Disclaimer – Everything either does belong to Joss or it should. I’m just borrowing his shiny ‘verse for a while.

The 21st Lancers belong to the British Army so I’m borrowing them too. I hope they don’t mind.

* * *

“As he faltered the deadly spear of Aeneas flashed. His eyes had picked the spot and he threw from long range with all his weight behind the throw. Stones hurled by siege artillery never roar like this. The crash of the bursting thunderbolt is not so loud. Like a dark whirlwind it flew carrying death and destruction with it."

The Aeneid – Virgil 19BC

“Whatever happens we have got, the railgun, and they’ve not.”

Major Steven Hicks – Speech to the 1st Battalion 21st Lancers 2522AD

* * *

Gallic Plains – Toulouse – 2522AD

Ships were still arriving even as final preparations for the armada to sail were made, dozens, hundreds even, circling overhead waiting permission to land. Mal hadn’t seen the like since the war, the last war he reminded himself as he drove his borrowed four-wheel drive between rows of transports.

They’d come from all over the rim. So many volunteers they couldn’t hope to properly arm more than half of them and the high command wasn’t going to waste manpower sending boys with shotguns against heavily armed Federals, so they’d sorted out the combat veterans and told the other new recruits they’d have to wait their turn and train in the meantime.

Compared with the sixteen brigades that had shipped to Hera in the last war this new force was considerably smaller, but then again the Alliance couldn’t put a fraction of the same number of men into the field to oppose them either. The Federals had been caught badly off-guard with their industrial base hamstrung by the EMP attacks on several core worlds and a large percentage of their available troops enforcing martial law. Thus it was that relatively the Independents were putting a stronger force into battle this time than they had when they’d lost the planet a decade