The Olifants' Graveyard by ColorCopyCenter on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

This illustration depicts a scene from the Vermilion Coast, deep in the heart of the eastern equatorial wastes. In the wake of a wandering storm cyclone, a twin-vehicle reconnaissance party of the Vryberger Vlootstaat, one of the more prosperous Orbitaaler fleet republics, probes a newly formed inlet of the Sea of Vapors ahead of the main salvage fleet, cautiously searching for the spoor-sign of the Freeporter bushwhackers who prey upon the unsuspecting and unwary in this untamed swathe of the equatorial frontier.

The vehicles are Grysbok-class all-terrain utility vehicles, manufactured before the collapse of interstellar civilization by the old Armscor conglomerate in the heyday of humanity's colonial expansion across the stars. Originally designed and fabricated in response to a military specification drawn up by the European arm of the Interstellar Commerce Authority for the extraterrestrial rigors of the Twin Moons Campaign, the mine-resistant Grysbok and its various derivatives, both licensed and unlicensed, had proven their sturdy reliability in the service of twelve armies on ten times as many battlefields in just as many years, from Antarctica and Angola to Alpha Centauri and Aurora VII. In peacetime, surplus and decommissioned Grysboks were routinely refurbished and further customized for resale to colonial corporations, including the ZAMKOR conglomerate, which purchased hundreds as satellite vehicles for their Blesbok-class heavy lifters, later to become the Ossewa-class rigs of the Orbitaaler-Berger republics.

In the service of the republican descendants of the original ZAMKOR miners and corporate contractors, the ubiquitous Grysbok has become colloquially known as the Bakkie, and under that name, it ably serves as the workhorse of every Orbitaaler-Berger fleet, from the great surface cruiser squadrons of the mercantile republics down to the triple Ossewa convoy of the humblest scrap salvaging clan. The modular nature of its various external mounts and interior compartments alike allow the Bakkie to be reconfigured from a reconnaissance scout into a cargo transport, mobile comms station, or dozer-excavator in a matter of hours, provided the proper modules and access to the automated vehicle bay aboard any Berger surface cruiser or Ossewa. On solid ground, a well-tuned Bakkie can match the speed of the fastest surface cruiser, can nimbly navigate rough terrain inaccessible to the lumbering flagship behemoths of the Berger fleets, and even amphibiously motor across open seas too deep or swift for even the best of Ossewa captains to safely ford. The Bakkie is even capable of fully autonomous and remote operation, though usually a skeleton crew of one or two qualified operators stands watch on the command deck while the autopilot is engaged.

The vehicle's great limitation is its range of operation. In the three centuries since the Orbitaaler-Berger clans first set foot on Shindai, near continuous use of their trusty Bakkies under conditions above and beyond the intended operating thresholds has inevitably degraded the storage capacity of their vehicles' irreplaceable fuel cells over the years. Where they were once capable of traversing tens of thousands of kilometers without requiring a single recharge, an exceptionally well-maintained Bakkie of today can only manage a mere hundred kilometers before it exhausts its power reserves and must return to the vehicle bay of its parent Ossewa or surface cruiser for an overnight recharge. Thus, Ossewa and surface cruiser captains typically mandate rotating shifts for their Bakkie escort pickets.

In combat, the Bakkie scout-escorts were traditionally withdrawn to the safety of the laager under the old fashioned Orbitaaler tactical system and kept in reserve for the pursuit of shattered enemy forces in the aftermath of a successful "laerslag". Since the obsolescence of the laager, however, the Bakkies have found a new role in the innovative fleet tactics of the more progressive Berger and Orbitaaler republics. Although retaining their conventional role as the forward eyes and ears of the Orbitaaler-Berger fleets, the Bakkies have joined the striking arm of the fleet force, making full use of their superior mobility and durability to counter the movements of hostile squadrons and blunt their attacks through judicious employment of ramming and combat minelaying. Among the many treasures they brought with them in their voyage down the gravity well, the Orbitaaler and Berger republics possess entire shiploads of the explosive demolition and mining charges that their corporate ancestors had used to crack open many a deep space asteroid. Rigged to blow on a contact fuse or via remote detonation and strapped to a bundle of inflatable flotation spheres, these jury rigged mines are loaded aboard Bakkies and dropped overboard in a carefully coordinated pattern to create rapid-deployment minefields that restrict the paths of maneuvering enemy fleets, breaking up squadron cohesion and separating unwary vessels from the support of the fleet. Minelaying tactics are nothing new to fleet combat on Shindai, but the superior maneuverability of the Bakkies enables the laying of offensive cordons with unequaled speed and precision, and their durability gives them an unmatched ability to counter enemy minelaying tactics. Although the Bakkies of the fleet republics were stripped of their original complement of military grade ceramsteel armor plating during the civilian refurbishing process centuries ago, the mine resistant nature of the vehicles' basic chassis and wheel design still enables it to safely plow through the heavy blackpowder contact charges and self-propelled torpedoes employed by many of the nations of Shindai as the ultimate battleship-killers. The same sturdy construction enables the bold, some say foolhardy, Bakkie pilot to safely ram his vehicle into most other hostile vessels at considerable speed, inflicting critical structural damage under the right circumstances without seriously jeopardizing the operational integrity of the Bakkie's core component systems. Nevertheless, Bakkies in their standard configuration still remain vulnerable to modern hypervelocity musketry and armor-piercing artillery, requiring them to either keep a respectable distance or use their superior maneuverability to effect evasive maneuvers that frustrate the ability of enemy gunners to find their mark.

Returning to the scene of the illustration, the object of the Orbitaalers' salvaging efforts dominates the background of the tortured landscape in the form of the decaying ruins of what was once the planet's sole space elevator. In its heyday many centuries ago, it towered above the equatorial mudflats of Shindai, a pristine white column that stretched from the horizon to the blue of the heavens above. A mega-scale product of the ancient nanoengineering revolution, for decades it had lifted countless cargoes of harvested hyperkrill and algae biomass from the planetary surface up the gravity well and into geosynchronous orbit for transshipment to the interstellar trading lanes beyond the Corvus System, but those days are long gone. Since the cataclysmic clash of fleets that extinguished the light of spacefaring civilization in the system, the cyclopean fragments of the shattered hulk have been scattered for tens of thousands of kilometers across much of the planet's equatorial reaches. Considering the roughly contiguous patchwork debris fields as a single entity, the ruins constitute by far the single greatest spacewreck on the planet, dwarfing in sheer dimensions all other wrecks by orders of magnitude.

The titanic, world-spanning ruins are known by many names to the peoples of Shindai. Projected upon the topographical holo-surveys of the Orbitaaler-Berger fleets, its numerous debris fields are collectively labeled as the Olifants' Graveyard, recalling the lumbering leviathans of ancient Africa. In the navigational maps of the Kommersant and terrain charts of the Texacor, it is called the Grand Anaconda Reef, a moniker dating back to the notes of the first scouting expeditions to brave the hellish storm systems of the equatorial wastes. And to the Dyong-Kok and their Red overlords, it has been known for generations as the Long Serpent, after its peculiar appearance from a distance. But to the savage pirate tribes who have infested the cyclopean ruins since the fall of interstellar civilization on Shindai, there is but one name: Freeport's Bones.

The Freeporters, as the pirate savages call themselves, are the degenerated descendants of those freelance shipping crews, freight handlers, terminal staff, customs inspectors, and dry dock workers who were marooned on the planet's sole orbital spaceport at the cataclysmic local conclusion of the Wars of Dissolution. Although initially escaping the wrath of the great fleet combat, whose combatants were too busy pummeling one another into oblivion with hyperkinetic ordnance and smart missile barrages to take note of the handful of backwater civilian structures in orbit, the spaceport and the elevator linking it to the planetary surface were catastrophically wrecked by the vast swarms of orbital debris left hurtling silently through the void in the aftermath of the great battle. Within a matter of days, the ruined hulk of the triple torus spaceport had violently reentered the upper atmosphere of the planet and come to lie at the center of a smoldering impact crater in the stormwracked equatorial shallows, bringing down with it the shattered column of the space elevator, whose broken cylindrical segments lay where they had been toppled across nearly the entire circumference of the world.

The battered and bloodied parties of survivors who pulled themselves from the wreckage of the interstellar spaceport and its attendant dockyard of long-haul freighters found themselves in the midst of a hellish place. Burning debris rained for days from the skies, before they turned dark with storm clouds and the promise of more suffering to come, for the runaway destruction of the orbital infrastructure by the whirling detritus of the dying fleets had obliterated the weather control platforms in low Shindai orbit, enabling the formation of the first of the cyclopean megastorms that would henceforth ravage the equatorial latitudes of the planet for all time.

While the howling winds and pounding rains finally extinguished the worst of the fires burning in the shattered hulk of the spaceport, enabling the dazed and motley bands of survivors to seek shelter from the deadly storms within the half-flooded ruins of the spaceflight terminals and scavenge for sustenance and supplies in the twisted wreckage of what had once been duty-free concourses, multi-level food courts, and zero-G storage blocks. Trapped in the labyrinthine maze of ruins by the raging storm systems outside as the weeks dragged into months, and the months into years, the civilian inhabitants of the wrecked spaceport inevitably slid towards anarchy as they feuded over ever diminishing stockpiles of salvaged supplies, and violent clashes soon gripped the starving population as gangs of roving scavengers fought over hitherto unexplored sectors of the spaceport ruins. One gang, formed from an amalgamation of all the shipping crews of a Subsaharan Free Trade Union freight convoy that had been delayed at Shindai for months on illegal smuggling charges, rose above all the others survivalist bands in savagery and brutality. Exterminating or subjugating rival gangs one after another and enslaving those hapless parties of scavengers too weak to resist, these Freeporters, as they came to be known, soon established their bloody dominion over all the others and found themselves the unchallenged rulers of what they christened Freeport's Bones.

In the decades of isolation following their consolidation of power over the spaceport survivors, the Freeporters added to their short but bloody history within the half-flooded corridors and upturned concourses of the wrecked terminals with a few heated wars of tribal succession and the brutal crushing of a number of slave revolts, all the while unaware of the insidious danger lurking in the very air they breathed and the rations they ate. Since the orbital devastation and reentry of the spaceport, its ruins had been heavily contaminated with all manner of toxic, carcinogenic, and mutagenic compounds and agents. Millions of tons of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, enzyme precursors, industrial coolant fluids, volatile liquid thruster fuels, half-processed reactor core waste, and a multitude of other hazardous materials and chemical byproducts typically stored within the vast holding tanks and quarantine bays of any interstellar spaceport began to seep out of sealed reservoir compartments and containment systems as safety shielding and reinforced bulkheads were torn asunder by the earthshattering impact of reentry. Trapped within the fetid passageways and tunnels of the ruined underworld by the unending danger of the equatorial megastorms outside, generations of Freeporters waded through a toxic milieu of chemical contaminants, with the long term exposure resulting in substantial genetic deterioration, manifested most visibly in psychotic savagery and the extreme ritual scarification employed to camouflage the most gruesome of physical deformities.

It was no surprise then, that when the first parties of equatorial explorers unknowingly entered the realm of the Freeporters, contact was instantaneously violent and brutal. In their period of undisturbed isolation, by using the intact segments of the collapsed space elevator as a sheltered path through the stormwracked wastes, the Freeporter tribes had gradually colonized the full extent of the equatorial debris field that would later be known to other nations as the Olifant's Graveyard and the Grand Anaconda Reef. Safe passage north through the equatorial wastes by first the refugee bands of the Dyong-Kok and later the defeated squadrons of the Red Fleet was only practicable through a precious handful of unguarded passes. Along the rest of the impenetrable length of what they fearfully called the Long Serpent, the dark pirate gangs of the terrible Freeporter tribes would strike out from their hidden strongholds in the decaying underbelly of the Serpent and fall upon any unwary sailskimmer flotilla. Along the narrow winding inlets and twisted broken coasts of the Serpent's flanks, to say nothing of the claustrophobic confines of its bisecting passes, even a veteran Red shock squadron could be hemmed in with no room to maneuver and cut to pieces by the nimble pirate skiffs of the Freeporter tribes, leaving them easy prey for the berserker raiders swarming over the upper decks with boarding ladders and grappling hooks. Armed with a handful of ancient yet functional plasma cutters, fusion torches, and a multitude of savage slashing blades and spear-staffs crudely fashioned from ceramsteel scrap and sectioned pipe, a boarding gang of a hundred shrieking Freeporters can make quick work of a lone steelclad Kommersant gun-clipper or even a Texacoran treadnaught if their Desantnik and Marine detachments respectively are not up to the task of repelling the savage boarders.

The occasional campaigns mounted by the great old nations of Shindai to suppress the pirate menace and make safe the equatorial passages have been frustrating exercises in futility. The Freeporter raiding parties never stray far from the safety of the Long Serpent, which offers them safe harbor along almost every point of the equator at any point they choose to break contact and flee, while the unpredictable equatorial megastorms prohibit extended campaigning in those latitudes during most months of the year, with the danger of the storm fronts always threatening to obliterate any fleet unfortunate enough to be caught in their paths of destruction. If that were not enough, negotiation and diplomacy have failed at every turn. Whereas the numerous outlaw pirate clans of the Dyong-Kok and the licensed mercenary privateers of the Kommersant make a brisk and even perfunctory trade in the ransoming of hostages and goods, whose monetary value would be considerable damaged by mistreatment of any sort, the savage Freeporters have never shown any interest in accepting tribute or ransom. Vessels, cargoes, and prisoners that they seize simply vanish into the cavernous bowels of the Long Serpent and are never seen or heard from again. For centuries, darkly whispered rumors and lurid tales have told of the unspeakable tortures and sickening horrors inflicted upon those unfortunate enough to fall prey to a marauding band of Freeporters, but searches of blasted skiff wrecks and liberated pirate outposts have only turned up scraps of faded cloth and a scattering of bone fragments that might have once belonged to unlucky captive.

The only fleets to have successfully pushed back the Freeporter menace with a permanent measure of success are those of the Orbitaaler-Berger republics, which began advancing into the hitherto unconquered equatorial wastes a century after they first made landfall on the planetary surface. The key to their unexpected success was the resilient network of meteorological satellites the first generation of pioneers had placed into low orbit. This valuable relic of orbital infrastructure gives Orbitaaler-Berger laager commandants and fleet captains highly accurate forecasts of oncoming equatorial storm systems, which their surface cruisers can outrun and their Ossewa rigs can safely weather. For Orbitaaler-Berger fleet campaigns in the equatorial wastes, the titanic storm systems endemic to those latitudes, while still a considerable factor to contend with, are not insurmountable obstacles and can sometimes even be turned to their advantage in combat against the Freeporter pirate tribes under the right conditions.

Out on the equatorial mudflats and coastal shallows, the unarmored raiding skiffs of the Freeporters present easy targets for the long range rifle fire of even the most modestly armed of Orbitaaler laager convoys, so long as the lumbering Ossewa rigs and their Bakkie escorts can keep their distance and stay out of boarding range. However, most cunning Freeporter gangs know better than to tangle in open fleet combat with Orbitaaler laagers and Berger squadrons, and all experienced Orbitaaler-Berger commandants know better than to allow their massive Ossewa and surface cruiser flagships to be lured into the labyrinthine maze of the Olifants' Graveyard. Thus the most decisive combats between the Freeporter tribes and the Orbitaaler-Berger republics are frequently small unit affairs in which vanguard parties of Orbitaaler volunteers advance on Bakkie and foot deep into the Olifants' Graveyard to pry the savage Freeporter bands out of their hidden stronghold anchorages in the heart of the ancient debris fields. Although their semi-armored Bakkies, repeating magazine rifles, explosive demolition charges, and orbital surveillance satellites somewhat compensate for their numerical inferiority in dismounted combat against the seemingly endless hordes of Freeporter berserkers with their cutting torches and nefarious blades, the unpredictable skirmishes and sudden ambuscades in the Olifants' Graveyard are often closely contested affairs. In the savage warfare of the equatorial wastes, no quarter is given and none is requested, with the Orbitaaler republics and the Freeporter tribes fiercely despising one another as hated ancestral enemies whose deep seated animosity reaches all the way back to the bloodstained battlefields of ancient Africa. The Orbitaaler salvagers of the equatorial latitudes are taught from birth to never allow themselves to be taken alive by the barbaric Freeporter heathens for fear of suffering the multitude of fates worth than death that the brutish pirate savages would inflict upon a captive Orbitaaler, and this intensely fatalistic attitude has served them well by transforming even the smallest punitive backwater expedition against the Freeporters into a zealous crusade for the Orbitaaler laager-states and fleet republics involved.

Over the past two centuries, sustained Orbitaaler-Berger combat operations in the equatorial wastes, not infrequently augmented by volunteer expeditionary forces sent by the Kommersant, the Texacor, and Djong-Kok states with a mutual interest in suppressing particularly troublesome pirate tribes threatening the equatorial trading passages, have liberated not only the Great Western Pass from Freeporter depredation but also nearly all the permanently navigable passes through the Olifants' Graveyard, ushering in a golden age in cross-hemisphere commerce and mercantile trading. The traditional Freeporter hunting grounds that once ranged across the entire breadth and width of the equatorial latitudes have now been forced back to those troubled shallows and bleak flood plains lying within the shadows of the Olifants' Graveyard.

And even there, in the den of the beast itself, the most ambitious Orbitaaler-Berger republics have established temporary salvaging outposts and seasonal footholds in pursuit of a forgotten resource now highly coveted by the reindustrializing nations of Shindai. In fact, the decaying remains of the ancient space elevator that stretches the entire length of the Olifants' Graveyard are a veritable goldmine for millions of tons of priceless carbon nanotube. Originally woven into high tensile fiber bundles which formed the structural backbone of the ancient space elevator, these endless kilometers of tightly bound carbon nanotube now lie unraveled in millions of twisted heaps and limply coiled piles throughout the heart of the Olifants' Graveyard. For centuries, these shimmering black bundles were known and prized across the planet for the remarkable structural properties offered by their high tensile strength in such varied uses as sailskimmer rigging and harbor towing lines. Since the advent of reindustrialization, however, these ancient carbon bundles have gained an even greater value to the the industrial concerns and modern fleets of the Kommersant, Texacor, and Dyong-Kok alike. When the sooty, fibrous bundles are shredded into a fine powder and mixed with the proper reactive compounds in the correct proportions, the resulting carbon nanotube dust is rendered into a highly combustible fuel additive that provides a potent boost in power to the hungry blast furnaces, machine forges, and steam engines that feed the fiery heart of mechanized industry on Shindai. Thus, raw nanotube is the essential lifeblood of the ongoing industrial revolutions in the elder nations of the world. The merchant fleets and naval forces of the Kommersant and Texacor depend on their precious fuel bunkers and internal reservoirs of nano-dust to achieve top speed in crucial trading runs and combat cruises. The bustling manufactories of the great Kommersant industrial houses and the Dyong-Kok mercantile clans consume tons of nano-dust every day in order to run the machinery of industry that turns out the thousands of stands of arms, commercial trade goods, and raw reforged ceramsteel that feeds the growing appetite of the hungry nations.

The Orbitaaler salvager clans of the equatorial latitudes were quick to exploit this newfound demand for nano-dust by mounting vigorous offensive campaigns to expel the Freeporter savages from the sites of the richest and most easily scavenged deposits of ancient carbon. Although the victorious Orbitaaler clans sought the manpower of Dyong-Kok contract laborers and the mercantile expertise of Kommersant fuel traders to maximize their exploitation of the rich nano-dust deposits of the Olifants' Graveyard they now claimed as their own, the shrewd Orbitaaler commandants and captains were always careful to maintain their salvaging monopoly on the precious resource deposits. Rising tensions and open disputes over the Orbitaaler domination of the nano-dust market reached a boiling point at the conclusion of the last century, resulting in a bitter war between the grand battle fleets of the Kommersant and the backwater Orbitaaler salvager clans of the equatorial wastes. The prosperous Berger mercantile republics of the Vierkleur Konfederasie, fearing the threat of trade embargo and open commerce raiding from the Kommersant, declined to intervene on behalf of their frontier Orbitaaler sister republics, eventually tipping the balance of the war in favor of the Kommersant, with their grand fleets of modern gun-clippers and unending waves of conscript levies. A peace treaty between the belligerent forces was finally negotiated in the fifth year of the war by a neutral delegation of Texacoran diplomatic emissaries, as the embattled Orbitaaler fleet republics struggled to contend with a resurgence of renewed Freeporter pirate activity in the eastern equatorial regions that had arisen due to the withdrawal of Orbitaaler fleets to participate in the defensive campaigns against the Kommersant in the vicinity of the rich western nano-dust deposits. In exchange for the cessation of hostilities, the Kommersant secured substantial concessions in the form of full territorial and salvaging rights to two of the five greatest nano-dust deposits and partial salvaging shares in all subsidiary deposits.

In the decades since the Dust War, the much weakened Orbitaaler monopoly on the precious ebony deposits has been steadily consolidated and in some places expanded through the pacification of new stretches of the Olifants' Graveyard to the eastern frontier and the exploitation of the black treasures that lie within, leading to whispered fears of a second Dust War. The executives of the Kommersant's leading industrial concerns make no secret of their keen desire to punish the insolent equatorial Orbitaaler clans and permanently demolish their stranglehold on the black dust of the Olifants' Graveyard, but the Kommersant's fleet admirals have thus far been hesitant to risk entangling the full might of their battle squadrons in a protracted war in the hellish equatorial wastes given the growing naval strength of the Red remnant empires of the northern hemisphere.

While the uneasy peace holds, the equatorial clans of the Orbitaaler salvagers are more than content to give the full focus of their military attentions to the ever present threat of the Freeporter pirate incursions on the untamed frontier.