Admiral Kohl, his ships harassing the Federation force the entire time, pursued Wolfe's battleship over the planet. In Kohl's formation were Dagger-class small attack boats, ships that carried the ESA's newest secret munition: high-yield antimatter warheads. Too dangerous to be risked on a capital warship, the smaller attack ships carried one missile each, powerful enough to destroy a starship with a single hit. Up to that point, antimatter weapons were thought to be purely theoretical, but Admiral Kohl had brought eight to the Odmena System to face Wolfe with.

Almost every human born since will have seen the footage of what happened next. Kohl's small attack ships made a critical error, stacked behind the Jericho and clustered too close together. There was a collision between two that sent the three ships into Odmena's atmosphere where all three antimatter warheads detonated. The devastation was indescribable. A city of four-million people was simply erased from the surface as one of the warheads blew up almost on top of it. The other detonations caused tsunamis that took out coastal cities and threw up enough debris into the upper atmosphere the planet was dark for nearly half a decade, killing most indigenous planet life.

Regardless of whenever the two political factions decided to officially declare war on the other, this incident is nearly universally regarded as the beginning of the Unification War. In the face of such an atrocity, and in the heat of the moment, Admiral Wolfe ordered his taskforce to engage the ESA ships. The resulting battle was so savage and absolute that any chance for a diplomatic solution was effectively gone.

A deeper dive into the Battle of Odmena and the beginnings of the Unification War in general show Admiral Jackson Wolfe is much more of a reluctant combatant than his military record would indicate. The official transcripts from the Jericho's logs have been preserved in the Archives, and they clearly show an officer who only cared about protecting civilian lives and did everything he could to head off the violence that cost the people of Odmena so dearly.

That being said, Admiral Wolfe is still the same man who defeated the Phage and the Darshik, two advanced alien powers bent on the eradication of humanity. A reluctant warrior though he might have been, once the battle had been met, he would show no quarter. The actions of the admiral following the massacre of civilians in the Odmena System are still studied by Academy students even today.

1

"Still no indication we have been detected, Admiral."

"Maintain posture," Admiral Xiao said. The commander of Taskforce Nine, Third Fleet, sat in the Kuài Jiàn's command chair while the heavy cruiser's captain sat quietly at one of the observation stations. The taskforce was a small one, only nine ships strong, and all of them built before the fall of the Terran Confederacy and the subsequent restructuring that saw all Asianic Union worlds come under the newly formed Eastern Star Alliance. The ships were old—hell, they'd been old before the Phage War—but they were in excellent shape due to the fact they had spent most of their time on patrol or sitting in dock for months and, sometimes, years on end.