On the outskirts of the Solaris system a group of twenty corvettes dropped out of Hyperspace and began to switch their engines over to Realspace propulsion. It could easily be said that the system that the Angelus Holy Union’s second invasion force had jumped into was crowded. The star that was the center of the system was just as big as Sol, but there were ten planets in the system instead of eight and three of those planets fell in the ‘goldilocks zone’. While only Gaia, or as it was known to the AHU ‘Solaris 5’, was inhabited by intelligent life, there was flora and fauna on Solaris 4 and Solaris 3, known to the locals as ‘Gaia Second’ and ‘Gaia Tertiary’.

The twenty ships slowly started to make their way towards Gaia, their sensors sweeping the system to try and find a trace of the first invasion force. After a year of Gaian Time (365.25 Days to be precise) the Purity Council that made up the ruling body of the AHU decided to send a much larger and more modern group to investigate the lack of contact from the previous invasion group.

As the ships passed through the asteroid belt that made up the dividing line between the planets Solaris 6 and Solaris 7, they began to experience comms difficulties. Eventually, this lack of virtual ‘eyes’ got the better of a few ships, which sustained minor shield damage due to colliding with a few space rocks. The deeper the twenty ships went into the belt, the more difficult it became to communicate from ship to ship, until finally there was nothing on their sensors aside from static.

As they reached the middle of the belt, one of the ships seemed to hit a space-mine and was pushed off course and into another vessel. However, there was no way that there would be space-mines in this dingy little backwater system. The natives were too primitive to even begin to understand space travel, so it must have just been a terrible failure from a little bit of faulty maintenance. After another three explosions tore chunks out of another three ships, they began to realize that they had walked right into a trap.

The space craft tried to turn around and get out of the trap set by one of the other Galactic Powers and warn the Purity Council about the acts of war committed by their neighbors, but by now it was too late. It had taken them a day and half of Gaian time to get into the center of the belt and it would take another day and a half to get out if they could just go in reverse. But they could not. As the corvettes tried to flee, they were attacked from all sides by a barrage of primitive, albeit effective, weapons.

Mass drivers launched magnetically accelerated tungsten rods at the rear thrusters of the corvettes while rockets, missiles and torpedoes flew in from the top and bottom. Exceptionally elongated plasma beams illuminated the void as they seared the now unshielded armor of the corvettes, which was followed shortly thereafter by humanoid strike craft popping out from behind the cover of the asteroids for brief moments to let fly their fury.

As the last of the AHU’s corvettes that could move floundered in the sea of stars with its thrusters only barely working, some of the giant humanoid strike craft moved in for the kill. The few point defense weapons on the surviving corvettes opened up on the strike craft, but they remained just out of the effective range of the guns. The strike craft pulled back a bit farther and wove around the insufficiently accurate fire as they worked together to blow apart the annoyance that kept them at a distance. A few more minutes later and the last PD gun went silent.

Now with nothing to stop them, the Mobile Suit Golems advanced upon the stranded ships and proceeded to use several melee weapons to carve entrances into the interior of the invading vessels. Switching their sizes to Human Sized, they entered the ships armed with guns, shields and beam resistant coating.

…

The goal of the operation was simple. They only needed to cut power to the rest of the ship and wait for the crew to die either of oxygen deprivation, starvation or dehydration. Unlike the previous engagement, there was no desire whatsoever to show off or risk lives. There was no way in hell that they were going to put the Creator at risk just to take a little glory.

A wall of shields advanced down the corridors of the ship, only barely parting to allow guns to peek out from the defensive line and tear the ‘Angels’ to pieces. Oddly enough, the aliens did have personal energy shields, but these only defended against energy-based weapons, not kinetic or explosive ones. This meant that rather than searing holes in the invaders the MSGs were instead blowing them to pieces with grenades and turning them into swiss cheese with slug-throwing guns.

Occasionally a shield would be penetrated by a round from the weapons of the invaders or a round would hit one of the MSGs, but as soon as that happened the wounded machine would slip back behind the lines and a new one would take their place. The shield wall pushed through even the most stubborn resistance until it finally made it to the power core of the corvette.

“This took longer than expected. Start building barricades, we don’t want them restarting their power.”

The group of MSGs began to fortify their position and prepare for a counterattack as they worked to sever the power core from the rest of the ship. They did not want to damage the core, as they could glean a lot from such a device if they managed to recover it. Who knows, maybe they could use the knowledge gained from such a prize to upgrade the newer ships that were being built?

Worker Balls and Zaku Tanks with Crane Backpacks began to erect a sandbag wall, followed by a wall made of reinforced concrete and then topped it off by putting a whole mess of razor wire in front of it all. Meanwhile, the shields that were carried by the MSGs were partially melted to the metal floor via the use of melee beam weapons. These defenses may have been a bit excessive, but they were deemed appropriate for the occasion. In truth, if Arkhan had never been affected by the alien weapons and the damn Great Cycle, then they would have gladly just used numbers to solve the problem.

Instead, they were forced to play it safe, which was something that they were not accustomed to doing.

“Two minutes until the core ins severed from their control. Prepare for counterattack.”

The counterattack they were waiting for never came. During their assault they had actually killed all of the ship’s security personnel and ground forces, and now there was basically just the ordinary crew of the ship left. If they had gone for the bridge, they might have been able to vent the atmosphere in the vessel, but they had thought that it would be more dangerous to attack there than it would be to attack the core.

“Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

The lights in the ship cut out and the energy-based bulkheads that sealed the damaged ship from the void vanished. In every part of the ship save for the bridge, the cold and uninhabitable nothingness of space consumed the air inside, leaving only a near vacuum in its place. The troops of Arcadia entered a waiting game with the nonexistent defenders of the corvette, a situation that was playing out in every other ship that had been boarded.

Seconds turned to minute turned to hours turned to days.

Eventually the boarding party advanced out of their fortified posts and made their way to the bridge, which was still sealed by a bulkhead, this time a physical one rather than an energy-based one. Beam Sabers cut into the heavy metal and melted it, eventually creating a molten ring which was quickly pushed in. Several flash-bangs were tossed in, which exploded soon after. The shield-bearing MSGs quickly entered, only to discover that the crew of the corvette had died of oxygen deprivation.

The ships were now theirs and were towed to Gaia to await a mechanical autopsy.