Neither the colonel nor Captain de Macha knew what that meant.
“Enlighten us,” said Marks.
But the wild-eyed doctor seemed not to hear him and just continued moving his head up and down erratically as though confirming something he’d been so sure of all along. And still felt responsible for nonetheless.
His voice shook as he started backing up. “They were here for weeks, possibly months even, before the ship came in, and they were quiet as a mouse, sneaking around and up to no good. Quiet. As. A. Mouse. They hacked our DNA and Med Archives. We keep files and samples for every citizen. State-of-the-art processing and archive center down in the Old Colony. Somehow they got in there, hacked the data banks, pulled out physical samples, and had enough time to spin up targeted nanoviruses on our leading command and control systems. That first wave was here for, maybe… at least two weeks before everything began going to hell. We…”
He drank more water.
The colonel used that as an opportunity to change the subject and see what other intel the obviously fractured man might be able to provide.
“We’ve had reports of compromised citizens attacking the strike force. Being used as IEDs. What can you tell us about that?”
Captain de Macha didn’t even blink when the colonel failed to use the proper Coalition term rescue force. Instead he added, “And how can we be sure your group isn’t also compromised?”
The ragged doctor nodded emphatically and guzzled more water, sloshing it across his scraggly beard. “Red striations. Like a rash all over the neck. We identified that early on and the only cure was to quarantine your own group. Not quarantines for the sick; quarantines for the healthy—keep the good shut away from the bad. It was the only way you knew people weren’t infected, so you could trust them.”
“This illness is what causes… people esploding?” asked Captain de Macha.
“Yes. In the sense that it makes them willing to do it. The red striations are the result of some kind of neural control toxin. Something they were injected with before the surgery.”
“Surgery?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, moving from desperate survivor to clinician. Calmer now as he turned toward the business he understood. The interface of medicine and survival. “Infected survivors exhibiting the striations would attempt to infiltrate other survivor groups. The Savages at first were trying to get down into the bunkers along the subway and into Old Colony itself. More than a few episodes of self-detonation—not always explosive, mind you; there were reports of nerve gas and other chemical agents as well—but these patterns were nonetheless identified by the survivor network using the emergency survival protocols we’ve trained for our whole lives. And we developed a response.”
“What was it?” asked Marks, eager for any insight into this particular band of Savages.
“Simply put, we cut ourselves off from each other. The most dangerous part, I suspect, right now, is that as the refugee groups are leaving their bunkers, coming out to be rescued by you, these lone bombers—that’s what we’ve been calling them—will attempt to mix in and detonate within your ranks. Expect it.”
De Macha whistled and swore.
The medic had given the doctor a low-dose sedative, and he was growing calmer by the second, even appraising, as though only just now fully appreciating the grand perspective of the hell he’d just lived through.
“I’ll tell you this,” he said, watching something off in the distance that no one else could see. Something only he saw because it only existed in his mind and memory. Marks had seen that look thousands of times before. “It speaks to the Savage ruthlessness that they’d devise such a cunning strategy. It was almost as if they knew you’d respond in force, and they wanted to be inserted among us, or even posing as a whole group of refugees, so that when the time came, when you showed up, as it were, they’d disable your ground forces by masquerading as the most desperate of us.”
He frowned. “I am… or rather I was… a student of history. Old Earth history. I don’t think I ever will be again. I couldn’t possibly be after this nightmare from our past suddenly showed up on our doorstep and ruined everything we’ve built. But I was. And what the Savages are employing, the IED trick—it’s timeless. It still turns up occasionally in our modern conflicts, but back on Earth, before the Big Uplift, before the Great Leap, it was very common in dealing with superior numbers and an overwhelming technological advantage held by the enemy force. Especially among the fundamentalist radical types. Ideologues.”
“Nothing new under the sun,” Marks said, rubbing his face. He hoped the doctor had something more useful than fourth-rate military history to chatter about.
The doctor nodded. “What this tells me about this particular brand of Savages—and I know this is shockingly naive, you types are all briefed in their behavior mechanisms and patterns—but this tactic, this is like a window into their soul. Which is really a window into our souls, as it were. The Savages are who we were before the advent of the hyperdrive. Before the colonies and the new empires. We’re getting a look back at ourselves, how we used to behave, and it’s absolutely barbaric. Turning other humans into bombs to blow up your enemy where he’s weakest. Where he’s giving aid and mercy to the desperate. Terror campaigns.”
Marks didn’t have the heart to tell the trembling academic just how nasty war was out on the fringes, far away from formerly safe and civilized worlds like New Vega.
“When your men get wind of this,” the doctor continued, “the terror will spread just as it did then. And suppose this invasion is a sign of what’s still to come? What do we know of the Savages? Really? Their numbers? Their abilities? Their coordination? Suppose we see more of this, and the panic grows. And the worlds we call home catch fire in a frenzy of terrorized angst, and all the other fractures are revealed. One bombing in some high-end restaurant could be all it takes to make an empire capitulate to the Savages. It’s happened before. To us. This was us. They were once us. That’s who were facing out here. Except now… they’re post-human. And what, exactly, does that mean?”
No one said anything.
“Can you tell me?” asked the doctor.
But no one could.
So no one answered.
The doctor shook his head rapidly, as if clearing it of all the thinking he’d done during the six weeks of stark raving hell since the survivors had bunkered. “There’s one other thing. Their strategy… capturing strays, pumping them full of neural control toxin, and then performing a bomb-install surgery… it hurts them too.”
“How so?” asked the colonel. He always keyed in on ways to hurt the Savages.
“Why, they’re cannibals now. Haven’t you noticed? They’re needlessly wasting calories just to terrorize us. Look around. This city had a population of ten million. Do you see any corpses in the streets?”
16
The Wild Man
Thirty-Second Floor, Cyrus Gardens Luxury Apartments
Hilltop District
He’d come to hunt.
Hunt Savages.
Six weeks after the infection, invasion, call it what you will, when all the planets of the not-even-yet-formed Confederacy, sometimes it called itself a Coalition, had put out the general warning to avoid New Vega at all costs, possible Savage outbreak in the stellar region, he’d arrived.
Why… he’d headed straight for it.
The only option for a lone traveler was to find an old scout ship from the past. There always was some soul foolish enough to buy one and think they could avoid all the traps of stellar navigation and light speed in order to find some fabled lost planet of gold, treasure, or tech. There always was such. The galaxy seemed to breed them by the dozens.
He wasn’t that breed.
He wasn’t a scout. Or an explorer.
He was a shooter.
Always had been.
All of it on a forgotten world. A lost world.
You can’t find Stendahl’s Bet on the maps anymore. The stellar charts. It’s gone. Gone baby gone.
That was ten years ago.
Just gone like that.
Savages came one day, and they lost half the planet in a week. It had never been too populated to begin with. A colony world. A lot of ranching. Off-world beef exports had been the main source of business. But there had been a few big population centers. Hasting. Willoughby. Corazon.
Gone by the end of the week.
The militia had been deployed to protect the pop centers. And he went off to fight. Never mind the wife and baby. He went. Deployed first against the assault on Corazon along the eastern seaboard.
They lost big-time there. At Corazon. The Savages had put down a pretty significant presence. Like they were going to march across Stendahl’s Bet reaping their booty no matter who stood in their way.
There would be a fight.
And that’s all he’d ever asked for. For a fight. Not fair. Nor good. Those things were for movies.
But a fight. It’s all he’d asked for.
I mean, it wasn’t all he’d ever asked for. But it’s what he’d asked for ever since Stendahl’s Bet ceased to be a place. Just a fight. Within range. A good sight picture. And the chance to fight them. And kill them.
He’d asked for that ever since.
Ever since the wife and baby…
Those Savages. The ones who had tried for Stendahl’s Bet… they hadn’t been calorie hunters like these on New Vega he watched through his high-powered scope from the thirty-second floor of an apartment high-rise at the edge of Hilltop. Those Savages on Stendahl’s Bet had been metal scavengers. Anything that was metal, they’d hauled it off in their salvage vessels. Back up to their big hulk to be taken off away and forever. That had been their booty. Yeah, they were makin’ somethin’ out there in the deep dark where hyperdrive ships from all the navies of the worlds wouldn’t ever find them.
During the worst days of the battle for Willoughby, when the wild man helped the fading defenses trying to retake the city, they found there was no city to retake. Nothing but a skeleton of that oldest of boom towns from back during the frontier days.
Some said Willoughby was named for the navigator on the Horizon. Stendahl was the captain. They came to the planet hundreds of years ago.
Captain got to name the world, as the old traditions went.
So say the old-timers.
But who would really know now? Less than a hundred people survived the Savage attack on that world ten years ago. Survived the attack… and survived Tyrus Rechs’s rain of fire that cleansed the Savages—and everyone else—from the planet.
He didn’t hold that against the crazed sociopath Tyrus Rechs, the man all the worlds hated these days. He’d been there on Stendahl’s Bet during those last days. There was nothing left. Nothing but the Savages in the end. Only a fool thought wife and baby… y’know… might have…
Only a fool.
He didn’t hold it against the war criminal.
But sometimes he did.
Because maybe wife and baby might have made it. Maybe the Savages hadn’t dealt with them in the way they’d dealt with everyone they found in Willoughby and Corazon and a dozen other one-horse ranching towns across the continent.
The Trail of Blood.
He’d stopped using their names. Now they were Wife and Baby.
It was easier that way. Easier to package. Easier to ruck. Easier to carry.
He didn’t picture them much anymore.
Unless he had a Savage in his scope. The powerful and dialed-in scope that sat above the large-bore rifle he used. He didn’t picture them then either. Or at least, he didn’t see them.
But he felt them.
Her standing just behind him. Baby on her hip. And that smile he’d fallen in love with. The smile when he did things for her. Things she couldn’t do. Things that made her proud he was her man.
He could feel them in those moments. Those first finger-pad-on-the-trigger moments. Those slow-breathing, falling, almost gone…
Pull.
BOOOOOOOM thundered the weapon.
Moments.
And way out there, right up close in his scope, another Savage had a massive hole torn open in its chest. With his special rifle he didn’t need head shots. The big rifle could hit them anywhere and they were done. Hell, if he hit them in the head, and sometimes he did, the head would just vape.
But he preferred to nail them center mass in the upper portion of the chest. Because… for a moment they knew they were dying. They had at least a second, sometimes more, to know that they’d met the wrong survivor.
That they’d met the wild man.
And now they were dying because of him.
And if you believed the rumors, the theories, the whispers that some spoke about the Savages, no matter what tech tree they’d followed, all the old rumors said that these, in whatever form they’d become, these were as old as the hyperdrive itself. Older than that, if you understood your histories. From the way back.
Once humans.
No more.
And now they were dying because he’d put them down.
In those moments he could feel her and baby behind him. Smiling.
Sometimes he could almost hear her voice.
“Another one, babe.”
That’s what she’d say.
He lived for that moment when he could almost hear her saying that.
“Another one, babe.”
After Stendahl got nuked into oblivion by Tyrus Rechs. Right down into zero viability for a hundred years or more, because that was really the only way to deal with the Savages—or so said those who believed in the renegade criminal known as Tyrus Rechs.
Only way to be sure.
He’d hunted Savages ever since.
He never would’ve left Stendahl. But he was wounded at Gap Springs. Badly. Face and chest all scarred from a fragmentary device that went off close and suddenly just as everything went to hell for the militia. Next thing he knew he was on board the Mercy. United Worlds hospital frigate. They were in jump. Stendahl had been dead for more than a week, the doctor told him.
And the worlds were baying for Tyrus Rechs’s blood because there had to be another way to deal with the Savages other than just nuking planets into oblivion.
The planets called it a raid. Tyrus Rechs called it a foothold.
A prelude to a living, breathing world of Savages.
But who knows? Maybe they didn’t desire those things anymore. Maybe they had moved beyond the wanting land, sky, and water. Beyond the basic ken of a human understanding of those basic things.
Maybe.
In the darkness of the galaxy, who knew what was possible?
And so, after leaving the refugee center on Sudlow, one of the Britannian colony worlds, the planet on which he’d been established as an official refugee, he’d gone hunting on his own. Gone looking. Got had for an old rundown scout vessel called the Sweetwater Express. Belonged to some old scout who’d been dead nigh on twenty years. His daughter was more eager to unload it than she let on. She was more than happy to sell it to the wild man.
By then, that’s what folks had taken to calling him. Big, brawny, scars like tattoos. Big beard and coal-dark eyes that seemed to burn for nothing but revenge and something that could never come back. He never told them the story, but they guessed it all the same. Pain’s like that. Like an open window in your heart, someone once said. Everyb
ody can see in and see that you’ve been blown apart.
Revenge.
Revenge was enough.
“Do another one, babe.”
Yeah. Sure thing, girl. Anything for you.
And so, whenever the Savages, or the rumors of a Savage infection, outbreak, invasion, came over the galactic transcomm, he fired up that old scout that shouldn’t have even run and took off for parts unknown, flying on baling wire and prayers.
He’d shoot ’em for as long as he could.
But in the end, Tyrus Rechs, or someone else, one of his true believers from another planet, a colony too close to the infected world to take chances, would nuke the planet until it glowed and the atmosphere itself caught fire. And then it was time to go. They always lost. Never won.
But sometimes the Savages would up and leave on their own after they’d taken everything they’d come for in the first place. Lives. Water. Metal. Food. Tech. They’d be off once again into the Big Dark, before the exterminators showed, sailing between the stars in their massive sub-light colony vessels that were the height of tech… back before the hyperdrive.
And now, after all that contact and scavenging and stealing, maybe they were the height of tech again.
Savages.
Hard to believe they’d ever been the best and brightest humanity had to offer. Once. Long ago. The dreamers, thinkers, builders.
Or maybe that was just what they’d said about themselves to justify it all. Men and women of destiny. Because destiny needs justification.
Six weeks ago he heard the rumor that the Savages had come in and hit a sector giant. New Vega. A big player in the fledgling galactic scheme.
New Vega.
He checked the flight directives and found that the world had an off-limits advisory tag.
Surest sign of Savages.
So he fired up the Sweetwater Express one last time, barely got her into orbit, barely coaxed her into jump, and practically flung himself at New Vega on a best-guess trajectory.
It wasn’t a crash. Not even a crash landing. But the Sweetwater Express would never leap into the hyper ever again.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 7