War in the Galaxy
A Science Fiction Novel
If you haven’t read “Hortus Deorum,” or “System Sanctus,” both of those are in the same universe as this story.
1
You could always tell Dreiad ruins by their arches. Everything else they built had been made of plasteel , which didn’t stick around after they were gone. But the stone arches were their signature. Those stuck around.
The Dreiad Empire hadn’t ruled the galaxy for very long. They’d managed to unite the entire Milky Way, temporarily subduing the various warring nations and forcing them to pay tribute. But after a hundred-and-twenty years, they’d collapsed suddenly. It was said that the proximate cause had been the tension between the working and patrician classes. Nor did it help that the various nations which the Dreiad had subdued had been chafing under their taxation. But whatever the cause, their civilization was gone, leaving behind little beyond the stone arches.
On many worlds, the Dreiad had ruled with a touch so light it was barely noticed. But on the worlds where they hadn’t, they’d built stone arches, impressive roadways over deserts and oceans, and open fora. Hundreds of years later, some worlds still used Dreiadian coin.
Any arches which hadn’t already cracked had been blown apart in the last three weeks. Heni hunkered behind a partially intact arch now, but not out of any impression that it would protect him. The arch would block snipers from seeing him. That’s all it would do. Unless one of them decided to shoot down every arch so that there was no place on the alluvial plain to hide, he would be relatively safe here. Relatively. A direct hit would destroy the arch and any shells which landed within an eighth of a mile would kill him instantly.
Heni waited for the drones to show. He knew the enemy was mapping the battlefield with drones and doing their best to shoot over the horizon. Luckily, this was an outdated strategy. He had a device on his belt which could knock any drone out of the sky within ten klicks at the touch of a button. Better yet, it had no signature and there was no way to know where the signal which knocked out the drones had come from. This weapon, invented some hundred years ago by a man named Aeschilles, had upended modern warfare, moving the status quo back in the direction of ground combat between human beings who could see one another and sometimes even touch one another.
Heni touched the button just in case. Nothing fell out of the sky. He counted the clips in his belt. He checked his water tanks. He had twelve liters.
The Merian Federation had a strange relationship with units of measurement. Both imperial units, and international units – once known as metric units – were considered standard, and every child was taught to convert from one to the other at the age of five. Most Merian high schoolers could do the conversions in their head, even from slugs to pound-force to Newtons. Technically, imperial units were the official units of the Federation, but Heni could use metric well enough and he found himself thinking in both. He carried water in liters and traveled in miles.
A shell exploded close enough to give him the shakes. When he’d calmed down, he pressed a button on his wrist and radioed Gurney.
“They’re getting close to me,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“I’ll cover you if it’s time to break for it.”
“Roger. You have line of sight.”
“Yes.”
“Start firing when you see me put my pack on.”
His pack weighed twenty pounds. Heni threw it on his back and he heard the satisfying sound of gunfire aimed at his enemy’s position. With a quick word of thanks, he darted out from behind the arch and started running from crater to crater, trying to make his way to the trench. Gunfire ripped away overhead but the enemy sentries were too tied up to get a good bead on him. Lucky for him.
He made it to a crater adjoining the trench. Diving inside headfirst and landing facedown in the sand, he flinched as several rounds went by overhead.
“Damn near got me,” he muttered.
“Not today,” said a voice above him. He recognized the voice. It was Gurney. Heni rolled over onto his back. Gurney had his hand out. Heni took it and Gurney pulled him up.
“Glad you made it back,” he said. “Captain says we’re going to do another push to the west soon. He says this one will be for real. You made it back just in time. He says the time for feints is over. All points to head back to the trenches. We need to prepare for the next assault.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“For covering me, not for helping me up.”
“Of course.”
Gurney led his friend down into the trenches, which snaked away from the action for over a mile. While they walked, he toggled with a few buttons on his wrist and monitored his headglass out of the corner of his right eye.
Rather than a full visor which would impede line of sight, the headglass fit on to one side of a helmet and could be used to monitor up to ten feeds at a time. A quick tap on the console, which most armor had strapped to the right wrist, would pull up any one of the ten cameras. From the console, a skilled operator could control up to ten semi-autonomous vehicles, or fire up to ten wireless gun emplacements. Gurney pushed a button and a heavy chugging opened up just above their heads. Light shells whizzed away towards the enemy lines, coming out of a cannon embedded in the nearby rock.
Gurney pushed another button and they waited for a minute. Then he tilted his headglass so that Heni could see and they watched the camera feed as a missile strike took out two autonomous ground vehicles. Two others rolled by, undeterred by the loss of their peers.
Just then, the gun stopped firing. The cameras still worked, and they watched as both vehicles stopped dead in their tracks. They heard several crashes as drones fell out of the sky.
“Dammit,” said Gurney. “Someone detonated an Aeschilles. Captain gave the order for us not to do that until right before we make the push. He wanted them to be surprised. Give us maximum advantage. Let their guys hang back a bit so we can get closer to them.”
“Must have been someone on the other side.”
“Maybe they think we’re about to make a push and they wanted to hit us first.”
“Or they’re making a push of their own.”
And just like that, they heard the telltale sound of rotor wings. This was followed by several explosions. The explosions didn’t stop. There was a lull after the first few, but then they continued. They grew closer.
“Run,” said Gurney. “We have to get to cover. There’s a bunker just around the bend.”
They dashed forward down the trench as the artillery picked up. This bombardment was too heavy to mean anything other than a major push. The rotor wing sound, just audible above the explosions, was coming in closer, indicating that air support was right behind the line of shelling.
After a full breathless minute, they reached the door of the bunker. Gurney slammed the operating switch open and let the scanner read his face. The door opened and they dove inside, tumbling into a steel vault. The heavy doors closed behind them.
They ran to the back of the vault where there was another door, which opened an elevator. They got inside and within milliseconds the elevator was whisking them down and east, deeper into the ground and away from the shelling. The rotor wings didn’t drop anything which could bust a traditional bunker, but the Merians weren’t taking any chances.
On Gurney’s feed, they watched as the rotor wings hit the first line of the trenches and began bombing. Suddenly, several dozen winged craft came into view over the ridge behind their lines. They cheered. Their airmen were here.
What followed was a vicious dogfight between the Xing rotor wing craft with swivel guns and air-to-air missiles and the spaceplaces of the Merian Federation with their fixed guns and laser cannons. When it was all over, the Merian Space Force had prevailed. The last of the Xing rotor wing craft limped away over the horizon. A barrage of missiles followed them. Most made contact with their targets. Even with the lack of many satellites in orbit around this planet, neither side needed line of sight to be able to hit a target.
One of the first things a team did when establishing a beachhead on a new planet was to set up an array of positioning satellites which could aid in precision navigation. And one of the first things any attackers did upon entering an atmosphere was to disable those satellites. In past centuries, militaries had fought viciously to protect their satellites, and battles had been won or lost based on the actions of kamikaze satellites.
Today, most armies had learned to fight in what was considered GPS-denied environment, or GPS-contested environment. GPS satellites were disposable, and it was very cheap to set up an array of twelve or thirteen satellites orbiting any planet of reasonable size. On contested battlefields, most armies only bothered to send up a few satellites, which would give an edge when it came to navigation and precision missiles, but which wouldn’t be determinative and which therefore wouldn’t be heavily relied upon by soldiers on the ground.
Besides, other technologies developed in the last century allowed most soldiers to see and map the battlefield, even without the aid of either drones or satellites.
Gurney used just such a technology now when he pulled up a visual of the Xing positions. He was surprised to see how depleted their stores of ammunition were. Maybe there was hope yet for the Merian forces to reclaim the battlefield and thereby the planet.
He wasn’t holding his breath. They’d been five weeks on this desolate planet, fighting over a world without any life or resources, engaged in a hopeless battle of attrition against a superior force. Gurney had learned to stop hoping long ago. He took each day as it came.
Neither he, nor Heni could remember the last time they’d had leave to go home. He knew they’d both declined the last time it had been offered. There was forced downtime for every soldier who had been too long on the front lines – or every soldier who had been too long on the front lines and survived. Most didn’t survive.
The best predictor of who survived and who didn’t was how long you spent on the front lines. But both Gurney and Heni had been on the front lines ever since they’d rotated out of System Sanctus two years ago. It must have been before that when they’d last visited their homeworld of Harbor Uilturnia. Gurney was forgetting what an emerald sea looked like. All he knew was dust and the sound of shelling.
Gurney had taken to wearing a cross around his neck. It was an old symbol from an old religion and neither of them was entirely sure what it meant, although they’d met other soldiers who believed in it. It was said that there were parts of the Federation where the religion was still heavily practiced, but Gurney had never been to any of them. At the same time, in all their time on the front lines, on four planets, in three systems, in different corners of the galaxy, fighting with different units, they’d never once met a man who still claimed to be an atheist. Most said they didn’t know what they believed, but they all thought there was something out there. A lot said whatever was out there probably didn’t care about human beings, but others said that maybe human beings deserved whatever it was they did to one another.
Not a man was willing to denounce the war. They all thought it terrible, although in a strange and sadly glorious way. But not a man that either of them had met thought the Merian Federation wasn’t in the right, nor that they weren’t fighting for a just cause. Not a man said he wasn’t glad to die for that cause. Heni wondered sometimes about that. He reckoned either the Merians really were the good guys, or war had that effect upon soldiers, that it convinced them fully of the rightness of their cause for the alternative was nihilism and despair.
“What’s it look like up there?” asked Heni.
“It looks like we’ve got a good chance. If we can hammer them enough for the next four hours, we can break them.”
“Aren’t we making a push before that?”
“Probably. Let’s find a team and link up.”
“Are all the rest of ours dead?”
“I think so. I haven’t heard from Jarret and I stopped hearing from Semolina an hour ago. The rest I either saw die with my own eyes or you did.”
They fell silent and stood there for a moment. Then, without speaking, they turned and went deeper into the bunker, looking for other Merian uniforms. Both had lost their long-wave comms, so the only people they could communicate with were each other.
It took them several minutes to reach the closest command post, and there they found several dozen Merian Marines. Some had their helmets off – the command post was pressurized and had oxygen – but many were suited up or suiting up.
“It’s time,” said a voice over a microphone. It was Captain Javits, who wasn’t their captain, but who probably would be now. If Gurney was right that everyone in their unit was dead, that probably meant Gurney and Heni would need to be folded into Javits’ unit. They saluted a nearby sergeant.
“We’re going to make our push,” said Javits. “To the newcomers, if you were in D company or B company, you’re in my company now. E company. Look for the nearest sergeant and he will organize you into new platoons.”
They went over to the closest sergeant. “We’re putting all the newcomers in two platoons,” he said. “Lieutenant Jevers will lead one and Lieutenant Liao is in charge of the other. If you’re in Jevers’ platoon, you’ll listen to me – Sergeant Mik. If you’re in Liao’s, you’ll listen to Sergeant Wyandot. If I fall, you’re to answer to him. If he falls, his men are to answer to me. If we both fall, listen for the captain or one of the Lieutenants. You’ll hear them on your radios.”
“Sir, how do we know which platoon we’re assigned to?” asked Gurney.
“Who was your lieutenant before?”
“Rian.”
“You’re in Jevers’ platoon then.”
The sergeant led them over to where their new lieutenant had gathered his platoon. There were some quick introductions, brief orders, and then Heni and Gurney were taken to the armory to get resupplied. Gurney hadn’t realized how much ammunition he’d expended already.
“We’re running low on shells,” the quartermaster told him. “But I’ve been told not to ration them. Order’s come from high up. We’re either going to break them with this charge or die trying. We don’t leave anything for later. They’re not going to call off the push if things go south.”
“Meaning we’re to fight until they surrender or we lose?” asked Gurney.
“That’s the word.”
They exchanged glances.
“Alright then.”
“Alright then.”
2
When they’d left System Sanctus, Gurney and Heni had been plagued by the same irrational worry many young soldiers have when they first come close to combat: they worried the war would be over before they’d have time to get to the front lin
es. Neither had enjoyed being stuck in System Sanctus while their cousins and friends were out risking their lives in far-flung regions of the galaxy. Luckily, whenever they stopped in Merian cities on their way to the front lines, nobody asked them, “What are you doing safe and sound? Where have you been the last year while the war’s been raging?” Instead, they just gave polite nods or thanked the young men for their service or saluted them as they went by.
It took a full month before Gurney and Heni were rotated out to a combat division. Their first battle was a small skirmish over an asteroid belt in an otherwise unforsaken star system far from any major military targets. But the asteroid belt was rich with metals and small teams of miners eked out a rough and dangerous existence in order to extract enough lithium, copper, and beryllium for a small fleet. Miners worked off and on in six-month tours, during which they earned the equivalent of two years’ salary for mining work in less remote and less dangerous locales.
When the Merian fleet arrived, most of the miners had evacuated already. They’d seen the Xing warships and fled. But they needn’t have worried. The two fleets didn’t engage one another directly, preferring to lurk and bide time. When there was a brief engagement, none of the asteroids took a direct hit. But neither admiral wanted to commit his ships or his men for what looked to be a bloody fight for little gain. The layout of the system gave advantage to any defender, especially since both sides had immediately taken up positions inside various craters and in dark side orbits where it would be difficult for their adversaries to sneak up on them. Any attacker had to fly straight into a maze of an asteroid field, aware that fire could come from above or below or in front or behind or on either side.
The fields were littered with both sides’ droneships and cameras. These monitored all major vessels at all times, meaning any safe engagement would require taking out these autonomous eyes on the battlefield.
So, the two sides circled one another for several weeks, engaging occasionally in a miniature battle, but otherwise holding themselves in reserve. Eventually, the Xing ships left, either having received orders to go elsewhere for another fight or because their admiral had decided to call it a draw and seek out more worthwhile targets.
Gurney and Heni had been disappointed. Most of their time had been spent sitting in the bunkroom with two other marines, waiting for something to happen. They spent time at the gymnasium and lingered over meals. Gurney and Heni read books from the ship’s library. When they left, Gurney and Heni were glad to find they were to be reassigned to a new company.
Since that time, they’d found battle in the jungles of Wolvedon and on the tundras of Wincaster. The latter had been an atrocious battle of attrition, involving long periods of monotony interspersed with intense screaming and agony. This was where they were first introduced to modern trench warfare.
Heni liked to read history, so he was always lecturing Gurney and the other marines about trench warfare during the Great War, the first of the world wars on Old Earth. Gurney eventually said that this was all very interesting, but that it was decidedly less so when they were living in a trench themselves and taking incoming shelling every day or so. Battles were intermittent and the monotony grew on them. Eventually, both sides withdrew from Wincaster, which had very little strategic value. Gurney lost a finger to frostbite, but it was regrown for him in a short time and reattached in the hospital bay on the transport home.
They didn’t go home, though. Instead, they went to Dagravia, an industrial world primarily occupied by one of the largest Merian bases in this section of the galaxy. Gurney and Heni were recuperating there, preparing for the first assault on Xing territory itself, when a surprise attack hit Dagravia and they found themselves holed up for a month repelling it. The attack was unsuccessful, but it canceled the planned assault on Xing territory, and it did enough damage to the surface of Dagravia to set back the Merian war effort severely.
From there, Gurney and Heni had been sent to this planet. Neither of them knew what the objective was, or even the name of the world, but neither of them concerned himself with it. They went where they were sent to go, and it was pointless to ask questions which wouldn’t be answered.
Chapters 3 and 4 will be available tomorrow.