Combined Arms

The defining craft fact of combined arms is that the layers do not run on the same clock. Render the difference; the engagement makes its sense from it.

• The void runs in minutes. The orbital engagement may decide before the wet-water engagement has finished forming up — a capital may have died and the orbital line stabilised inside the first hour, while the Legio is still digging in along the ridge and the assault hulls are still loading on the coast.
• The sea runs in hours. By the time the wet-water Reckoning is held, the void engagement is two hours past and the ground engagement is barely past its Clash.
• The ground runs in days. The battle for the contested coast and the inland approaches may run a week or longer. Void hulls may complete their action and redeploy to another theatre while the Centuriae are still holding the wire.
• The air threads all of them. Fighters from a deck at sea may strike enemy formations on the ground; a wing from low orbit may answer a wet-navy fire-mission. The wing is what binds the clocks.

The prose must hold the mixed clock honestly. Cut between the layers at the natural rhythm of each, not at a uniform interval. A long void scene at the opening can run beside a brief Deployment glimpse of the ground; a long ground scene at the middle can run beside a short Reckoning glimpse of the void. The reader who is taught the mixed clock reads combined arms through it.

• It exists for the duration of the operation, not as a standing rank. A senior officer holds combined authority for the engagement; after it, the command dissolves back into the branches.
• It does not command each branch directly. Each branch retains its own commander. The unified hand coordinates them — sets the tempo, assigns the layered objectives, decides which layer is reinforced when the broken theatre arrives. A scene that has the unified commander micro-managing a single Centuria has departed from doctrine.
• It wears the cost. The unified commander is the only person in the engagement who sees every layer's losses in real time — the Centuria on the ridge gone, the ship at sea sunk, the frigate on the orbital line listed, the wing returned three short — and the operation continuing because the world is not yet held. She does not have the relief of one layer's intimate camera; she carries every layer.
• It is human. A commander who calls a perfect engagement is a piece of doctrine, not a scene. The combined-arms register uniquely supports the commander who makes a wrong call — who reinforces one layer and lets another break, who reads the broken theatre wrong. This is one of the Republic's hardest scenes. The wrong call is paid for in dead Republic, and the prose holds the cost.

• The world is the stake. A piece that resolves a combined-arms battle without invoking what coast, what cradle, what colony, what station was held has lost the register.
• The regular service in its full strength. A piece that has only one branch present has not earned the register — where only one branch is engaged, the single-domain craft applies, not this one.
• The Imperial Armada is the last reserve. No piece commits it casually. Its absence is felt; its arrival is the heroic register at maximum amplitude, used once in a long arc, paid for in the world's near-fall.
• The mixed clock is honest. A piece that flattens all layers to one clock — the void Crisis and the ground Crisis resolved on the same page — has lost the doctrine. Render the lag and the offset.
• The cradle defence is the last shape. The terminal scene of a tragic combined-arms engagement is the cradle defence — every layer collapsed, the line at the cradle itself. The Republic's most concentrated heroic register, used sparingly and earned by everything before it.
• The unified commander wears the cost. A commander whose decisions land without doubt has not earned the register.
• The Vox speaks the count of the world. The final count is the operation's count across every layer — orbital hulls, naval hulls, ground Centuriae, air pilots — held in one formal liturgical tone. End there.
• No catalogue showcase. One suit, one ship, one frigate, one fighter — held; the rest in the panorama. A piece that names every class in the inventory has become a wargame.