War in the Galaxy
A Science Fiction Novel
5
Of all the influencers in the pay of Dreier Media, by far the most puzzling was Reni Haffenswen. Unlike the others, Haffenswen had neither spent his entire career as a "dissident" - a member of the fringe and amorphous collection of cranks occupying the less savory corners of social networks, characterized by conspiracy theories and "alternative" audiences - nor had he been a nobody, without any prospects of fame and fortune apart from antiwar hysteria.
No, Haffenswen had come from traditional journalism. By the age of thirty-five, he'd already been profiled in all of the most important elite publications, often as an "up-and-comer to watch" or one of the "best and brightest under 40." He'd started his career with Inter-Merian Press, a weekly aggregator which collected stories from around the Federation. He'd moved up from reporter to junior editor in short order, and from there he'd transitioned into holovision journalism, starring on Releuken Broadcast Media's "Galaxy Tonight" and eventually hosting his own talk show. Bored by the interview format, he'd moved back into writing at the age of thirty-three, joining a small, but reputable, opinion journalism outfit. The Daily Merian fit squarely within mainstream Federation politics. It backed patriotic, business-friendly political parties.
At the time, Haffenswen had begun making a name for himself as a security hawk, worried by the growing belligerence of the Xing Coalition and concerned that Merian politicians were insufficiently attentive to protecting Merian interests abroad. In the prewar years, he'd gained notoriety for a series he’d published on the Klang Incident - the hijacking of a Merian spaceliner in Merian space by a group of pro-Coalition terrorists - which became one of the precipitating events leading to the war. His anti-Coalition stance had been so strong that some had accused him of xenophobia.
Nobody was accusing Haffenswen of xenophobia now. In his latest webcast he had called the Xing Coalition "superior culturally in every way" to the Meri Federation and stated that their people were "fit and intelligent, unlike us." He'd gone on to explain that Merian citizens were "hedonists, addicted to their holos, fat, and weak."
His former colleagues at the Daily were at a loss to explain Haffenswen's transformation. Most pointed to the day five years earlier when he'd come into the office and told several colleagues that he'd uncovered new evidence about the Klang Incident which had changed his mind. He wanted to revisit the subject and publish a final installment. His series had been out for a month at this point. The new evidence supposedly cast doubt on the official narrative and instead implicated what was known as the "Transtrian Theory," which held that the Klang Incident had been a false flag operation executed by Merian Intelligence Services in order to drive the two nations into war, which would have the effect of increasing the power and importance of the Merian Intelligence Services. According to the theory, the terrorists had actually been agent from Transtria, a semi-autonomous zone between Merian and Xing territory.
If it had been a false flag operation, Lilia would have known. The Merian Intelligence Services never executed false flag operations, which were known to be counterproductive and ineffective. Lilia found herself perplexed that such a well-regarded journalist with a solid career and impeccable credentials as a patriot would fall for such a transparently silly theory. Why would the Merian Intelligence Services try to start a war to increase their influence within the decentralized Merian government? As she read through the files on Haffenswen and listened to some of his webcasts, she wondered what evidence he thought he'd uncovered.
The bosses at the Daily had refused to let Haffenswen publish this new evidence, and this had enraged him. He'd continued investigating, turning more and more to dissident sources. His colleagues had described a gradual transformation. Each day, he had some new story he wanted to talk about, always from fringier and fringier publications. Eventually, his boss told him he would have to quit doing this research on the company's time, or be fired. Haffenswen had quit in disgrace and joined a small, war-skeptical outlet in Yorilea. There, he was welcomed with open arms by new friends and a new audience, who greeted him as faithful always greet a new convert. He put his talents to work in a new cause - uncovering more evidence that the official stories on many controversial topics were lies pushed by the Merian government and their controlled-opposition media networks. Soon, he was pushing theories that the founding of the Federation had been a cynical effort by a wealthy elite from many different planets to exploit their lower-class countrymen. He made a name for himself as a "splinterist," an anti-Federation activist who championed the cause local subgroups which opposed the union. He left the Yorilean outlet and started his own webcast, where he interviewed various dissidents, contrarian historians, and, controversially, the leaders of terrorist groups.
Then war broke out, and he'd come out against it. Even then, after all that had happened, former colleagues had described their shock that a man who'd once been accused of being a warmonger was now the one doing the accusing. He specifically fingered his old bosses at the Daily as "warmongering zealots" who had a hand in provoking the conflict. In the early years of the war, he'd grown in prominence and popularity.
Then he'd been hired by Dreier Media.
When she grew tired of her research, Lilia blacked her screen and walked over to her suitcase. She pulled out a paperback copy of The Stars Like Silverfish, a famous novel from the early Merian Republic. Lilia had a serviceable printing kiosk at home and before trips she liked to print and bind several Merian classics for the dull moments in between the stars. When she finished them, she could dispose of them into any of the recycling kiosks located throughout every starliner.
She read for several minutes, but found she struggled to pay attention. The story began slowly, following a series of upper-class Merians in the Opuscant District on Dorle. Lilia put it down on the bed and walked over to her viewscreen, pressing a button to make it transparent. Hyperspace was numbing to look at, so she pressed another button which rendered a depiction of what the starfield would look like if the ship were to stop at the moment the button was pressed. The rendering would last for five minutes, and would move slowly, mimicking slow and steady flight.
Lilia stared out at the stars, each one a dim fire surrounded by an emptiness which almost swallowed it up. To think that ninety-five percent of the universe was darkness, and only five percent of it was light. The stars lay spread out against that dark emptiness like so many small campfires in an interminable night. Around each one, men and women gathered, as they had gathered so many thousands of years ago around small fires on Old Earth. Each star burned for millions of years, but eventually the emptiness won out. Each star would fade and the night would return. Each star burned for millions of years, but the night would go on forever. And it seemed to her that though human beings had long ago civilized the galaxy, those fires of civilization with their men and women huddled around were very small, and though they burned brightly the universe was very cold, and though their fires could light up entire nebulae, those men and women were no different from their millennia-old ancestors who shivered around dim campfires on an icy world.
There came a knock at her door.
6
The Merian forces laid down a heavy bombardment before their push. When Gurney and Heni emerged on the planet's surface, the ground ahead of them was rubble as far as the eye could see. Their pressurized suits could fly short distances, and they hopped forward, flying up over some rubble and ducking down into a crater, and then repeating. For nearly ten minutes, the Merian line advanced undisturbed. They jumped in a series of three lines, with one line covering the jumpers and another preparing to jump. In this way, they covered the better part of a mile.
Then the shrapnel started, followed by the lasers. Merian aircraft were buzzing overhead, laying fire down ahead of the advancing line of ground troops and engaging with any drones or fighters which appeared to harry them. Most of the lasers shot up out of the rock below them, planted deep underground with a tiny pinhole through which to aim. As each laser was identified, two men would drop down on either side of it and plant a counterlaser over the pinhole, which would absorb a laser's energy and send it back to fry the original source.
The drone minesweepers had already gone through, but occasionally a Merian soldier detonated an uncaught mine when he landed in a crater. Their suits could withstand a glancing blow from a mine or a laser, but a direct hit would melt through even the toughest armor. The shrapnel mostly bounced off their pressurized armor, and the advancing soldiers ignored it. It was intended as a distraction.
Cannon fire began somewhere ahead of them and shell after shell thudded around them. There were fewer cannons now. This was the lightest barrage Gurney or Heni had experienced yet on this planet. But even with their artillery softened up, the Xing forces could lay down a punishing barrage. The Merians halted, hunkering down behind piles of rubble. Their enemies wouldn't hold anything back this time, and with all of their artillery firing, they weren't hiding the locations of any of their emplacements anymore. Within sixty seconds, several hundred missiles flew over the men's heads aimed at the artillery in front of them. The explosions rocked them, but the shelling stopped.
With the Xing air forces all but destroyed, none of the Merians expected an overhead assault. But just as they began to move forward again, a line of spaceplanes descended out of the sky above their air support. Several of the spaceplanes launched drones or dropped bombs, while the others engaged with the unprepared Merian air forces. This was bad news, as it meant the naval battle in the atmosphere wasn't going well for the Merians. They had lost control of the upper atmosphere over this section of the planet.
Gurney and Heni dove into a crater and flattened themselves against the wall. They took aim with their rifles at any drones which descended low enough and hoped no bombs would land in their crater. Each of them knocked a drone out of the sky with a targeted magnetic pulse.
The sky disappeared momentarily as a spaceplane flew low overhead. "If he's low enough to blot out the sky," said Heni, "we can reach him."
Gurney raised the thumb on his left hand and held it up. Then they both switched their rocket packs over from short burst to sustained flight. This was a risk. Even with the heavy armor on their backs covering the rockets, a direct hit to their fuel cells from a 55-inch spaceplane shell would penetrate directly through and cause a controlled explosion. But both of them knew how to fly in a pattern which would evade most targeting sensors, and it was less risky than staying in the crater and waiting to be identified and bombed.
They jumped up out of the crater and into the low sky. A drone nearly hit them as it flew by, but the automatic targeting sensors on their shoulder pads aimed magnetic pulses and both men hit the firing button. The drone dropped out of the sky.
The spaceplane that had flown over them was far off now, engaged with a Merian fighter, but another spaceplane flew by them, practically underneath. This was surprising. Typically, spaceplanes only flew this low in order to land.
The two men increased their speed as high as it would go, landing on the wing of the plane with a metallic thud, and immediately deploying the grappling claws in their feet and hands to grip onto the plane. Their rockets shut off automatically.
They wouldn't have much time here. The spaceplane could heat up its armor to repel landings and already their suits' temperature sensors were recording a spike. Each was equipped with a small bomb capable of punching through heavy spaceplane armors. Nearly in unison, they reached up with one arm and detached the bombs from sheltered compartments in their right-shoulder armor-plates and set them down on the wing below them on a delayed timer. The bombs were magnetic and stuck to the wing.
Immediately, they released their claws and jumped free, firing their rocket thrusters, letting the burst carry them in the direction opposite to the one the plane was flying. Within ten seconds, their bombs detonated and the wing ripped in half, sending one fragment punching through a nearby drone and causing the spaceplane to tumble down out of the sky where it crashed on the ground. The two men looped around to land to one side of the plane, aiming their rifles at it.
But nothing came out, and after a minute, they were forced to take cover again when a spaceplane flew low and strafed them. They lay against a rock outcropping which had somehow survived the bombardment, and aimed their rifles at drones in the sky, firing occasionally.
Both men knew that they could only last so long on the surface. Victory depended on what happened in the upper atmosphere, and if Merian naval forces couldn’t manage to retake the atmosphere above their position, the charge would fail. A retreat might not even be called, and even if it was, their chances of making it back to safety would be very low.
They stayed where they were for five minutes, and then moved again. Drones were beginning to swarm them, and there were fewer Merian soldiers hopping around the surface now. They saw that a hatch had opened on the spaceplane they’d downed and several figures were emerging. As they jumped over it, Heni fired down at the hatch and Gurney tossed a self-guided grenade through before there was time for the hatch to close. It detonated behind them.
Finally, a signal came through that Merian forces had reclaimed the upper atmosphere. Several Merian spaceplanes now descended into the sky to engage with the Xing spaceplanes and relieve the beleaguered air force. Gurney and Heni found cover again and watched until the battle had been won. Then the order came to advance again. They encountered no more trouble as they headed towards the Xing tunnels, where the real battle would begin.
Read Chapters 7 and 8.