Sergeant Hiedo was panicking. Even though the orbital bombardment hit the enemy hard, they still could fight. And the hit on their city did not convince them that capitulating might be a good idea. The opposite was much more true. And of course, even if the admiral somehow got permission to bombard enemy positions while endangering civilians, that did not mean that artillery support was forthcoming. She was, together with 7 others, stranded deep inside the enemy lines, after their transport had been shot down from some man portable anti-air assets the kyreikon possessed.

There were at least 200 Kyreikon soldiers advancing on their situation. And high commands answer when they asked for support was a simple: “sit tight, we will get to you eventually”, which was not really helping their already hurt morale.

Although the fact that the enemy was out for blood after whatever had hit their city center did help with that aspect. If you could expect to die in cruel and unusual ways in the case of yourself surrendering, you are much less likely to do it.

Sergeant Hideo took careful aim with her weapon and began to mentally curse the idiot who approved this weapon again. Yes, that HUD, which helped aiming was fairly nice, if it were not unreliable in anything that was not a perfectly mapped city with satellite support. Oh, and if it would actually adjust for the ammunition type loaded. She was, after all, not using grown control weaponry., but instead pseudo anti-armour rifle ammunition. Now, that was admittedly a software issue, and might thus be somewhat easily fixable, but the motors, which helped adjusting her aim were a pain to keep deactivated. It did not help matters that the rifle really hated any sort of dust in the air, and thus regularly decided to activate the automated maintenance cycles.

Now, to be fair to the weapon, it could take the dust in the air. Without maintenance afterwards, it would not be good for it, but it could. The automatic maintenance was such a quality of life improvement that one should be able to deactivate however.

She finally dealt with the current crop of issues with the rifle and fired. One down, 199 or more to go…

5 minutes latter, Sergeant Hideo and the rest of her squad mates were dead.

Meanwhile, back on Terra, where the political elite had begun to return over a year ago, the first reports of the use of orbital bombardment had reached. The outcry was nearly instant. In both directions. Because, while the use of it was clearly against the rules, and the reports had mentioned the accidental hit of a population center, the reasons for it were quite clear, and the first reports of the fighting on the ground, as well as the losses in landing craft did back up that reasoning.

A call for the ceasing of all non vital military operations went out while the politicians thought about how to deal with this conundrum. It was already clear that it would take a while, because the military overstepping its bounds in such a way could not go unpunished, on the other hand, outside of the accident, the admiral in charge had done exactly what the UE leadership might be a good doctrine for the future. Which meant they needed to find a way to save face. Which in turn created several new committees to plan the next steps. Over the course of the next several months, a lot of discussion would be happening.

It took over 2 months, but Andraskon was now mostly in UE hands. It was now the 7185-06-07, and the Kyreikon civilian population had accepted foreign rule, at least for now. The last remaining military formations had capitulated, although it was not considered ton be impossible for there being still some guerrilla troops that were simply lying low. In fact, that was considered to be very likely. The UE had taken major losses in the ground campaign, and its ground force was eagerly awaiting new equipment, which was was promised to come after a new bombardment doctrine had been finalised. At least the politicians had accepted the need for an updated doctrine in that regard. Meanwhile, Admiral Donnelly had left the fleet for Terra and had been replace with Admiral Schwimmer. Who then proceeded to nearly loose a destroyer against some hidden anti orbital weaponry the Kyreikon had either hidden before or during the initial battle, or even produced afterwards. The destroyer had survived, barely, but it was forced to retreat to Terra, for repairs. In fact, it was not entirely clear if the destroyer would be repaired or if it would be taken apart to figure out faults in the current designs. The current political difficulties were slowing down the decision process.

A treatise on early weapons of war as used by the United Earths Armed Forces by Gerhard Hängerruh:

The early weapons the UE used, especially in regards to personal infantry weapons, up to armoured personal carriers, showed their origins as police weapons clearly. The onboard assistance computers tended to prioritise either incapacitating single combatants or pacifying a growd, which in the eight millennia meant to attempt to psychological influence the growd to be more peaceful. Which worked well against humans that were not trained to attempt to kill you, not so well against completely alien lifeforms that wanted you dead. Another issue was the safety features, which were designed to prevent accidents. Because accidents could kill, and the goal of police work was not to punish, read kill, the perpetrator, but to capture him or her, so that others could work out the punishment….

… The over reliance on monitoring systems, not an issue on UE worlds, was, however an issue on unknown, hostile worlds, whose orbitals were not always friendly. UE doctrine, especially the haphazard early one, assumed that the orbitals would always be at least neutral, with a clear focus on friendly, but building those monitoring systems took time, even if there was not some idiot with a gun attempting to shoot down the, admittedly incredibly well stealthed, satellites.