the Martians were unaware of their little manoeuvre, and the four of them reached an emergency repair tunnel in the belly of the Poseidon carrier without a hitch.

Ethan, a robot with natural powers, easily ripped open the sealed ramp door of the maintenance tunnel, and the remaining three entered, successfully infiltrating the Poseidon.

"Okay, we cripple the battleship engines, then call the Punishment in, and finally get the weapons and information and pat ourselves on the back, how's that, all clear?" Once inside the battleship, Reyes couldn't wait to make his plan clear to the others.

Naturally, the others took it in stride, even if Reyes said that everyone would follow him to Mars to assassinate Salen Kotch, his minions would have gladly accepted.

But Ethan didn't know that someone else was after the classified information he had already ordered, he was in his room packing his weapons and equipment, he planned to do it once the ship entered the leap.

Only what he didn't expect was that he hadn't gone halfway when suddenly there was a dull explosion from deep within the battleship, followed by a buzzing sound as the entire carrier went offline.

"We have an enemy on board, all hands to battle stations, activate the alert droids and destroy them!" The red emergency lights went off accompanied by the annoyed roar of the carrier's captain, then the whole ship tumbled like boiling water that had just been boiled, heavily armed marines and sailors with tools at their disposal swarmed to the engine room, and crackling gunfire and explosions came from that direction in quick succession.

"A good man lives in peace!" Ethan, who was having a headache over the sheer number of sailors in the hangar, was overjoyed and hurriedly watched the soldiers leave their posts. Instead, he himself ran in the opposite direction towards the carrier hangar.

With his senior officer status as cover, he managed to get past the cordon of alert droids and managed to rendezvous at the hangar with his newly recruited ground boys.

"What's the situation?"

"There are twelve armed droids patrolling the hangar, we can shut them down, but we can't do anything about the ones in the warehouse, their mission is to guard the warehouse, they won't come out unless the enemy hits the door!" A groundskeeper pointed regretfully at the simple drawing he had just drawn on the wall of the terrain he had just scouted.

"Don't worry about that, I've got an idea!" Ethan took his foot and kicked the flyover behind him, the Eighth Fleet had assigned this to themselves as insurance in the first place, and now it was time to give their own people a taste of what it meant to be infernal.

The firefight continued, especially when the unsa called in the Retribution, and the unsa entering the Poseidon received more reinforcements, with elite armed commandos blowing right through part of the Poseidon's gates and airlocks, before infiltrating the carrier like ants.

The fierce gunfire naturally made the guards in the stores tense up, especially as the captain had instructed the soldiers to destroy all the drawings if they could not defend the ship.

Just as the soldiers were concentrating on guarding their surroundings, gravity grenades came clanking into the warehouse.

"What's this? What's this robot doing in the warehouse, hey machine, get the hell out!" One soldier impatiently stepped forward and tried to shoo the flyover out of the room.

But Fly Over completely ignored his orders and walked to the group by himself, then took out the gravity grenade he had hanging from his waist.

"Hey, what are you doing?" It was only after the grenade had clanged to the ground that the soldiers awoke from their dream, but it was too late.

The burst of magnetic fields disrupted gravity and sent the unprepared soldiers floating through the air, while Ethan, who had been waiting outside the door, heard the commotion and rushed into the room with his weapon in his hand.

After taking care of the soldiers, Ethan did not bother to check the contents of the box. Once he destroyed the surveillance around him and put the safe away, he left the scene of the crime, leaving behind only a large Z and a few bodies that had fallen to the ground.

As he walked away, Ethan made a point of cleaning up any information that might reveal himself, removing all the processors from the droids, even the one that had been dismantled to scrap metal by the magnetic field of the gravity grenade, and Ethan ripped the former's head right off.

"Sorry about that, thanks for the sacrifice!" Ethan ran carefully out of the hangar carrying his own weapon and had just pulled open the door that had lost power due to the explosion when Ethan saw a tiny hunter-destroyer robot crawl over with a gurgle.

"Holy shit!" Ethan didn't even think about raising his hand to fire a shot that blew up the Jagdroid, which had a kilogram of charge and would have killed everyone within ten metres if it had exploded, not to mention its microcomputer that would have guided the robot to quickly crawl towards the nearest enemy.

"This is moving too fast, isn't it?" Ethan recoiled and dodged back to the hangar door, then pulled out his EM1 plasma rifle from subspace and prepared to start welding the door.

Mind you according to the boarding training Ethan had received when he was a Fourth Class, they were also just clearing people one compartment at a time, not just blowing up or smashing their way through the battleship like these rashers had done, carving out a hard straight path. He had no choice but to avoid this for the time being, and anyway, there was a small door on the third floor of the hangar that was used for access to the duty crew, although of course the soldier on duty at this point had already been pulled away from his post.

After welding the door shut, Ethan dropped two-directional blast mines, then Ethan activated the propulsion mechanism of his suit and leapt up into the third-floor corridor.

"Pass!" Ethan had just jumped up when there was a loud bang from the hangar door, the alloy fireproof door bulging out in a large chunk as if it had been hit by a rhino, and a few innings of fucks or some such cursing coming through the gap.

"Sorry mate, the party's over!"

Grabbing the butt of his rifle and slamming down a side decoder, Ethan would pull out the wires to overload the doorstop as the crashing continued downstairs, perhaps tired of banging on the door, the unsa commando who broke it down switched to an aluminium heat bomb, the nuisance sparks quickly burning the entire door to iron.

"Hold your fire, the enemy is behind you!" No sooner had he taken a breath than a dozen Marines poured into the long tunnel, frightening him into shouting.

The Martian soldier who was about to fire immediately shouted out, "Don't shoot, friendly forces are approaching!"

"Sir, is everything all right, where is the enemy?" An officer immediately stepped forward and asked when Ethan had rushed through the blockade.

"They're breaking through the hangar doors, there's a lot of them, there are assault droid units, I only had time to weld the doors shut!" Ethan pushed the psychic energy in his body, then cried out to the officer with a very sad expression.

"It's too soon, there are still our fighters in the hangar! That's the latest test model!"

Ethan's posture of worrying about his country gave the Marine officer a moment of emotion; they all said that the land forces just died and the air force just flew, and they all thought that the air force was a bunch of useless sissies who spent the most money on the military but the marines did the heaviest work, but now looking at those smouldering looks on Ethan's armour and the look of guilt on his face for not rescuing the country's property, the Marine soldiers stood in awe.

"Men, come with me, retrieve the experimental machine, charge!" The Marine officer gave Ethan a look of leave it all to me, then picked up a titan energy machine gun and charged into the tunnel ahead of him.

The fierce gunfire resumed as the Mars soldiers, inspired by Ethan's spirit, charged the UNSA task force with such fierce firepower that even Reyes had to go with plan B.

"Retribution, we're pinned down, blow the armour and let the HoW in!"

"Roger that! Look out!"

Just as the Martian Marine soldiers and droids had formed a perimeter around Reyes and the others and were about to make the final assault, a dull explosion came from the thick blast deck doors outside the hangar and the entire battleship shook violently.

"Activate magnetic boots!" Reyes bellowed, and the next second the deck door exploded, a furious stream of air spewing the caught off guard Martian soldiers out of the gaping hole in the hangar almost instantly, the whole loss of pressure lasting for nearly thirty seconds until the hangar turned into a vacuum before a switched flight state Hulwolf fighter flew in through the gap.

The vectored ion engines at the rear of the HoW's cockpit spewed out a ghostly blue fire and two 30mm cannons were aimed at the canopies on the third floor of the hangar, and as the first of the Marines to come in for reinforcements popped their heads up, the HoW opened fire.

"Fall back!" The terrified Mars soldier shouted over his comms trying to back up, but the comrades following behind him and the magnetic boots on his feet made his movements less nimble and he only had time to turn one head.

The 30mm high explosive poly armour-piercing rounds cut through the chute like a plough blade, shattering those soldiers inside, shattered limbs and splattered blood frozen in an instant, the last thing these soldiers saw was the cold faces of their companions.

Tactical literacy was not compensated for by numbers, the Eighth Fleet had expanded so quickly that almost all of the experienced land forces had given up their lives in the lunar raids, and now only a few of the marines on the various ships were officers and non-commissioned officers who had actually been in battle and understood what to do in various situations, but unfortunately, the elites on the Poseidon had either died in the raid or been sucked out of space, and the Poseidon was now a lamb to the slaughter for the 100 battle veterans on the Retribution.

What the survivors of the half-destroyed Poseidon hadn't expected was that instead of destroying the Poseidon, which was on the verge of disintegration, the Punisher had quickly withdrawn from the airspace after capturing the fighters in the hangar.

"Why did they go?" A soldier with a damaged tube who had bruised his head on impact asked curiously.

"Because our reinforcements have arrived!" Ethan's eyes were dead on the patch of airspace next door to Poseidon, the majestic form of the Mount Olympus filling almost the entire window after a massive arc of lightning flashed by.

"Search for survivors, clean up the battlefield and clear the wreckage of the battleship!" Ethan looked around and it seemed he had become the highest-ranking man on the Poseidon, as for the captain and his staff, they had accompanied the bridge on the first wave of the Punishment's strike and gone roaming through space.

"Sir, urgent orders, Admiral Salen Kotch wants to see you!"

"Sir!"

Salen Kotch's figure appeared within the wrecked battleship, and he couldn't help but frown at the splatter of blood and various pieces of wreckage on the bulkheads.

"What are the casualties?"

"The Poseidon has lost seven hundred and twenty-four men since the captain and above, half of the wounded, the droid security force is completely wiped out, 80% of the ship's equipment is scrapped, it will take about three months to repair it if we have to, in addition, the prototype weapons we were transporting were taken away!"

"Understood, now you will act as Captain of the Poseidon, transfer all casualties and assets to the Poseidon!"

Salen Kotch gritted his teeth and finally made a difficult decision, "Abandon ship with all hands!"

"Abandon ship? But the Poseidon can still be repaired if we pull it back!" Ethan was jumping up and down, how rich was Mars to say they didn't want an aircraft carrier?

"We don't have time for that! Acting Captain Ethan, Admiral LeFrancis told me about you, he said you were very capable, so you should also understand what our mission is now!"

"The Retribution?"

"Yes, this damned warship must be dealt with, those damned Earth scumbags!" Salen Kotch was furious, after jumping out of the Martian encirclement, the Punishment carrier was like a fish into the sea, stirring up the Martian logistics, methane factories, bombed, ace pilots, fucked, destroyer escort formations, exterminated, in less than two days, the Punishment had taken out over twenty Martian ships of all types, hundreds of aircraft, translating into tonnage, that's nearly one and a half million tons of warships, which was already the combined tonnage of six Olympus Hill ships.

The loss of battleships and aircraft was enough, but it was the loss of the factories that had been built on the various planets that caused Salen Kotch to feel the pain. There was no shortage of titanium ore for shipbuilding on Mars, but methane fuel for battleships and some rare elements had to be collected from other colonies.

"As ordered, sir!" Ethan switched off his comms and strode towards the second bridge in the middle of the battleship, which had been protected by armour so had suffered little damage, but the person would have to be made up for by the versatile C6 droids.

"All personnel, execute abandon ship preparations!" The whining alarm sounded again, and the backup generators that the damage control appeared to have salvaged and returned to work. The surviving sailors throughout the battleship were collectively silent for three seconds upon hearing the order and then swarmed to the ... Poseidon's galley, where over a thousand litres of ice cream and jam were still stored.

"Okay, okay, stop dawdling and keep moving, come on, come on, come on!" Ethan stood at the entrance to one of the retractable canals connecting to the Mount Olympus, a large metal tub full of strawberry ice cream in his arms, while he just forked up a big spoonful into his mouth every now and then, then puffed out his cheeks and gave orders to the busy droids. The other surviving sailors were in much the same position as he was, with the ammunition stored in the magazine being the first wave to be moved, followed by the food stored in the huge cold store on the Poseidon, and the third wave of less important data and supplies.

The transfer was quickly completed with the tireless service of the tireless robot troops, and then after a final farewell ceremony, the sailors on board the Poseidon were all transferred to Mount Olympus, which then fired a barrage of Olympus guns, turning the Poseidon into a burning space coffin.

"It's a tough decision, sir, but I'm sure we'll get our revenge!" Seeing Ethan's unhappy face, a Marine sergeant on the Poseidon thought the other man was having a hard time with the loss of his battleship.

"I believe you!" Ethan didn't explain that he was actually upset because he had just made a run to Poseidon's power room, originally thinking to see if there was anything broken he could clean up, but only when he walked through the closed door did he realise that during the raid, the Punishment's assault team had blown the entire engine straight to pieces and the Poseidon was now the equivalent of a space coffin.

After the shelling was over, Ethan was surprised to find that although the Poseidon was still burning, the main body of the ship was still intact, the hull had not broken, but the entire ship had lost its value for recovery.

"This thing will probably turn into a space hulk after floating in space for tens of thousands of years!" Seeing that Mount Olympus did not continue to fill in the blanks, Ethan did not say much, after all, he would have a military meeting to attend.

"Has the news been confirmed?"

"Yes sir, Colonel Rhea, the Director of Intelligence, has been captured, that's why our raid was unsuccessful!"

"I see!" The ugly expression on Salen Kotch's face finally diminished considerably.

"Unleash all our forces on Earth and get him out!" Salen Kotch looked at the huge globe in front of him, his mind racing, "The Punishment wants to buy time for Earth, then we'll go straight for Earth, gather all the ships, we'll solve this trouble on Earth once and for all this time!"

Salen Kotch's statement was not applauded by the rest of the fleet's captains as he would have liked, and it was Ethan who ended up leading popping applause, only to be met with a bunch of other angry looks.

"Sir, isn't this too risky, we've done it before ..." one of the captains objected.

"So this time we won't go into high Earth orbit! We're going straight into the atmosphere!"

"What?" If it had only caused the captains to waver before, Salen Kotch's current tactic was like dropping a thousand boulders on a calm lake.

"Sir, think twice, it's too dangerous, there will be a lag period for the battleship to jump out, if it is attacked, the consequences will be unthinkable!" Someone raised an objection.

"We know absolutely nothing about the situation on Earth now, what if Colonel Rhea is not saved?"

"That's enough, Rhea will be saved, I'll send my best assault team!" Understanding that it was the successive failures that had shaken the confidence of his men, Salen Kotch was furious and he stood up and cursed his men as cowards.

"I have made up my mind, you may object, but you must carry it out, or I don't mind shooting a few more captains!" With those words, Salen Kotch sent his battle plan to all his officers and then hung up the comms in a huff.

"Mr Hunt, I heard that you once studied on Earth for two years?" After the meeting, Salen Kotch turned his attention to Ethan in the corner.