Two decades later, humans fought and won its first war against the Snakes, using mostly warships of their own design, and relying on their uncanny ability to endure exposure to warp space. The Tree Cousins were nobody’s pets, and the two species’ liking and mutual respect had become tinged with more than a little apprehension. Humanity’s rapid advancement into independent status was as worrisome as its seemingly unnatural resistance to the Chaotic Void ships must endure to traverse the vast distances between stars.
Demons. Witches.
Starfarers shared a mythology developed over millions of years, passed down in fragments of incomplete information. Much was lost when civilizations either fell into Oblivion or Transcended into Elder status, abandoning their worlds and departing towards the center of the galaxy. That mythology spoke of cursed cultures that dealt with forbidden technologies. Humanity’s ability to resist the madness of warp transit had no equivalent in recent galactic history – the thirty thousand years or so that was all that even the largest databases could hold in any detail. Outside history, however, there were plenty of cautionary tales about older species who had turned into monsters in deed and appearance, and whose sins had precipitated periods of darkness and strife.
The Hrauwah liked humans, but they tempered their feelings with caution. There was never a formal alliance between the Kingdom and America or any other Earth polity. Trade aplenty and a great deal of technical support, yes, but never a formal agreement to fight for each other. Even now, when humanity’s destruction might result in the Hrauwah’s own, the High King would not commit to that degree. There were almost a hundred Royal Warships fighting alongside Americans on several war theaters, but they were all volunteer formations like Grace’s own flotilla.
Only fitting I should lead one such group, Grace thought. Her choice to prevent humanity’s extinction had led to this.
Strange how a decision made so quickly could impact so many lives over the ensuing decades.
* * *
“In conclusion, we are at DEFCON-One, people. Enemy emergence is categorized as imminent. All birds are loaded and ready to go.”
Captain Fernando ‘Hulk’ Verdi, USWMC, shrugged at the news. Everyone in the briefing room knew what was going to happen. The Joint Star Fleet had been given its final orders: stand or die. Which pretty much meant ‘stand and die,’ unless the fighters of CSG-11 could pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat. It appeared that their Wyrm allies were counting on them doing just that.
Sometimes getting a rep for kicking ass and taking names means they’ll give you more asses to kick than you can handle.
“What do you think, Hulk?” asked Richard ‘Dicky’ Morales, Fernando’s wingman. They weren’t moving their mouths, or even subvocalizing the way people did when using ordinary comm implants. Their conversation was happening entirely inside their heads, unbeknownst to the colonel giving the briefing or anybody except other warp pilots. One of the many benefits of being the few, the proud and batshit crazy Marine aviators. Nobody had expected fighter pilots to become telepaths, but that was exactly what happened.
“I think we’re going to have to try the thing, Dicky,” he said. They both knew what ‘the thing’ was, but had developed a superstitious urge not to refer to it directly.
“That bad, eh?”
“You saw the scout reports. Almost five hundred distinct contacts. Too far to make out the actual classes, but the energy signatures showed hundreds of heavy-weights. Looks like they’re bringing in more battleships than we’ve got ships, brah.”
“Yeah. And nobody’s talking about running.”
“Nowhere better to fight them, not for three warp transits, and that means leaving like three billion Wyrm asses hanging in the wind. If they were Americans, would you run?”
“Shit, no. You’d think we’d have gotten more reinforcements, though.”
“The Gimps just opened a second front. The Wyrashat Empire may be bigger than the US, but they only got so many ships, and they can’t be everywhere at once. If we can’t help them hold this system, they might quit on us. They can make a deal with the Galactic Alliance. We can’t.”
“Can’t trust nobody,” Dicky groused.
“In the end, you look out for your own. And we’ve got a bunch of Puppies fighting alongside us, even though they don’t have to.”
“They owe us, man. Do you know their flotilla commander...?”
“… is the one that led the Snakes to Earth?” Fernando finished for him. “Yeah. Everyone knows. She was also along for the ride when we burned down the Snake core worlds. She’s been lobbying for a full alliance all this time. Don’t be talking shit about the Bitch Queen.”
Dicky replied with the telepathic version of a shrug. The two pilots didn’t usually discuss politics, which was just as well. Dicky was a Humanist, a faction that considered aliens to be a necessary evil at best and pure evil at worst. A lot of Marines were part of the movement, which made some sense given that their primary job was to make war on assorted ETs. The Navy was supposed to be a little more nuanced. Fernando, who’d been a jarhead throughout his career, sometimes wished the Corps could be more like the senior service.
“Yeah, easy for you to think,” Dicky said, picking on Fernando’s thoughts. Hard to keep things to yourself when engaged in a psychic chat; his opinion had leaked through. “All due respect, Hulk, but you used to be a pogue shuttle pilot. You ain’t been in the dirt dodging plasma.”
“Fuck you very much,” Fernando said, but without much heat. His wingman had a point. Even a so-called ‘assault shuttle’ rarely performed hot landings. Shuttles mostly waited until orbital bombardment and Marine warp-dropped attacks had secured a landing zone, and then ferried troops and equipment to the surface. Hard to do anything else in the face of energy weapons that traveled at the speed of light and had a range measured in light-seconds. The only combat ops Fernando had performed in his former MOS had been against primitives who couldn’t threaten a civilian lander, let alone an armed and armored one.
“You still think any aliens are our friends, Hulk? After all this shit?”
“People are people. And if it wasn’t for the Wyrms and the Puppies, we’d have gotten swarmed under before we even came up with warp fighters.”
“Sure. Let’s hope they don’t change their minds while we still need them.”
“Let’s,” Fernando agreed, putting an end to it. Not a good time for breaking their rule about talking politics.
He knew why they’d done it, though: so they wouldn’t talk about ‘the thing.’ The new trick warp fighter pilots had come up with shortly before this deployment. When it worked, it worked great, but it came with a price. If the US had enough time to develop the new tech – or new magic, the way some of their scientists spoke about it – they would be able to beat anybody.
“Battle stations. All hands report to battle stations. This is not a drill.”
The Gimps had arrived. On Drakul System, time had run out.
* * *
Not letting them hear her growl was becoming rather difficult.
The King-Admiral tried not to snarl at the liquid-filled transparent pillar and the holographic display within. The holotank readings illustrated the information that she’d already received via her cybernetic implants and confirmed her worst fears.
“Warp emergence detected! Three light-seconds away. Five hundred vessels of all types.”
“Battle stations,” Grace ordered, echoing the commands she received from the leader of the Joint Star Fleet of which her flotilla was but a minor element.
The enemy force couldn’t have arrived directly from its original point of departure on Vendack System. A twelve-hour warp transit would leave their crews incapacitated for as much as three hours, plenty of time for defenders to tear their vessels apart. To avoid detection and recover from transit, the enemy force must have arrived no less than fifteen light-hours away from the terminus of the ley line connecting the two systems.
A human scientist, one of the first to grasp the concepts inherent to faster-than-light travel, had likened the process to swimming under a sheet of ice. One entered through a hole in the ice, and emerged from another hole. It was theoretically possible to exit somewhere other than the ‘hole’ in question, but it required massive energy expenditures to claw one’s way through the ‘ice,’ which was a metaphor for regular spacetime. The further one was from a hole, the harder it was. That had been a daring move, to arrive so far away from the system’s single white dwarf star and the handful of inner planets whose gravity fields’ interactions created the network of ley lines that allowed relatively safe access in and out of warp space.
One percent of the ships that made the high-risk jump would never return from the bizarre realm where distance and time were meaningless, their crews doomed to death or some worse fate. The enemy was willing to suffer significant casualties for the privilege of denying the defenders the advance warning a more sensible approach would have provided.
Five hundred vessels. Their warp jump into the periphery of Drakul System must have cost them at least five or six ships. That sort of determination was rare in the known galaxy.
Grace glanced at the icons of the Joint Star Fleet while sensors identified and cataloged the emerging enemy armada. Following Wyrashat tradition, friendly forces were marked in dark green, the enemy in a deep purple. There were a few nervous whines among the bridge crew as the purple icons grew in number and size and the correlation of forces became clear.
The Joint Star Fleet was centered around the Wyrashat Upper Quadrant Defensive Wing: ninety-three vessels strong, including half a dozen superdreadnoughts, eight dreadnoughts, nine battleships and twenty battlecruisers, with the rest of the formation composed of light cruisers, destroyers and a smattering of frigates. The Wing had been reinforced by the Human Expeditionary Force: six battleships, twenty-four cruisers of assorted tonnage, six carrier vessels and fifty lighter ships, evenly divided between destroyers and frigates. Grace’s Volunteer Flotilla was a semi-independent adjunct to the HEF: her single dreadnought, thirteen battlecruisers and twenty-eight light vessels were not particularly modern or well-outfitted. Some had considered her post as its commander to be an insult of sorts; she disagreed rather strongly, although she still wished the Hrauwah Kingdom had seen fit to be more generous with its assistance.
The two-hundred-plus vessels were arrayed around the sixth planet of the system, a rocky giant surrounded by five warp entrances that led deep into Wyrashat space. A dozen orbital facilities circled the planet, including four massive fortresses, each bristling with three times the firepower of a superdreadnought. On its surface dwelled some fifty million colonists; due to Drakul-Six’s inhospitable atmosphere, they were mostly confined to a handful of underground cities. Each city was protected by a formidable Planetary Defense Base capable of engaging targets up to two light seconds away with its battery of super-heavy graviton cannon and well-stocked missile launchers.
The system was named after a legendary Wyrm warrior-king; humans had replaced the long and unpronounceable name with one that meant ‘Dragon’ in one of their languages as well as being the title of an ancient warlord in their own history. By any other name, Drakul lived up to its reputation as a deadly bulwark against anyone daring to invade the Wyrashat Empire.
Every door has a key, and it is shaped like an axe. The old Hrauwah refrain flashed through Grace’s mind as the Galactic Imperium’s formation came into focus.
Four hundred and ninety ships. Numbers alone meant little, of course. Tonnage and energy signatures were the only meaningful metrics to assess the threat each vessel represented. Grace had to fight an atavistic urge to whimper as the raw data was converted into tangible designations.
Forty-nine superdreadnoughts. Eighty dreadnoughts. A hundred and seventeen battleships.
The icons’ sizes were proportional to each ship’s estimated class and firepower. Capital vessels looked massive in the display. Grace couldn’t credit what her eyes were seeing; for several seconds, she believed there had been an error, some glitch in the fleet’s sensors. The oversized icons remained on the holotank, however. Each superdreadnought was three times the size of the largest ship in the Joint Star Fleet.
The rest of the Imperium force appeared to be comprised of light cruisers or oversized destroyers, tightly arrayed around the larger ships. Their contribution to the force’s broadside weight would be negligible, not that it mattered. Drakul’s defenders would be woefully outgunned by each of the three categories of capital ships facing them. With all sets of ships combined, the situation was beyond hopeless.
The King-Admiral cast a hopeful glance at the icons of the Human Expeditionary Force. Earthlings were notorious for winning spectacular victories against seemingly impossible odds. Humans, led by the American tribe, had fought numerous wars against several larger and more prosperous polities and won most of them. If anyone could deliver a miracle, it would be them.
She glanced at a visual display focused on several HEF vessels. Their outlines were obscured by glowing multi-hued clouds. Those warp shields rendered human ships invulnerable to most direct-fire weapons, at least until ranges closed enough that the enemy could probe for the gaps between them. No other species in the known galaxy could endure the constant exposure to desecrated spacetime those shields represented.
Warp Witches.
The unfair thought lingered in her mind for a moment. Perhaps that’s what humans were. The Galactic Imperium certainly believed so. That belief had been strong enough to forge an alliance with humanity’s enemies. Witches or not, the American ships would determine whether Drakul could hold against the impossible armada bearing down on them.
Grace-Under-Pressure dutifully passed on the orders from the leader of the Joint Star Fleet. Fleetlord Klem Angarar was four hundred years old and had fought the Imperium and its clients in no less than five conflicts of varying intensity during his multi-century career. His long-necked, pseudo-reptilian image filled several screens as he addressed the JSF.
“The so-called Galactic Imperium has arrived. A dozen times in our history, it has tried to force its way past the gates of Drakul. A dozen times, it was forced back, earning nothing, their crippled hulls filled with hisses of grief for their dead and maimed. Today, our enemy will be taught for the thirteenth time that Drakul is forever closed to invaders. Empire, Republic and Kingdom: we all fight together against a common foe. Our joint efforts will be successful. Carry on.”
Grace’s Hrauwah’s culture would have found such plain words downright offensive, but the Wyrashat prided themselves in their terse and simple speech, saving their creative energies for visual arts and crafts. Grace sighed and uttered a commonly-used phrase out loud, to help mollify any ruffled fur among her crews.
“Diversity is the universe’s way to test our patience.”
Every sophont in the galaxy had evolved from small tribal groups, where everyone looked and behaved alike and ‘stranger’ was synonymous with ‘enemy’ or ‘dangerous.’ It took considerable energy to deal with different cultures, let alone species, and most people didn’t bother except when circumstances forced them to do so. Most polities’ citizens spent their lives without ever meeting an alien in person. The Galactic Imperium had unified dozens of species into their fold, but only through a determined effort to stamp out all native cultures and replace them wholly with its own.
As part of the small minority that could endure faster-than-light travel, Grace had grown to appreciate different ways of doing things, however. Having nothing better to do while her well-trained crewmembers performed their duties, she indulged herself for a few moments and watched the visual displays of the Joint Star Fleet’s varied vessels.
Wyrashat designs followed biological motifs: their warships resembled great beasts covered with glittering emerald or azure scales, their warp nacelles and weapon ports skillfully concealed beneath spreading wings and sharp talons; each ship was a
sculpture as much as a tool of battle. American vessels, by contrast, were functional almost to a fault: their lines were meant to magnify internal space, which meant spherical chambers connected with a latticework of struts and tunnels. The Kingdom’s aesthetics lay somewhere between the two extremes, with functionality being the primary but not sole concern. Grace liked to think that her dreadnought’s elegant lines, somewhat similar to pre-Contact humans’ fictional depictions of what rocket ships would be like, were a sensible compromise between style and substance.
The Wyrashat could afford their extravagance, being one of the wealthiest polities in the known galaxy. Those beautiful sculptures hid extremely efficient shields and weaponry, with a good twenty percent more firepower and resiliency than Hrauwah’s ship-type equivalents, and thirty percent greater than the Americans, at least when you removed warp shields from the equation, something most Starfarers wished they could do in reality. Humans, on the other hand, were poor up-and-comers, with barely enough industrial capacity to meet their defense needs, and able to survive only because of their extraordinary ability to survive exposure to warp space.
One’s status was never fixed in time, of course. Like a segment of a wheel, what was on top today could well be on the bottom tomorrow. This battle would likely determine which way the wheel would turn.
Grace watched the Galactic Imperium’s ships as they moved into range. Like the Wyrashat, they were works of art, their facades the color of burnished bronze and seemingly made of riveted plates covered with intricate bas-reliefs depicting scenes related to each ship’s name and history. Several of the advancing superdreadnoughts and battleships had fairly plain decorations, which meant they were new vessels with no great deeds attached to their names. Unsurprising, given their number. New ships meant green crews, who even if experienced elsewhere had likely not spent much time learning the ways of their current spacecraft. That might be turned to the Joint Star Fleet’s advantage.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 96
