Hyperspace beacons had detected it long before it was in range of the system.  The fleet was enormous.  In fact, it was the largest fleet anyone had ever seen assembled at one time.  No space naval engagement had ever been this massive, and nobody had any idea what to expect.  The experts, after all, were learning the ropes of space combat along with everyone else.

In response, the Terrans had thrown everything they could into the defence of their home system.  Every Hegemony ship, from one-man attack craft to massive dreadnoughts, were deployed throughout the solar system.  Orbital weapons platforms and unmanned defence emplacements were activated, installations on the Moon and Mars were brought to full alert.  Everywhere, there was a sense of impending doom.

Evacuation of the entire Earth had been impossible, of course, and even if it had been that would not have taken into account the people living on the Moon, Mars and the various orbital colonies.  So, the Hegemony was evacuating everyone it could, on the  basis of merit.  The best and the brightest were fleeing to colony worlds, Cybertron, and other Alliance-held
systems in the hope of saving the human race.  By the time the Imperial fleet entered the outer fringes of the system, roughly twenty million people had been safely scattered throughout the stars.  Humanity would continue, even if the Empire succeeded in taking Earth.  Not that any human had any intention of allowing that to happen.  Though there were never any official declarations, every single Terran soldier vowed to die before letting the
Cybertronians to set foot on Earth.

The first battles were light, tentative strikes as each side tested the other.  The engagement around Pluto was almost nothing; a handful of Destroyers clashed and broke off after dealing little damage.  At the outer edge of Uranus’ orbit, battleships were added into the mix, and this time the smaller forces fought more fiercely than before.  The Terrans smashed the Cybertronian incursion force, but had to retreat before the massed might
of the enemy armada.  They regrouped around Saturn, then fought a running battle all the way back to Mars.  Once there, they were heavily reinforced, and the battles around the red planet lasted for days.  Finally, though, the Terrans were driven back by the sudden appearance of a dozen Imperial dreadnoughts.  Though they’d been outdistanced by the more mobile elements of the Imperial force, the Terran blockade at Mars had allowed them ample
time to catch up, and their appearance, fresh and in fighting trim, finally made the Martian position untenable.  Regretfully, the Terran forces withdrew from Mars and regrouped, at last, around Earth.  Before the Cybertronian force continued on, however, they wiped the surface of Mars clean of the Terran emplacements and, by extension, the millions living on
the planet.  Unable to assault the Cybertronians with any serious chance of success, the Terrans could do nothing but wait and watch as their brethren were slaughtered.

At last, three weeks after the first appearance of the malevolent warships, they turned their attention at last to Earth.  The blue-green sphere was ringed with warships, orbital weapons platforms and satellite weapons, and the Moon had dispatched every fighter and destroyer that had been stationed around it in the earliest days of the Hegemony.  Humanity was ready, as ready as it could ever be.  There could be no surrender; the enemy wouldn’t
accept it.  There could be no retreat; there was no moving the Earth.

This would be a fight to the end.

“Range?”  High Commander Ryoji, supreme military commander of the Terran Hegemony and personal military adviser to the Hegemon himself, sat on the bridge of his own personal flagship.  The dreadnought Titan was the most technologically advanced warship in the entire Hegemony, and as such was the flagship of the Home Fleet and, by extension, the entire Terran navy.  His ship was poised at the leading edge of the blockade, and her sensor net was patched into Earth’s system monitors.  From his flag bridge, he could exactly how close the horrific tide of Cybertronian ships were to his home.

“The enemy fleet is roughly halfway between Mars and Earth, sir.” someone reported.  He didn’t pay attention to who it was; he had other things on his mind right now.

“Have the seventeenth wing pull a little closer.  Try and close up that gap.” he ordered.  He knew his words were being relayed by his comm techs almost as he spoke them.  They were good people, and a threat to their home system, let alone their home planet, inspired discipline and competency in almost everyone.  “And order the fifth squadron to advance seven hundred clicks.”  He continued giving orders, reacting to the enemy’s changing
positions as they moved around, coming towards him unevenly, one side sliding back or moving forward almost at random.  For an hour, they advanced in-system, and nobody could do anything but watch.  The orbital weapon platforms were too short ranged to strike anything out that far, and Mars was certainly in no condition to hit them from behind.

At last, the two forces were almost in range.  The enemy was mere moments outside the powered-missile envelope of the Terran ships.  It would’ve been better if they’d attacked a half day or so later, when the moon would’ve been there to support the Earth Home Fleet with it’s fortified laser cannons and entrenched missile batteries.  Still, the Cybertronians had chosen the time of their advance, and it would be beyond stupid for them to advance
when they had a tactical disadvantage.

Ryoji waited, tense, on the bridge of the Titan, watching the range drop second by second.  He felt as he were a single giant spring, under tension, just waiting to be released at the right moment.

“They’re in range!” someone shouted, and he reacted on instinct.  “Open fire!” he shouted needlessly.  His comm techs relayed the orders, and every ship with missile tubes, every orbital weapons platform and satellite weapon opened fire.  Space was thick with missiles, and the horrible wave that had sealed the fate of the Tau Seti forces was a mere pinprick compared to this, a candle to the Sun.  In response, the enemy flushed their pods as well, and
a comparable wall of firepower flashed out towards Earth.  When the two intersected this time, they were so spread out that only a small percentage of them, say a couple hundred or so, actually met and detonated.  Hundreds more thundered down on both sides, and as well as the normal laser clusters, salvoes of ECM, ECCM, scrambler and distracter missiles had been fired.

Fire control crews scrambled to bring down as many birds as they could before contact, but there were simply too many of them.  Both armada’s suffered noticeable casualties, destroyers obliterated, battleships broken in half, dreadnoughts reduced to floating cemeteries.  Whole wings of fighter craft were wiped out by a few stray blasts, and the death toll in those first few moments would’ve staggered anyone.

And then, through the haze of the midpoint-detonations, the Cybertronians came.  Sleek fighters and speedy destroyers led the way, with the stronger battleships following after and the lumbering, but deadly, dreadnoughts plowing through the wreckage in the end.  They came in with missile tubes launching, lasers blasting, and ECM waging an invisible war with the
defenders’ computer systems.  The Terran fortified defences proved their worth, however, shielding the naval vessels from the most damaging effects.  Their enhanced targeting systems picked salvoes of missiles out of space, and laser-intersections drained hostile beams of their charge.  At the same, the defenders’ more mobile weapons dashed forward, charging into the fray and slashing with their lasers.  Whole decks were opened to space in one slice, crewmen turned from bots or humans to rapidly dissipating whiffs of trace elements.  Though the Cybertronians had the more advanced vessels, the Terrans had both superior numbers and their static defences.  After twenty minutes or relentless destruction and death, the Cybertronians began to withdraw.

“We’ve got them on the run!” Ryoji declared triumphantly.  The Titan had fared well, being encased within her dreadnought task group.  The six super-ships had driven into the centre of the enemy’s lines, crushing destroyers and battleships with ease.  It wasn’t until they came up against what they had to assume were the enemies’ own command complement had they
met a serious challenge.  Three of the Titan’s sisterships had been destroyed outright, with a fourth reduced to half power after the forced ejection of two of her powerplants.  Still, they had succeeded in destroying the Cybertronian dreadnoughts, and it seemed that had been the turning point.  Squadrons and wings of craft began to disengage, fighting their way
free of the chaos in an attempt to regroup around Mars.  The Terrans, sensing their opponents’ momentary weakness, redoubled their efforts.  Hegemony ships trailed after Imperial ships as they fled back to the red planet, harassing them as they went with missile strikes and laser blasts.

Most followed their targets almost inside Martian orbit before beginning to draw back.
Which was exactly what the Empire wanted.

“Sir!” a young woman shouted.  Ryoji glanced up; a comm tech.  “We’re getting a transmission from our Lunar installations!”  That brought him up short; the Moon was currently around the Earth, blocked off from the fighting.  What could they possibly have to say?

“Play it.” he ordered.  Immediately, silence fell across the bridge as everyone waited to hear what was happening.  “Mayday!” a panicked voice shouted over the speakers.  “Imperial warships…. out of nowhere…… my god!  That one……  assive!  Look o….”  And then, there was nothing more than static.  For an instant, it seemed as though nobody even dared to breath.

“Helm, bring us around, full acceleration!” Ryoji ordered at once.  He had no need to issue a specific direction; the man would know.  “Comm, pass that order along!  Stress the utmost urgency!”  As the massive vessel began to spin, the point of view on the main screen changed.  It whirled from a view of Mars, quite close, through an empty stairfield, and finally back the
watery vision of Earth.  For an instant, he thought that it might still be all right.  His ships were fast, and whatever was on the other side of the Earth would need a lot of time to do serious damage.  Not to mention the orbital platforms.  No prob-

And then he saw it.  At first, he assumed it was just a viewer defect.  After all, the Earth couldn’t really be cracking apart, could it?  But there it was; he could see magma spilling out, killing millions as it swarmed over the planet, hungrily devouring the surface of the earth.  Tectonic plates cracked and pulled apart from each other, splitting cities down the middle
and dropping whole towns into the core of the planet.  As it continued, Ryoji could see the planet split into innumerable smaller fragments that began to pull apart from each other.  For a brief instant, the core of Earth held it all together.  But then, with an explosive force greater than anything anyone had ever seen (save, perhaps, Unicron’s destruction), Earth
exploded out.

It was, perhaps, a good thing that most of Europe slammed into the Titan and her two escorts.  Ryoji, certainly, embraced the void willingly after that specatacle.  His last sight was a tear-blurred image of a massive vessel moving with impunity through the ruins of his home planet.  And then.... Nothing.