The Frontier Wars, Part 3: 2272 to 2279
The Interstellar Age, S02E10
It was three months after the Second Battle of New Columbia when the Kyrans made their move. Wildcat shipyards and weapons factories had been working overtime. Heading into the battle, the alliance could muster about fifty armed merchant ships, eighteen of them Starbird vessels with good armaments and well-trained crews. The remainder were unreliable, lighter armed, with civilian crews that could perform well enough when supported, but had been shown to collapse when formations broke. Wolfe also now had six warships, including three new hulls at Frontier, while six new construction warships, based on Starbird designs and armed with Avengers and other weapons, had just been completed at Horizon.
After their losses in the two battles at New Columbia, the Kyrans were thought to have at least twenty warships. If so, the wildcatters would have an advantage in numbers, but a marked disadvantage in firepower. Having burned the surprise advantage of the Avenger missiles, Wolfe now intended to distribute them among the civilian ships at random, as well as heavily arming his warships. Other civilian ships would be equipped with conventional missiles, or decoy launchers designed to simulate Avengers, so the enemy would not be able to alpha-strike the Avenger platforms.
Despite the mid-range advantage the Avengers gave him, Wolfe surmised that his only chance at victory would be to keep a strong force—ideally, the mixed fleet of warships and armed merchantmen at Horizon—in reserve. Further, he could not commit those reserves to battle until the aliens had already committed their full strength, which he assumed would include a strong reserve force as well. The key would be to convince the enemy that either he had no reserves, or better yet, that they had already been committed.
This was no easy task. To begin with, Wolfe needed to determine where precisely the aliens were likely to attack. He believed that they would either attack the colony on Freedom in order to draw the fleet out, or else seek to force Wolfe’s fleet to fight with the planet behind them, to induce them to make disadvantageous maneuvers to protect the colony.
On this assumption, a plan was formed. Wolfe would keep his entire fleet together well above Freedom’s north pole, in an ideal position to conduct a flank attack against a force moving to fire on the colony cities, which were clustered in the equatorial region. This, Wolfe expected, would induce the Kyrans to decelerate from Stardrive above his fleet, so that their MAC fire would impact the ice cap, potentially causing flooding and other impact-related devastation to the planet.
In response, Wolfe would head away from the planet on an oblique course. This would give the enemy commander three basic choices:
Use his positional and velocity advantage to intercept, forcing a close range engagement, then call in his reserves in a point-blank attack to destroy Wolfe’s fleet;
Ignore the fleet, and orbit the planet to fire on the cities directly. This would force Wolfe to double back, exposing him to a reserve attack that would pin him inside the gravitic threshold, as Dahl had been at New Columbia;
Intercept Wolfe, then call in the reserves to open fire on the colony, forcing Wolfe to commit his own reserves, and opening both forces to destruction.
Now, the deception. While setting up planetary defenses, Wolfe would summon the Horizon force, instructing them to take up position above Freedom’s south pole. There, they would act as a reserve force in case the aliens should draw the main fleet away, then commit reserves to fire on the colony.
But the Horizon force would never arrive. Instead, it would halt in deep space at least two light days from Frontier, where it would be nearly impossible for the aliens to detect. Then, a second force of drone-piloted merchant ships dispatched from one of the minor colonies—which the Kyrans were unlikely to have under observation—would arrive at Frontier, precisely when and where the Horizon force should have arrived.
These ships, refitted to mimic the hulls and power curves of the Horizon force, would be completely AI controlled in combat; once engaged with the enemy, they were instructed to fire a token volley of Avengers and other missiles, using the high-value weapons to convince the enemy they were a genuine combat force. Wolfe would have preferred to augment this deception using his ships’ extensive cyberwarfare capabilities. Unfortunately, all efforts to breach the aliens’ computer systems had thus far failed, likely due to radically different systems architecture and programming languages. Until an alien ship and its computers could be captured intact and studied, it was likely that cyberwarfare would play little if any role in the battles to come.
In any case, if the deception was effective, the drone fleet would simulate a retreat to avoid being locked in close combat once the enemy put them under pressure. Wolfe hoped this would convince the aliens to commit their reserves early. Then, he could call for the real Horizon force to take them in the flank.
For that to work, Wolfe’s fleet would need to survive a protracted, close-range fight with the aliens. So far, every human force that had found itself in that position had been destroyed.
To this end, Wolfe and his staff devised a number of new tactics to offset enemy advantages at close range. These included false front formations, “ghost” Avenger launches mixed with drone squadrons, Avenger warheads dropped out of retreating ships—all tactics which are still used, in modified form along with the Avenger itself, by the ICN to this day.
Wolfe also seeded the space above the polar regions with mines, mostly dummy warheads designed to mimic Avengers, with a few real Avengers mixed in for authenticity. Knowing the enemy would see these mines being deployed, the intent was to shape the battlespace, cannalizing the aliens into known attack vectors. These vectors would be pre-sighted with Avenger / conventional missile barrages, to be launched the moment the enemy decelerated. The missiles would find their targets while in flight, reducing launch time and hopefully disrupting or slowing the attack.
These preparations were completed by the end of the year 2271. But when the Kyrans abandoned New Columbia, they became a fleet-in-being—a fleet which, by its very existence, forces its enemy to protect strategically vital targets. Wolfe had no idea where the aliens were, and thus would get no warning of their attack.
The Battle of Frontier began on January 17, 2272, when a force of twenty-three Kyran warships decelerated directly above Freedom’s north pole—and Wolfe’s main battle fleet. The aliens opened fire immediately, scoring several hits and impacting the ice caps, causing flooding which would eventually reach the inhabited valleys of the equatorial region. But the damage of this initial attack was limited when the Kyrans were forced to execute defensive maneuvers within seconds of decelerating, to avoid the pre-programmed missile volleys.
Wolfe’s fleet chose an oblique course at random and burned away at maximum acceleration, firing as they went. The Kyran force burned in for an interception. Minutes later, a second squadron of five Kyran warships appeared above the colony and opened fire. This prompted the decoy force to leave its high southern orbit and attack. Once they were engaged, a third force of ten alien warships decelerated, catching the decoys in the flank. Several AI-controlled ships were instantly destroyed in the Kyran ambush. The remainder attempted to retreat, with most being lost as they fled.
This rapid victory allowed both Kyran reserve forces to move in for an attack on Wolfe, who soon found himself surrounded, unable to retreat without leaving Freedom completely defenseless.
This was the crisis point of the battle, and arguably the entire war. Wolfe had ordered a messenger skiff positioned well above the planet on low power to Stardrive out and summon the real Horizon force as soon as the second alien squadron arrived. But those reinforcements were still up to an hour away when his fleet was surrounded—an eternity under sustained assault by Kyran plasma weapons and torpedoes.
Wolfe arrayed his ships in a staggered spherical formation, with an outer layer of drones, a second layer of Starbird merchant ships, a third layer of warships, and the weakest and least disciplined allied merchantmen in the core. This formation slowly curved back toward the planet, as if being forced into the gravity well by the three-pronged alien attack while trying to keep at their optimal medium range.
Alien drones and fighters struggled to attack the weaker core vessels through the sphere’s layered point defense fire. Meanwhile Wolfe’s new tactics inflicted mounting losses on the enemy, primarily through Avenger strikes. But Wolfe was taking losses as well, with ships picked off from the edges of the formation under the relentless alien assault.
Then, as the formation was on the verge of cracking, the real Horizon force arrived, and delivered a shattering volley into one of the Kyran flanking squadrons, destroying or disabling four ships in a matter of seconds. In the Kyrans’ efforts to pin Wolfe within the gravitic threshold, they had unwittingly pinned themselves.
Wolfe ordered his ships to break into pre-assigned battlegroups based around warships, forcing the Kyrans to either scatter and escape, or stay in formation and slowly be destroyed. In a grim parallel of New Columbia, the Kyrans lost cohesion; some ships remained in formation to fight it out, while others broke and ran. Only two of the faster, destroyer-class Kyran warships managed to get away. The remainder were destroyed or disabled. One attempting a suicidal reentry dive into the colony’s capital city was destroyed by Freedom’s defense batteries—one of the few cases in history of a warship in space being eliminated by ground fire.
The wildcatter fleet suffered heavy losses. Two warships and twenty armed merchantmen were destroyed or wrecked beyond repair, and every other ship in Wolfe’s fleet suffered damage of varying severity. Freedom’s cities had been evacuated, with inhabitants who could not be removed placed in newly constructed subterranean shelters; nonetheless, the brief Kyran bombardment resulted in several thousand deaths and thousands of additional injuries, a small taste of the devastation that would have been wrought had the enemy been granted hours rather than minutes.
Meanwhile, thirty-two out of thirty-five Kyran ships engaged were destroyed. Two escaped, and one was captured largely intact; in that case, most of the crew had been killed by radiation and decompression, and the reactor control system had been too badly damaged for the survivors to trigger a self-destruct. Every other disabled ship destroyed itself or de-orbited rather than be captured.
The Battle of Frontier was Rance Wolfe’s masterpiece: a multi-layered deception operation leading to a shattering victory by a militarily inferior force over an enemy with the tactical and operational initiative. It was also an incredibly near-run thing—a rare battle in which victory or defeat hung on the outcome of a few hours or minutes of combat, rather than being largely decided before the first shot was fired. And an even rarer one, in which that contingent outcome had massive strategic implications, a hinge point on which history itself might have swung one way or the other.
Wolfe’s plan necessitated placing himself in a position from which he could not escape. Had he been defeated, the Kyrans could then have destroyed or conquered Freedom at will, tearing the economic and industrial heart out of the wildcat alliance. Clan Lhanak would then have had no difficulty conquering the remaining wildcat colonies.
What might have happened next is impossible to know; while the TIU had up until that point remained aloof from the conflict, it would have faced mounting pressure to intervene against the new threat as wildcat colonies fell. While the Terrans’ resources were far greater than those of Clan Lhanak alone, a war between the two would not have been a foregone conclusion. The TIDF navy was inexperienced, and its weapons and doctrines had just been proven utterly inadequate against Kyran firepower and tactics. If the war went on long enough for other Kyran clans to acquire Stardrive and join the fighting, all of humanity might have been threatened with enslavement, or extinction.
But Wolfe was victorious, and everything changed. The threat posed to the colonies by Clan Lhanak was effectively over; their fleet was utterly destroyed at Frontier, and in a series of defeats suffered elsewhere. Unbeknownst to us at the time, between 2268 and 2270, a second Lhanak fleet was dispatched back into Kyran space, in an effort to use the Stardrive to conquer the other clans, uniting them under a single Supreme Hierarch. Thus united, the clans would conquer the whole of the galaxy—at least according to Kyran legends.
While their monopoly on FTL tech allowed Lhanak to win some stunning victories over their sublight-bound cousins, this state of affairs could not last. Predictably, other clans captured and reverse engineered their own Stardrives in the course of the fighting, eliminating Lhanak’s asymmetric advantage. The details remain murky, but the Lhanak fleet in Kyran space seems to have been lost, almost simultaneously with their defeat above Freedom. Clan Lhanak was virtually annihilated by the other clans, the survivors reduced to a state of slavery.
Now equipped with Stardrive technology, the other clans continued to fight a raging civil war for dominance over the course of the next decade. Ultimately, no clan was able to overcome the others. As had once occurred on the homeworld centuries before, a violent equilibrium developed, with clans Harag, Rhyllok, Shahak, and Atkar emerging as great powers.
This civil conflict bought the wildcat colonies valuable time to recover from the war. With continuing economic assistance from the Corporate Worlds, they repaired the damage to Freedom and replaced the ships they had lost. The summit of the wildcat alliance formalized their unified military structure following the Battle of Frontier, and unanimously elected Wolfe as Admiral of the Fleet. It was at this time that the nickname “Starbird” began to stick, drawing both from the critical role played by his corporation in the war, and by his preternatural skill in space combat.
While a program of industrial and military buildup continued throughout the colonies, Admiral Wolfe determined to maintain the strategic initiative. The alien fleet had been destroyed, but the colonies had no idea how many planets the aliens controlled, or the size of their military forces and industrial base; thus, they had no idea where to strike to degrade the aliens’ warmaking potential.
As such, Wolfe’s first move was to strike at the only target he had: New Columbia. He hoped that with complete control of space, the alien occupying force might be compelled to surrender; but based on the behavior of the crews of disabled ships—all of whom chose death rather than surrender—that was a thin hope.
When Wolfe’s fleet arrived in orbit in late February, 2272, the Kyran ground force refused to communicate, let alone give up. The Kyrans had entrenched themselves in the colony’s urban areas and prevented the population from fleeing, rendering the alliance’s control of space and massive superiority in heavy firepower all but useless. Despite the small number of occupiers—fewer than 1,000 troops among a population of 20-25k—a brutal and protracted land battle would be required to eliminate them.
Five thousand militia volunteers and a small force of Starbird-trained marines had initially been brought in, but these were repulsed shortly after disembarking in a series of ambushes and counterattacks. Almost fifteen thousand further soldiers had to be brought in from the colonies over the next two months. These were forced to clear the Kyrans out block by block in vicious street fighting.
Alliance soldiers made extensive use of autonomous weapons platforms and drones to reduce casualties—but the Kyrans had their own drones, as well as powerful plasma weapons and camouflage abilities. Almost all of the one thousand Kyran troops were killed by the end of the battle four months later. Just a handful too wounded to take their own lives were taken prisoner. Even these would all die in captivity within a year, by then unknown bioengineered processes.
Meanwhile, over one thousand alliance troops died in the fighting, and six thousand more were wounded. As many as ten thousand New Columbians died during the occupation, roughly half of these during the fighting in 2272. With New Columbia liberated, the true extent of the horrors of Kyran occupation were laid bare. Admiral Wolfe ensured that data on the atrocities they committed, including harrowing interviews with survivors, were broadcast throughout the wildcat colonies, and transmitted to the TIU and the Corporate Worlds.
Despite an official narrative insinuating that the material was AI generated or altered, his data tipped Terran public opinion finally and decisively in the Alliance’s favor. The Union government still chose to stay out of the conflict, but under increasing public pressure, trade and travel restrictions with the wildcat colonies—at least those that were formal members of the Alliance—were lifted. Meanwhile a brisk trade in weapons and other vital material between the Corporate Worlds and the Alliance continued apace.
After the liberation of New Columbia, Admiral Wolfe’s priority was to locate the home system of the alien invaders, who were increasingly being called “Kyrans” in official literature, based on data recovered from the few captured ships, and abortive interrogations of prisoners. Colloquially, Alliance military and civilians continued to refer to them as “dinos,” or simply “the enemy.”
Wolfe hoped to eliminate the threat these Kyrans posed permanently, by any means short of genocide. But a massive search of habitable systems near Alliance space between 2272 and 2277 yielded few results. Only a handful of skirmishes with isolated Kyran ships in uninhabited systems proved that they were not chasing ghosts.
That paradigm changed in 2278, when an Alliance scouting drone discovered Clan Lhanak’s homeworld. By then, the planet was heavily depopulated, and under occupation by forces from Clan Harag. After several months of covert reconnaissance, Alliance analysts were able to piece together the likely course of events: that the planet had once been controlled by the clan that invaded the colonies, which was then overrun by another clan.
Furthermore, intercepted signals suggested that there was at least one other clan grouping in another sector of space, whose relationship with Harag was contentious at best. This suggested that the Kyrans might be an extremely populous and widespread people, all equally aggressive, equally dangerous, and a potential existential threat to the Alliance, if not all of humanity. The isolated Kyran scouting missions in other systems suggested another frightening possibility: that these other clans were searching for humanity, either unwittingly, or deliberately, looking for the species that defeated Lhanak. In either case, it was only a matter of time before they found us.
That in mind, the Alliance governments authorized Admiral Wolfe’s plan to launch a raid against Lhanak, with the aim of destroying the Kyran flotilla in orbit, along with any obvious military installations and assets in the system. The point was both to eliminate a threat, and to send a message: here we are—now leave us alone, or pay the price.
The mission, called variously the Battle of or the Raid on Lhanak, was a success. A picked force of top-of-the-line Alliance warships armed with the latest block of Avenger missiles, and upgraded drone swarms using reverse-engineered Kyran designs, took the Harag forces completely by surprise. Wolfe destroyed the Harag squadron, then wrecked over two dozen military installations throughout the system before departing. But if the Kyrans got the message, they interpreted it differently than intended: as a challenge.
Alliance relations with the TIU soured once again following the raid; the Union Parliament officially condemned it as a wanton act of unprovoked aggression, even if a number of its members—particularly those from the colonies—approved. This, in turn, prompted angry denunciations from the Alliance governments against the out of touch, pampered Terrans, who were safe from Kyran invasion only because of the blood of wildcat servicemembers. Both refrains continue to ring out, to slightly different tunes, more than two hundred years later.
More clashes between the Alliance and the Kyrans would follow, as each side probed the other for weaknesses. In 2279, the Wildcat Alliance formalized itself as the Coalition of Free Worlds. While some of the most fiercely independent colonies chose not to join, the Coalition included the Frontier, Dawn, and Beacon systems, as well as most of the minor colonies who had participated in the war against the Kyrans thus far.
Unsurprisingly, Wolfe retained his position as Admiral of the Fleet, and was simultaneously named Chief of the Joint Staff. In his characteristically laconic style, Wolfe uttered a now famous—or infamous—phrase at the signing of the Coalition agreement: “Si vis astra, para bellum.” If you want the stars, prepare for war.
This simple phrase would become an unofficial motto for the Coalition military. The ICN First Fleet preserves it to this day, inheriting it from the First Colonial Fleet. The phrase would also come to epitomize, for many, the dichotomy of promise and tragedy that has characterized humankind’s exploration of space.
Critics of Wolfe and the Free Worlds see it as evidence of their aggression and eagerness to reach for military force as a solution to complex problems. Some go so far as to blame them for the centuries of intermittent and bloody conflict that followed the 2270’s, even beyond the wars with the Kyrans.
Supporters of Wolfe and the wildcatters see it as an example of clear-headedness and realism; that they, alone in those early days, understood the true and terrifying dangers that awaited humanity in the depths of space. And they were the only ones willing to do what it took to face those dangers, head on.
In any case, while the most perilous moment for the Free Worlds had passed, the wars against the Kyrans were only just beginning. And Wolfe’s warning—his entreaty—was about to be proven more prescient than even he could have imagined.