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The armor on the aft quarter of Callisto glowed dull red as her fusion reactor and secondary fission reactor ran rampant and melted.

Thrusters on the Las Vegas puffed so she matched the pitch and roll of the enemy vessel . . . but turned so her prow faced the enemy’s obliterated midsection.

Missile silo doors on Las Vegas opened.

Transmission (alpha channel): This is Las Vegas. You are ordered to immediately seal missile doors and open Security Port 347 and allow our computer to take control of your vessel. Comply—or I will blast your ship in two.

ANALYSIS

* * *

The UNSC was not prepared for brutal ship-to-ship combat in the early years of the insurgency. The light destroyer class, for example, had none of the armament one recognizes as standard today. The titanium-A armor and magnetic accelerator cannons, however, would soon be developed as industrial priorities shifted from building . . . to killing.

More problematic, however, was the application of those new technologies to three-dimensional battles in the vacuum of space.

The use of nuclear weapons in the battle with Callisto was not expected. It was believed that fissile detonations in space were nearly useless. Such detonations are extremely low-yield and produced reduced electromagnetic pulse effect in a vacuum environment (very little bang for the buck, as they say).

But the fact that the insurgency knew this and had planted a nuclear device ahead of time in an asteroid that provided the reactive mass to outright destroy one UNSC ship and cripple two more was an astonishingly forward piece of military thinking.

More amazing, however, was Cole’s tactical leap of insight. UNSC officers and merchant men of the era had a near-religious reverence for Common Space Law—most especially pertaining to rendering aid to vessels in distress. The fact that Cole faked a distress signal to lure his opponent closer was both a stroke of genius and a breach of protocol so severe that UNSC CENTCOM dithered over whether to award him the Legion of Honor or have him court-martialed (ultimately, they did neither, to avoid difficult precedent). Cole’s moral strategy was drawn from centuries of ambiguity in dealing with the idea of “enemy combatants” and inhabits a gray legal and ethical area, even in retrospect.

Emblematic of Cole’s later tactical thinking, we see flexibility with regard to his ship’s functional design. He had crewmen remove Las Vegas’s last Ares missile from its silo and transport it to Cargo Bay 5—where it could be fired directly into the enemy vessel at point-blank range, bypassing her external armor, and destroying her FTL drive and reactor coolant systems.

Cole noted later in his personal log that he would never again be able to send a distress signal in enemy territory. “No one would believe it,” he stated. “Surrender, quite literally, is no longer an option for me.”

The UNSC, the insurgency—all humanity had been awakened from complacency; we were evolving and learning how to fight again.

Cole was evolving as well, jettisoning antiquated ethical qualms—and learning to do whatever it took to win.

SECTION FIVE: THE OUTER COLONY INSURGENCY: THE

GORGON V. THE BELLICOSE (2495–2504)

* * *

Cole was quickly promoted (although not without some protest) to first lieutenant and then commander and given a small corvette to patrol the Outer Colonies. After a dozen successful engagements in five years against insurgent forces and privateer fleets he was promoted to captain and received the honor of commanding the first heavy-destroyer-class vessel armed with a magnetic accelerator cannon (MAC), the UNSC Gorgon.

In Cole’s personal logs he attributes his success more to luck than skill in battle, and he wonders if his rapid promotion was warranted. He also notes that insurgent atrocities may have greased the public relations aspect of his promotions.

Cole might have sensed part of the truth. The Navy had latched onto him as a figurehead to quell an unease percolating through the Inner Colonies. Many of the Inner Colonies were beginning to wonder if it