So be it.
This world was as good as any to die on.
And he could shoot Savages all day long here.
There were more than enough of them. Even now. Even after all these weeks of hunting them and watching them. Watching them come out like cowboys back on Stendhal to ride the herds of survivors back into the ship.
He’d taken the occasional shot.
Just one shot.
Always just one shot.
And then he’d watch. Dialed in close on the scope as the targeted Savage flung back its faceless helmet and died looking at the sky.
“Do another one, babe.”
And now he was watching them. Big fight shaping up. This wasn’t Tyrus Rechs. This was the Coalition of Worlds, or whatever they were calling themselves these days. Coming in fast to attack… and what?
Drive off the Savages?
Annihilate the Savages?
Study them?
Take what they learned for themselves?
That was all… That was all like a sin to the wild man. You couldn’t reason with Savages. Couldn’t annihilate them. Couldn’t study them. Couldn’t even understand what they knew.
Why…
Why?
Because they weren’t human anymore.
And you wouldn’t, in fact no decent person would, want to know what they knew. What they’d discovered out there in the Big Dark. Dark knowledge never meant to be known.
How do you know that?
He didn’t hear that voice much anymore. He liked to hear hers instead.
Almost a laugh in her voice.
A lilt? Was that what they called it?
“I don’t know,” he whispered as he watched them through the scope. Watched them gathering for the big fight at the bottom of the hill. Three spears, three prongs. Three elements of the Coalition going straight into a hornets’ nest of Savages.
They had no idea what they were walking into.
He could’ve warned them.
But he didn’t have a comm.
Just the rifle. His personally loaded ammunition. And some gear to survive on, crawl away with, and shoot another day by.
“Do another one, babe.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he whispered.
The baby was on her hip, cooing. He was a proud daddy.
Thirty-second floor watching the Savages getting into place all along back streets and alleys. Coming up out of the subway they’d been so busy trying to crack into during all those quiet weeks when it seemed he had the city to himself.
What’s down there? he wondered in some distant part of his mind.
Once the fighting started between both sides, he could probably sit up here for a few hours and counter-snipe the Savages attacking the Coalition forces. They’d have bigger concerns than him blowing off the occasional head of one their elites.
Big mothers.
Head shots handed out all around on those.
That was for sure.
He swam the scope across the city. There were so many to shoot. Both sides were walking right into each other.
And the fun was about to begin.
Good times.
“Do another one, babe.”
Sure thing, darlin’.
Sure thing.
17
Team Ranger
Hilltop District
Forward elements of the main thrust under Ogilvie were already coming under direct fire at the bottom of the skyscraper-laden Hilltop District when Team Ranger made their first contact with the enemy. The Savages were entrenched along an improvised wall of destruction that blocked all entrance to the streets located deeper in the neighborhood.
Over the comm, the colonel could hear Ogilvie ordering his lead units to attack en masse and push through the resistance they were encountering within their designated avenue of approach.
“Push on, lads!”
He was issuing commands over the radio as though he expected them to be remembered for all time.
“Have at them, my boys.”
“We’re almost through!”
And…
“Give ’em hell!”
Meanwhile casualty reports and calls for medical evac over the battle boards monitoring the Coalition net were coming in fast. After half a block of heavy fighting, it was clear that there was no pushing on, pushing through, having at them, or any other such nonsense as dispensed by a field-grade officer not under direct fire.
Nonsense is still nonsense, even when spoken by generals.
What those lads were doing was dying.
There was no artillery support. The carrier hadn’t finished rearming the tactical bombers for close-air runs against identified enemy positions. Some units were communicating. Some weren’t. A few were missing altogether, and the cav, operating in the rear for some bizarre reason, was reassigned to check on those units and make sure the Savages hadn’t flanked.
It definitely did not look like the Savages were conducting a simple planetary raid, nor did it look like they were scrambling to evacuate back into the stars now that they had been caught by the Coalition. If they were even going to push off for deep space at all, they weren’t in much of a hurry to do so. In fact, to almost every commander involved in the operation—every commander except Supreme Coalition Commander Ogilvie—it looked like the Savages were interested in sticking around for a fight.
But even if the Savages managed to win today, even if the Coalition strike force went down in utter defeat, there was no way one single Savage hulk was going to stand up against all the human worlds combined. A defeat here would send almost every navy speeding here at max jump. And then there’d be no doubt that the Rechs Option would go into effect. The planet would burn along with the Savages who’d thought one colony ship, no matter how big it was and how much tech they possessed, could stand up to the entire weight of the Coalition and its several navies.
The numbers didn’t support the survival of the Savages in that scenario.
Not ever.
Not even remotely.
To stay and fight—to dig in—had never been the Savage game. They had proved that time and again in their random menacing of the known worlds. Hit and run. Loot, take, steal, and then disappear out into the stellar dark for another years-long haul at just shy of light speed to the next planet. That was their method. They were safe out there in the dark.
Too many options. Too hard to track.
Worlds with hyperdrive-capable ships didn’t go out that far into the empty space between worlds. Didn’t need to. There was nothing out there. So it was a safe space for the Savages. If they could stay out there forever, they probably would; it would give them all time in the world to get up to their utopian madness and diabolical experiments.
But…
There were no resources out there in the dark between worlds. You needed stuff to build stuff. Materials.
Nothing but cold out there.
And a black darkness that swallowed everything and gave nothing back.
All the Savages had was that powerful scream of engines doing their best to push mass between the worlds at speeds so slow that, compared to hyperspace travel, forward progress seemed negligible to the point of immeasurable. Travel was measured in decades as opposed to days, and each massive colony ship became a world unto itself, pushing along untethered and untetherable. And unless they managed to get ahold of hyperdrive tech, they were pretty much stuck in place while the galaxy continued to grow around them.
Team Ranger, riding shotgun on the right flank of the main body, had come up against the Savages’ improvised wall of debris. Colonel Marks was at the head of the column, standing in front of the lead Sentinel, designated as Alpha Zero One, when the point team spotted the wall of destruction that had been thrown up just a few streets away i
n the urban sprawl of Hilltop’s western slope.
It looked as though someone had taken a massive bulldozer and simply scraped up the street while simultaneously demoing all the buildings on the near side. Thus creating a wide kill zone and then a wall from which the enemy could shoot at any approaching Coalition forces seeking to penetrate the district.
The colonel called a halt and ran forward to the point teams, dropping down with his pulse rifle as he got close and finally crawling up behind a pile of debris to put eyes on the obstruction.
“Looks like they don’t want us to go on through, sir,” remarked the sergeant in charge of the point team. They were lying just below the rim of a pile of ruined building materials. Around the colonel the stripped-down weapons team hugged concrete and waited for the shooting to start. The air had that pre-game feel, that sense that something was about to go down in short order.
In the distance behind them, they could hear the rumble of the powerful Sentinel tanks—the premier ground offensive weapon of the Espanian military. Four massive turbines, which howled like banshees when the throttles were opened up to full, now whispered in a silent, menacing, low-pitched scream that made everyone uneasy.
Tanks were dangerous to everyone on the ground. The infantry knew that well.
“Remember,” Captain de Macha had announced to Team Ranger over the command net. “I have five weapons on each of my beasts. A 140-millimeter main gun. Heavy twin blaster. Automatic grenade launcher. And the right tread. And of course, the left tread. So please… stay out of our way, amigos. If we smell the enemy… well then, we will turn loose like wolves among the sheeps.”
The message, despite the broken Standard, had been received and understood by all.
“They’re trying to channel us into the meat grinder Ogilvie’s sending everyone into,” muttered the colonel beneath his ’nocs as he studied the high wall of debris on the far side of the open wasteland kill zone.
To the east, UW interceptors at twenty thousand feet shot down through the atmosphere and ran ineffective strafing runs against the streets the Coalition was sent to take. The bombers were being held back until enemy concentrations could be identified. Unearthly squeals of air-to-ground blaster fire tore through the canyons of the posh Hilltop District off to Team Ranger’s left. The fighters came in low, dangerously low, streaking through the canyons of street and skyscraper to make their passes against the Savage defenses firing down the hilly streets into the oncoming Coalition forces.
Portable surface-to-air missiles from the Savages streaked upward in response, trying to catch the fleeing fighters, but to no avail. The interceptors turned this way and that, popping flares and dropping chaff clusters as they dodged their mindless pursuers.
The intensity and volume of blaster fire from that direction rose in a sudden storm of noise. Ogilvie had ordered another ineffective push.
Moments later waves of gunfire, heavy automatic mixed with impressive booms of single shot, replied to the Coalition advance. And replied again. And again. Until the waves of gunfire drowned out the diminishing returns of blaster fire. The attack was stalling, stalled, and probably in retreat. The dead would be left in the streets where they’d fallen.
Heavy booms spat out across the cityscape as armor moved in to cover the retreat.
It was ominous listening to the battle a few blocks over and facing a calm wall of destruction, frozen like some arctic wave of crushed pack ice waiting for Team Ranger to assault. And that counterpoint—the silence here, as opposed to the cry of death and destruction on every level a few blocks over—was not lost on the wordless recon squad crouching in the debris. Or the infantry covering behind the tanks to the rear, waiting for the order to move forward.
Ogilvie was back on the command comm. Ordering more units forward with more inane motivational babble. Somebody had to do it, and he wasn’t going forward himself. Commanders of his caliber didn’t actually lead real people into real battles against storms of real gunfire.
Obviously.
“So what are we gonna do now, sir?” asked the recon sergeant lying next to the colonel in the dirt.
A long moment passed in which nothing was said and all were certain the new colonel had either not heard the question or was ignoring it entirely as he stared at the obstacle through his ’nocs.
“We’re going through, Sergeant. Then we’ll be where they don’t want us to be. Which is where you really want to be when the shooting starts.”
“Seems smart,” remarked the sergeant, whose dry manner seemed to indicate it was all the same to him.
Then the men of the recon company began to shed their rucks and excess gear. They knew what was coming. And it wouldn’t be pretty.
18
“You never know what they have until they shoot it at you,” remarked Captain de Macha once the colonel had finished relaying his plan to breach the debris wall on the far side of the kill zone.
“Yeah,” replied Marks. “I’ve found that to be true. More often than not.”
De Macha smiled and moved off toward his tank commanders to inform them of the plan. The massive Sentinels were idling on a side street that opened up onto the main approach that would take the assault across the no man’s land of cleared rubble and into the Savage defensive force. The infantry was staged and ready to go.
Ogilvie’s main assault had bogged down to the east and was now concentrating on regrouping, staging for another attack, and getting the wounded back to the Porter for evac off-planet. Rotary-winged dropships of the United Worlds design, their four massive blade housings hanging above a central cargo fuselage with an armored pilot and weapons officer cockpit nosing out and down, came in from the north to collect the wounded and depart under Savage artillery fire. And through it all, one of those massive mechs, at least four stories high and held well back from the fighting, was reported to be lobbing shells almost indiscriminately across the battlefield from its twin pom-pom artillery pieces.
Three minutes from go time and Ogilvie finally greenlit the supporting assault, if only just to relieve pressure on the main body that was getting torn to pieces. And with that the mighty Espanian Sentinels, hexagonally segmented, four massive treads turning slowly, grinding rocks and debris to powder, eased out onto the road that would become the axis for Team Ranger’s supporting assault.
The tanks fanned out into a rough wedge once they entered the kill zone, and the infantry crouched behind them.
The incoming fire started up almost instantly. Squad-designated marksmen and dedicated sniper teams returned fire from back in the rubble as soon as the Savage machine-gun teams opened up, and within seconds burning tracer rounds and hot depleted-uranium slugs filled the air. The ricochets off the tanks sounded like trays of silverware being repeatedly dropped, over and over, again and again.
Just behind Alpha One, the lead tank, from which Captain de Macha commanded his “beasts,” one of the assault team members who had swapped positions with the recon team remarked, “They’re just straight up shooting at it!” Like he couldn’t believe that the Savages had missed the obvious fact that neither blaster fire nor ancient chemical-based firearms were going to do anything to the forward armor of the infamous Sentinels.
The colonel was about to tell the man that the Savages were testing. That to the Savages, in his experience, everything was data. And that before they could do anything fully, they would test everything to find out what their options were.
There were advantages for the Savages in being cut off from the main of humanity out there in the dark for so long between worlds. No one facing them could guess how things had evolved. What their technology had become as it moved down the particular path they had chosen—and, in some cases, worshipped.
But the Savages didn’t quite know what they would be up against either. So they had to do some testing as they returned to the main line of development, as it were. L
ike some accidental time-traveler checking the calendar in a room they’d suddenly appeared in.
But the colonel didn’t get a chance to say all that.
“Engaging,” announced Captain de Macha over the comm. Businesslike. Efficient. Just another day at the office and certainly not headed into a storm of bullets. And a second later the powerful Sentinel erupted with her 140-millimeter main gun on a target across the killing field.
“Damn!” shouted one of the infantrymen as a dust storm erupted, enveloping the men surrounding the massive tank. This was heard on the local comm net, as everyone had activated the noise-canceling effect systems in their comm-linked earplugs.
The colonel was watching the thermal targeting imaging feed from Sentinel Alpha One on his battle board while he followed behind the massive death-spitting monster. The Sentinel’s round was smart-enabled, so there was some course correction on its track-to-target over the four-second flight time before it founds its first target and exploded, throwing debris up and out into the kill zone. What appeared to be the ghostly heat signature of a Savage anti-armor team of three was suddenly obscured by smoke and explosive vapor expanding away from the hit.
“Got ’em,” said de Macha with a touch of competitive pride.
A moment later, without any letup in the hail of incoming automatic gunfire coming from across the forward radial of the attack, a micro-missile lanced out from the Savage line, somewhere off along the rightmost flank, and smacked into the forward right tread of Alpha One.
Sparks and debris shot up into the air like a pyrotechnic display at a festival, and the tank came to a sudden halt.
“Technical difficulties…” said de Macha over the comm. Damage control alarms blared out over his feed. “ECM should have pushed that away. Give us a second. We’ll feather the tread and continue on.”
Meanwhile both of the forward-flanking Sentinels surged forward to cover their commander, racing out into the no man’s land like mad bulls charging through a firestorm of dust and flying rounds zipping through the chaos of the charge. Their sudden burst of speed was so rapid that trailing infantry were almost left in the dust. Sergeants hectored the weapon-laden men to hustle forward if they didn’t want to die of exposure to incoming fire.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 8