Final Resting Place

Recap

Arak 4 had until recently, been a thriving, insectoid-based civilization it appeared. However, TR Archeologists found a world devastated by massive planetary bombardment-and it was quite apparent the Arkains had not done it to themselves.
The task force entered the system under tactical alert in Terran Navy standard "V" formation with the battle cruiser "Sheffield" on point surrounded by the destroyers "Achilles" and "Santa Ana", and destroyer escorts "Adams", "Reagan", and "Washington".
When the Task Force had just cleared the radiation belt surrounding Arak 6, tactical screens on the "Sheffield" and the point ships glowed with a massive swarm of targets.
The Sheffield report to the "Hand of God" was cutoff mid-report:
"Many unknowns... Taking heavy fire... Shields failing... 'Hanson' on fire and 'Victory' is gone-"
Admiral Chaen immediately set General Quarters and brought his remaining battlecruisers to the front in a flying wedge. All fighters and bombers on all ships were immediately scrambled.
Tactical sensors were unable to identify the ships, but sizes indicated approximately 100 capital-size ships. Intel was most likely equivalent to dreadnoughts, battlecruisers, heavy cruiser, and light cruisers. Another 10 apparent carriers nearly as big as the "Hand of God" and over 500 escort and support vessels.
It was apparent that the Task Force had unwittingly sailed right into the middle of an invasion.
Sensor logs showed the alien armada, due to its size, was having to take their time maneuvering their larger capital ships around the Asteroid Belt and many moons associated with Arak 7 & Arak 8.
To take advantage of the chokepoints created by the gas giants, the moons, and the asteroid belt, Admiral Chaen split his task force into small groups built around his remaining battle cruisers to delay the armada. Limited space forced the enemy ships to run a gauntlet of missiles, torpedoes, and solid projectiles from the much smaller, but well-positioned Terrans who made every shot count.
When the chokepoint at Arak 8's Gamma Moon collapsed with the destruction of the battlecruiser "Vostok", Admiral Chaen pulled his remaining ships back to the perimeter of the Arak system and took stock.
The Terran Republic lost three battlecruisers, five destroyers, twelve destroyer escorts and 1200 fighters, bombers and miscellaneous spacecraft and crew losses topped 75,000. The "Hand of God" had lost over half her spacecraft, had a third of her superstructure open to space, and had lost one of her two weapons arrays. Landing bays Alpha and Gamma were destroyed and the carrier was hulled in fifteen places and 35 percent of the ships was open to space. She had also lost one of her main drives, however the jump systems were intact.
As the enemy fleet swarmed outbound towards the crippled task force, Admiral Chaen made a critical decision. With a minimal screen of fighters, the destroyer "Churchill" and destroyer escorts "Kennedy" and "Ticonderoga", he would attempt to hold off the enemy fleet so that the rest of the task force could get away.
What happened next would go down in Terran Naval History as the "Chaen Maneuver". With his escorts harassing the approaching fleet with long range missiles and torpedoes, Admiral Chaen suddenly executed a micro-jump that put him square in the middle of the enemy carriers.
Admiral Chaen unleashed a broadside of missiles and torpedoes and guns. Three enemy carriers died instantly and two more drifted out of formation as they lost main power. He then micro-jumped again before any weapons could come to bear on the "Hand of God"--this time positioning himself squarely between to enemy dreadnaughts. Again, he repeated his broadsides and jumped away. Explosions bracketed both capital ships and one of the dreadnaughts started to drift as explosions tore through her superstructure.
The third time, however, was not a charm for Chaen. As he jumped back into the carrier group again, battle damage to the Hand of God caused the carrier to reappear at the same place as one of the enemy carriers.
Structural integrity on both ships failed a two solid objects of incredible mass came together at incredible speed. The Hand of God's motion dragged the hapless enemy carrier forward along it's flight path, driving the conjoined warships into a third carrier. The resulting explosion took out all three ships as well as various fighters, destroyers and other ships within the blast radius and heavily damaged three enemy cruisers, another carrier, and one of the already wounded dreadnaughts.
The rest of the task force escaped, including the escort supporting Admiral Chaen, and the Terran Navy rushed more ships into the sector, expecting an imminent invasion.
However, a little over a month later, the invasion did come and the Terran Navy suffered even more losses in that sector as a full-fledged war with the Saurian Empire became known as the 'Dino-Man War'.
There were no major engagements larger that the original Battle at Arak in the ten years the war went on. Mostly strike and counter-strike. Both sides lost colonies, only to retake them a few months later. It was a grinding, bloody war that neither side seemed capable of winning-or losing.
Finally, the two sides arraigned a truce when the a coup overthrew the military government of the Saurian Empire and a civilian governing body was installed. The treaty was signed, ironically enough, back on Arak 4 where it all began.
Terms of the agreement placed joint custody of the Arak system in the hands of the Saurians and the Terrans and less than ten years after the war had ended, both sides were co-colonizing the habitable worlds in the system.
Arak 4, however, remained a insect/human only colony. Arakains from colony worlds were contacted and returned to their home world to rebuild their civilization (with Terran help). The animosity between insect and Saurian ran high and incidents threaten to turn into another war. At the suggestions of the humans, the Saurians withdrew from the inner worlds, limiting their colonies to the outer worlds rarely visited by the insects.

Epilogue

Debris from the battle littered the Arak system long after even the Dino-Man War had ended. Pieces of the "Hand of God" and the Saurian carriers she collided with rained down on Arak 7's forest moon, (named Chaen by its Terran settlers) on a regular basis. They were deposited there by the gravitational eddies created as the moon passed through the gravity field of it's huge gas giant master.
Most of the pieces were smaller and burned up in the thick atmosphere before reaching the ground. Chaen colonists though, had to examine each piece and constantly monitor the atmosphere due to some of the nasty byproducts that could sicken the population.
It was late in the tenth year of colonization that a survey crew, tracking down a particularly large piece of debris, stumbled across a large section of the Hand of God's superstructure "the island" in a remote jungle bay. The colonists set a memorial made from pieces recovered from the "Hand of God" debris on the shore of the bay where the superstructure was found.