Admiral Schwimmer looked stoically as the final reports of the second battle of Andraskon came in. It had been a clear victory for the UE, and, considering that the reinforcement fleet was here to stay, Andraskon was likely safe for the foreseeable future. But he now had the task of uniting his forces into a new Defense Fleet Andraskon - Terra, cleaning up the debris, rebuilding the defenses, as well as adding completely new ones. All the while he needed to care for the Kyreikon citizens on Andraskon, who were depended on food imports. Imports the UE had difficulties to create, and was mostly using low yield crops to pull it of somehow. Which meant that his logistical situation was about to get worse, not better, considering that most of the dense foods that could be procured were already here.

Well, he always liked a challenge, especially one that would not see a ton of violent deaths. Now, were would he find more transports? Maybe in his battleships…

On Terra, after the emergency resolution had passed allowing the reinforcement fleet to depart, nothing was yet solved. But Andraskon was a very pointed reminder in how things can go wrong, and that a solution needed to be available now. The situation had not improved thanks to a move of a significant opposition coalition to prevent anything else from happening until a solution for the future of the war had been found. They had managed that by citing constitutional concerns, which was a viable argument. The issues were affecting the interpretation of the constitution, and it would be important to solve them in the context of the constitution. It was not a particularly nice thing to do, especially not because that opposition coalition did not try to offer a solution at all, and even helped block any attempt at a solution.

But the UE parliament was a capable machine, accustomed to solving its differences peacefully and with agreeable discussion. And the shock of the near disaster that had been the second battle of Andraskon had lit a fire under a significant part of the representatives. The responsibilities of the fleet were expanded, as was its independence from the parliament. The same was true for all other arms of the military, but most of them were not as relevant anymore.

Orbital bombardent was tentatively allowed, but would need to be massively restricted, although any fleet of a certain size had all the required personell to make that decision. The navy was commanded to develop both a doctrine for the use of orbital bombardment with the help of the army, as well as a procedure for the actual deployment of such weaponry. Both should be focused at reducing civilian casualties as well as making misfires impossible, or rather as close to impossible as humanly possible and a bit more for goo measure. It would take over 7 years to be finalised, although a prototype was first unveiled and then used a bit over a year after the development began.

The deployment of fleets was taken mostly outside of the purview of the parliament, which until now had a strong voice in matters concerning that, although Every potentially threatened world under UE protection, which explicitly included each and every conquered world after the active fighting had ended, needed to have a garrison strong enough to defeat any expected threat within the next decade. Which meant that each and every earth that had made first contact needed that garrison. Those garrisons were explicitly allowed to be deployed as emergency responders if they did not move more than one day of travel time. This meant that each and every earth had a fairly strong emergency fleet available, especially because the navy took care to design the earth defense fleets with not having any FTL capability as well as the weird materials that came with that. It was a fairly immobile force, which was capable of defending almost every world under the protective aegis of the UE.

A treatise on the offensive of 7186-07-09, also called the First Reckoning of the Kyreikon-United Earths War by Prof. Dr. Jothes Tiros, written for the University of Kyreikon:

The UE decision to start a massive offensive at that point is weird, and the exact processes that forced the issue are poorly understood, even though a wealth of data, giving insight into the thought processes of the involved is available. It did not really make sense, the forces just were not there. The fighting mostly centered around useless planets, which, thanks to the strange humanitarian structure of the UE, were not a neutral gain but instead a massive drain on the resources, especially in mobile elements thanks to the requirement to garrison each and every of those worlds, was not particularly heavy or relevant to the massive Kyreikon Empire of the time.

In the coming section I want to explain a bit about the devastating, but unsurprising for both sides, success the first day of the 9 day long campaign was.

The biggest success of that campaign was the opening move. At 3:47 AM the campaign began with the simultaneous attack on five widely different worlds. It was planned to hit 14 worlds simultaneous, but that did not work out. Interesting is the case of Fasrin, which was surprisingly deep behind the accepted frontlines, which was hit in that initial invasion. Mostly because of a communication error and the responsible fleet taking 4 days less than planned to get there. It would take five days until a secure supply line inside the Terra universe could be established to Fasrin. Far less of an issue for the UE than for most civilisations, certainly, but still not a situation anyone wanted.

At the end of the day, 30 worlds had been conquered, with not a single battle lost, although losses had been heavier than expected in the case of Fasrin, were the hope was to divert some ships to other, more important worlds. The attacking fleet did have the resources deal with the fleet that was there, but had also managed to fall out of hyper inside the enemy range. The only thing that saved this battle was the fact that Fasrin had no battleships and the attacking fleet had one of those, which drew the fire upon itself to save its more fragile comrades.