For those I left behind - the memoirs of Colonel Jason Myers

[Jansen]

The plan to evacuate a whole nation within a few days was his masterpiece, he knew what he had to do.
Shortly after the beginning of 819 the Gallics breached through our defenses, the Warhammer, the glorious guardian of Tau 44 was able to destroy a Valor, before its own end, the Nemesis also caused considerable amounts of damage to the Gallic forces before it escaped heavily damaged to a position within the Tau 39 system. Due to the heavily damaged engines the Carrier had been chosen to serve as a tactical frontier base, codenamed Hades. Its position is only known to a selected few and the nebula surrounding it should prevent the Gallics from detecting it.
Despite the overwhelming Gallic forces, our own civilian and military causalities remained extremely low, Diocletians plan had worked. The Colonial nation arrived in a prepared system, even though Coronado was not as hospitable as our old home was, we had a home. The ice planet of Pecos was able to support us with Deuterium, this Deuterium was enough to keep the fleet running and enough to build up a working economy from the profits we made by selling it. A new shipyard had been built close to the Planet Yuma, even though it was not completely finished it already started producing ships when we arrived. We had everything we needed, but could not forget the Gallic danger, that would sooner or later arrive in Coronado.


Diocletian decided that the old concept of Battlegroups did not suit our needs anymore, he deemed many smaller groups to be more efficient. He was the one that had ordered our engineers to improve the old Thanatos class Cruisers, a ship that, in his opinion would be more suited to be the backbone of the fleet then the aging Zephyr Carriers. A byproduct of the Thanatos improvement was the Kronos class Battleship, a vessel that, at least by the engineers calculations, could be built relatively cheap and efficient with the resources gained by scraping the old Zephyrs. So the fleets most reliable ships were scraped for a new project, but it soon turned out that the Kronos class was not what the Republic would have needed. The Admiralty attempted to put pressure onto Diocletian, they expected to be the ones responsible for the fleets improvement.
Diocletians answer was simple, he sent the Admirals to different places, some to fight the enemies, some to simply have them out of his way.


With the Admirals being in something that might be described as exile, Diocletian established his own ideas, Thanatos Cruisers should be the backbone of the fleet, due to the fact that the Kronos Battleships were not reliable enough, important tests within their creation had been ignored due to the limited time he gave the engineers to work on two ship classes.
Diocletians new fleet consisted of many smaller wings, operating alone, each wing consisted of at least one Cruiser and various support ships, the command of these wings was given to soldiers that had proven trustworthy in his eyes. I was one of them.
I received the command of the Cruiser Pandora and a wing consisting of 2 Nyx and 1 Eros fighters, 1 Pytho Bomber and one Celestra combat transport. This constellation had proven to be the most effective one behind enemy lines.
We soon were sent out to the Taus, to damage the Gallic war effort wherever possible. Our operation there lasted for months until further orders, until we received a transmission from Coronado, one that told us that the Admirals had murdered the infamous President.
The order coming from the fleet command was clear, we were to return to Coronado to receive further instructions.

---