Midnight and Eclipse

One of the CEF 8th Fleet’s greatest advantages in their second invasion of Terra Nova has been the control of outer space. During the War of the Alliance, Terra Nova was able to inflict serious damage to the invading fleet through deploying huge minefields of autonomous suicide drones, forcing them out of orbit and leaving the ground forces trapped on the planet without support. A major focal points of the planning for the second invasion was finding ways to mitigate the threat this posed to CEF operations. Thanks to advances in space combat  doctrine and the use of specially designed ships like the Ballista-class, mass-scale minelaying operations like the ones during the War of the Alliance have become extremely risky for Terra Novan forces and few have been conducted recently thanks to high projected losses, with the focus instead turning to smaller minelaying groups operating independently. While this has proven sufficient to protect the major strategic locations on Terra Nova from orbital attack, it has been incapable of locking sectors of space in high orbit thanks to the CEF’s own minesweeping efforts, allowing Earth significantly more freedom to operate in space than they had during the first invasion. This has allowed the CEF to keep their planetary forces resupplied and even conduct large-scale transatmospheric redeployments between fronts, giving them much more tactical flexibility to respond to Terra Novan attacks.

Operation Midnight is Terra Nova’s plan to tip the scales and seize control of orbit back from the CEF. After suffering major losses early in the war, the majority of Terra Novan heavy space assets ended up in the Trojan asteroid clusters, venturing out for occasional raids and protecting the antimatter production complexes necessary for the Black Talons to continue offworld operations. For the first time in cycles, these ships have been making their way back to Terra Nova en masse (minus a few involved in diversionary attacks such as Task Force Sniffer’s raid on Zeus) to participate in the largest coordinated minelaying plan since 1913 under the auspices of the reformed Joint Terra Novan Space Initiative. While the assembled fleet is expected to take heavy losses, their mission is vitally important: not just to regain control of orbital, but also to tie down CEF fleet assets and make them unable to respond to the arrival of the task force from New Jerusalem scheduled to arrive shortly afterwards. Made up mainly of defected assets from the CEF 7th Fleet, the New Jerusalem battlegroup is expected to be able to effectively engage the 8th Fleet in direct combat in a way Terra Novan ships are incapable of, as long as it remains concentrated while the Earth forces are divided.

In order to successfully conduct Operation Midnight, the Terra Novan space forces will need to rearm and resupply with drones. Large drone stockpiles currently exist on Terra Nova’s surface, in no small part Republican Space Technologies’ hidden factories, which have remained in operation even with the occupation of much of the Southern Republic. The normal protocol in this situation would be to resupply the fleet in stages as it maintained geostationary orbit, but JTNSI Fleet Command concluded that attempting to do this during Operation Midnight would leave the fleet exposed to CEF attacks for an unacceptably long period. Instead, the plan is for a mass launch of supply vehicles over a single day, coordinated to intersect the combined fleets’ orbital trajectories as they reach their periapsis points over New Peace River and Port Aurora. The resupply operation has been precisely timed in order to have the ships fully loaded and deploying the drones by the time the CEF can vector to intercept.

CEF intelligence learned about Operation Midnight from their mole network shortly after preparations relating to it were completed. While they could have quickly dismantled the entire plan by intercepting first the ships returning to Terra Novan orbit, they chose not to, as it would be denying the Terra Novans the opportunity to make a colossal strategic blunder. The past two cycles have seen the secret construction of the Marena anti-orbital gun battery in the Eastern Desert, originally designed to defend the CEF’s main base at Massada from orbital attack. With Port Arthur in ruins and Port Oasis occupied, the only launch sites Terra Nova capable of supporting fleet-level operations are Hutchison Space Center in Port Aurora and Hitashi Spaceport in New Peace River. Marena was built at an equidistant point between the two, giving it the ability to fire on orbital launches from both. The battery’s main armament is a trio of gigantic mass-drivers loaded with canisters containing kinetic-kill vehicles that themselves release huge clouds of shrapnel, allowing the complete saturation and destruction of a wide area of space. This capability is what led to them becoming the main element of the trap the CEF has  planned, referred to as Battle Plan Eclipse. Normally even a wide-area anti-orbital barrage would only affect a few ships due to the vastness of space, but the resupply portion of Operation Midnight will cluster a large number of vessels in a relatively small area. A correctly timed firing of the Marena batteries would be able to wipe out both the reinforcements being launched and the orbital assets lying in wait for them, dealing a deathblow to Terra Nova’s space forces. 

Marena serves a secondary, even more important role that only high ranking and relevant officers are aware of. The gun battery is intended to serve as one of the primary defenses against the incoming forces from New Jerusalem, shielding Massada as well as the frontlines in the Northern and Tobian Plains. NEC mandates have suppressed the 7th Fleet’s defection to New Jerusalem from becoming common knowledge. The Party’s policy of completely denying the defectors’ existence has become increasingly ineffective following the bombardment and invasion of Home, but it still remains on the books and so few are aware of the true importance of Battle Plan Eclipse. Removing the threat of attack by the Terra Novan space forces will free up the 8th Fleet’s orbiting warships to intercept and destroy or drive off the incoming Jerusalemite attack, preventing a disruption that could throw the CEF’s operations into disarray at the worst possible time. The war has stretched both the Terra Novan and Earth militaries to their breaking point, and the events of 1955 will prove decisive. The outcomes of Operation Midnight and Battle Plan Eclipse are set to determine just what that decision will be.