Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars

by Jason Anspach

  And they wouldn’t have done it at all were it not a micro-jump. Only at short distances were these kinds of precise insertions possible. Small errors in calculation didn’t expand into the major critical failures that could occur over incredible distances. In those instances, even the most remotely placed fractions of decimals could magnify to the point where ships could annihilate each other on a bad reentry.

  The younger crew all about him, busy with their tasks inside the dark CIC, rushing from comms, to weapons, to power management and deflectors while he studied the digital sand table, seemed businesslike and heedless of what happened when two ships shifted back to real space and tried to occupy even the smallest bit of space-time in the same instant. Or tried to occupy some other object that was currently where they wanted to be. Like a sun, or a planet, or even a small asteroid that could be pushed out of the way by the effects of the hyper-destabilization bow wave.

  A ship could instantly become nothing but a debris cloud expanding across the cosmic background in such a horribly miscalculated moment.

  And the odds increased when two massive ships like the battle cruiser Omari and the carrier Defiant, along with their escort ships, hurtled through the void of hyperspace, whatever it really was because no one really knew, together. In battle formation. Ready to engage the enemy at broadsides.

  Marines were ready. Gunners standing by. Pilots in the briefing rooms were receiving the forward scout Explorer’s data and receiving their strike targets on the objective. Every crewmember had moved to battle-station readiness.

  Overwhelming, highly qualified forces were closing in on a single Savage hulk that had refused to take off.

  Maybe she couldn’t?

  Who knew?

  But why, wondered the admiral as he studied the static display—no new incoming data came in while in jump—did he have a bad feeling about all of this?

  In the last instant before the entire task force tumbled from hyperspace, an atmo insert no less, the CIC suddenly grew quiet. Even the constant electronic murmur of traffic between the ships and throughout the ship’s departments dropped off. And all that could be heard was the monotone voice of the fleet jump coordinator calling out the seconds until jump exit.

  “Three…”

  “Two…”

  “One…”

  “Exit.”

  The series of screens along the forward section of the darkened combat information center showed the view from the bridge. Admiral Sulla, like most deck officers, gave these an almost cursory, and really involuntary examination. Their eyes and ears were the data being assembled all at once across the CIC. They would be far more aware of what was going on by looking at these readouts, displays, and holographic projections, than by merely observing the forward bridge display screens.

  But their eyes were involuntarily drawn back, helplessly, to the forward view.

  To the apocalyptic amount of destruction in front of them.

  A stunned silence enveloped the bridge.

  The city was ruined.

  The admiral barked out, “Targeting!” to refocus his dumbfounded staff and crew. To tear them away from what could not be unseen.

  A ruined city. Impact craters, seemingly haphazard, carved out of entire city blocks. Oily smoke boiling up against a red sky. Shattered towers, collapsed buildings, entire sections of the once-brilliant city on fire.

  “Update from the Explorer,” called out the TacAn officer. Her job was to update the situation from what was known pre-jump, to what had transpired mid-jump, to what was now the state-of-play post-jump. “Negative contact with Doghouse. Negative update on ground operations from Warhammer Actual. No contact there either, Admiral. Titan Leader is under attack and broadcasting ‘Badstrike’ on the raid. Multiple friendly casualties confirming… Explorer confirms no damage to the Nest…”

  Stunned silence followed. They had been in hyperspace for less than a minute. How could such disaster have fallen on the Coalition in such a brief time?

  “Looks bad, Admiral,” she finished. An apt summary. “But we have target lock on Objective Nest and are closing to firing range with turrets. SSM solutions are good.”

  And now was the moment of decision for the most veteran of UW’s naval officers. Go with close-range fire for the capture, identifying and targeting critical defensive systems to disable that technological relic and ancient wonder, or destroy it and save as many assets as possible on the ground in the aftermath.

  One scan of the real-time updates coming in from every asset’s transponders, down to the infantry group level, told the admiral that the entire mission was a catastrophic loss.

  “Confirm SSM use now. All ships engage at will.”

  An electric buzz shot through the CIC, and the crew bent to the firing orders.

  This was, short of nuclear release, the most extreme option at his disposal. Ship-to-ship missiles rated at starship levels of hull penetration and destruction, being used in fleet fire support, would do massive damage to the city.

  “Instruct all units to withdraw to the stadium and stand by for evacuation.”

  The sensor OIC was at his side.

  “Admiral, Explorer is detecting an inbound hyperspace disruption.”

  The admiral’s blood froze. Because this was unexpected, and there weren’t any friendlies Sulla could think of who would come unannounced into a Savage war zone. But an enemy…

  They had theorized over the years that something like that could happen. Theoretically… it might. Many had said no. Made solid arguments why it never would. But on a day when so many things were going wrong… then why not today?

  Why not now?

  “Scramble the interceptors,” Sulla said. “Load the bombers with SSMs. We’ll take no chances.”

  The CIC shot-caller who was standing nearby to receive any such orders opened his mouth in disbelief. The bombers had been loaded with anti-personnel and bunker-buster munitions to mop up identified Savage holdouts and hot spots on the ground. SSMs weren’t used for those operations.

  “Sir, it’ll take twenty minutes to swap the ordnance out,” he protested.

  “Do it faster then,” said the admiral through clenched teeth. “We may not have even that much time.”

  The Beginning of the Way Things Would Be

  Coalition Fleet

  The Skies Above New Vega

  The history books would often get the Battle of New Vega wrong. The entertainments were even worse. For more than the next thousand years they would get it so wrong, and in so many ways, that no one at the battle could even have recognized that these epic narratives were meant to represent the actual event.

  It was not fought in the middle of the day with superheroes leaping between ships. There was no lovestruck couple, a junior weapons officer and an insubordinate female marine, riding the destruction down into the ruin of the Savage Nest planetside, sacrificing themselves to save the day.

  That was just something invented by storytellers to sell downloads.

  It was fought at dusk, and the sky looked like it was filled with strange behemoths from other worlds floating toward one another and hurling lightning bolts and smoking arrows across the sky as they closed the distance.

  In that… it was mythic.

  Epic even.

  But the directors of the entertainments had wanted it to look prettier and be more visible. They changed the facts in order to earn more credits. And long afterward, when the truth had already all but been done to death in the dark ages of war to come, the stories were changed again, this time to fit the times and highlight issues to support the agendas of the now in those far-flung future viewings. Disregarding the truth of the then. Of that day.

  What the Wild Man witnessed from the ruined and burning streets of New Vega, and what Sergeant Greenhill saw from the unfathomable destruction in the rear echelons, and
what the colonel and his strike force and any other survivors saw unfolding in the twilight darkness above them, was beyond description.

  Everything that would come, no matter the budget and despite the special effects, would pale in comparison. What happened that day… was terrible.

  It began with the arrival of Task Force Wrath at twilight as the city burned like some tormenting plane in the lower hells. One Spilursan battle cruiser, the Omari, and two defensive escorts, the Isolde and Galahad, supported by the Espanian missile frigate Campeche, led the Coalition fleet’s charge. To the rear and off the starboard side of that attack formation came the premier United Worlds super-carrier Defiant, supported by Bauer and Joan d’Arc along with three assault frigates, Moreau, Sterns, and Chang.

  The captain of the Omari had first-strike authority and fired a full spread of SSMs, six in all, as the distance closed to less than ten thousand meters between the advance guard of the Coalition and the Savage hulk. Less than a minute later, both Galahad and Isolde released torpedoes and fired four SSMs a piece.

  Suddenly the Savage Nest, an ancient colony ship built hundreds of years earlier in low Earth orbit and launched in the last days of the Big Uplift when elite colonists fled dying Earth for the promise of some found utopia out there in the stellar dark, erupted on the ECM spectrum with a powerful directional cone of jamming noise and electronic interference that activated failsafe codes within all of the incoming missiles that formed the Coalition first-strike response.

  That lone pulse, powerful and immense, defeated the first wave.

  But sensors detected a massive surge within the colony Nest’s powerful reactors, and it was an Omari TacAn officer’s analysis that perhaps this was some type of one-shot weapon.

  SSM reloads were underway at two minutes out on the three lead ships when the Campeche was released by the Omari’s commander to engage with a full broadside spread from all missile batteries. The Espanian missile frigate wasn’t carrying full payload SSMs, but rather the evasive and highly agile STORMs—systems-targeting omni-reflex missiles. These were AI controlled and capable of free-fire target acquisition on the fly.

  The Espanian captain unlimbered all batteries and launched as the ship lumbered into a hard turn to port, breaking off from the main assault at an altitude of four thousand meters above the ruined city. The ship heeled over as missiles erupted away from all batteries along her port side, their smoking trails dancing and weaving toward their target: the Savage Nest.

  The ancient white-hulled hulk once must have looked daring and impressive to those who prepared to leave Earth within it. But even before the missile strike from the Campeche ravaged the outer hull, the long years in space had clearly taken their toll. The hulk was covered in cosmic dirt and maintenance grime and ravaged by battle damage from other conflicts that had taken place somewhere along its distant travels. Strange mechanical blisters of unknown origin dotted its skin.

  The STORMs found and acquired targets identified as weapons systems, drive propulsion systems, or comm engineering structures.

  To the rear, as the forward three ships closed in, engaging in coordinated volley turret fire, the carrier Defiant switched to flight operations and deployed interceptors rapidly. Initial plans for the strike stated that atmospheric flight operations would begin once the Savage ground threat had been identified and neutralized. When targets could be selected during mop-up operations.

  Some return battery fire, actual old-school twenty-millimeter chain-guns reeling off spent casings from the Savage hulk, engaged at max range. The weapons had little effect against the closing Omari and her powerful deflector screen and forward armor. Meanwhile the Spilursan battle cruiser was firing at will with her thirty-six heavy pulse batteries.

  The ancient hull of the massive Savage ship was being torn to pieces as ship-to-ship fire ripped plating to shreds and destroyed critical topside systems along the dorsal sections.

  It looked as though victory was at hand. And perhaps it would have been had the thing—the theory—that all others wrote off as an impossibility, hadn’t come to be.

  Admiral Sulla overrode all comms to issue high-priority flash traffic from the combat information center of Defiant. “Warning to all Coalition vessels and forces: expect more Savage vessels this sector. Hyperspace destabilization detection alarm has been activated.”

  Collectively, this was the first time such a phrase had been uttered within the consciousness of either the military or the galactic culture as it was known. The Savages did not work together. They were highly tribalized as a result of their closed, floating utopias. The differing lighthuggers had been rivals on Earth, seeking to remove themselves from one another in the expansiveness of interstellar travel in order to pursue their individualistic ideals of perfect. The galactic consensus was that Savages were just as opposed to one another as they were to any civilized colony they encountered.

  A ripple of shock raced through fleet comm as commanders asked for clarification and crews struggled with the reality that the one-sided fight they’d been more than willing to participate in for glory and easy combat decorations might be turning into something far more difficult.

  The contingent of Rossonian Crusaders, a heavy mechanized infantry unit from Ross-241 accompanied by their diplomat as part of their agreement to submit to the Coalition leadership, threatened mutiny, immediately demanding that the captain of the Joan d’Arc terminate the engagement and withdraw safely from the battle.

  A similar scene played out on other Coalition ships as the fighting unfolded over the next few minutes.

  Two pivotal events happened within the next thirty seconds.

  The first would stun galactic culture, sending shock waves through the dozen capital worlds and the smaller colonies that had begun to flourish during the early golden age of hyperspace. Four massive Savage ships fell out of hyperspace at a range of just over ten thousand meters from the nearest Coalition war ship.

  The second was that the Savage Nest fired a swarm of drones at the Espanian missile frigate Campeche. Thousands of ceramic-forged drones, similar to the ones used in the anti-personnel strike that had taken place earlier, shot forth at rail-gun speeds.

  A moving cone of destruction erupted down the hull of the medium-sized capital ship—as though it were a tractor suddenly consumed by a swarm of locusts on a sunny country day. The powerful drones slammed into the forward sensors, upper bridge, lower command, and intel targeting, then proceeded aft through the crew quarters all along the ship.

  Critical hull failure occurred when the successive drone blasts penetrated inward and hit missile stores, activating a cascade of explosions among the STORM warheads that were ready-racked for loading. The magazine explosion tore the vessel apart.

  Only the compartment block containing engineering decks survived instant destruction; it managed an immediate emergency separation operation and fired the disconnection bolts to separate from the ship. But with the vessel at four thousand meters, deep in the planet’s gravity well, there was little room for recovery or escape. The engineering section came down in the wealthy seaside district of Porto Suello along the coastal southern side of the Hilltop District.

  There were no survivors.

  For the first time in recorded history, the Savages had joined forces for a common cause. The next fifteen hundred years of galactic history would be defined by this moment.

  The Savage Wars had begun.

  37

  Carrier Defiant

  Task Force Wrath

  Watching the battle on the forward display and letting the fighter intercept officers deal with this newly arrived Savage threat was all Admiral Sulla could do at the moment. The Campeche had suddenly flared and then gone up like a bomb off the Defiant’s starboard bow.

  The crew of the carrier, men and women who’d seen countless pirates destroyed and had participated at long range in the Battle
of Tellae, gasped as pieces of the missile frigate went in every direction. Smoke trails erupted from the fiery blossom, rising into the atmosphere hundreds of meters before falling down to land in the vast urban sprawl of a dead city, several boroughs of which were already on fire.

  A senior deck officer began to cry, her sobs poignant reminders in the sudden silence that enveloped the stunned CIC that the game had just changed, and that it would be an all-in game. There would be losers, and perhaps… winners. Someday.

  Sulla tore himself away from the image of destruction.

  “Redirect all sensors! We need data on those four new contacts now!”

  Suddenly the CIC was alive once more with chatter and motion as trained professional officers forced themselves into action. It was time to start fighting this battle if there was to be a chance anyone might survive.

  Out there, off the starboard bow, the burning wreckage of the main spine of the Campeche fell like a burning Hollow Eve skeleton toward the city below. Not far off, the engineering section, which had disconnected at an extremely low altitude, plummeted along its own dangerous vector.

  “They’re not going to make it!” someone who was still watching called out.

  But Sulla had no time for that. None of them were going to make it if things kept going the way they were headed. Already a distress signal was coming in from the scout vessel Explorer in low orbit, indicating that she, too, was under attack.

  38

  Three-Six Armored Cavalry (Fast Attack)

  931st Artillery Perimeter

  There wasn’t much left of the detachment of motorized cavalry that had been sent out at just after dawn to recon the area surrounding Objective Rio, and which had instead become a loose collection of ad hoc gun bunnies attempting to execute fire missions under the direction of the wild-eyed drug manufacturer and distributor Private Makaffie.