Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars

by Jason Anspach

  One Sentinel engaged some distant target, roaring out with a massive boom heard even through the noise-cancelers installed in the helmets, then the other Sentinel followed suit. Two targets, sheltering inside buildings facing the kill zone the Savages had constructed, exploded. Seconds later the faces of those two buildings slid down into the edge of the kill zone in a waterfall of construction materials and office furniture.

  Then the ground jolted, hard, once, and both Sentinels went nose over into a crevice that had suddenly opened up in the middle of the field. The trailing infantry, now exposed, scattered for cover. Dozens were shot to pieces within seconds from zeroed Savage ground fire.

  When the dust cleared, the colonel saw that the leading compartment of both Sentinels had gone down into an underground trench. The subterranean route of their local transit system. The rear section of each trapped Sentinel was attempting to reverse out, pulling hard and making some headway. But then the anti-armor fire from a few stories up inside the fronting buildings began to streak down onto the exposed tanks’ topsides.

  Three high-energy rounds punctured the dorsal armor of one of the Sentinels. The tank caught fire as its internal ammunition racks began to cook off in successive whumps. The nearby infantry scattered and began to take what little cover they could. Some even ran forward and tossed themselves into the open subway line despite the exploding tank.

  Counter-sniper teams, operating from the buildings and streets the Coalition force had come from, opened up on these anti-armor teams, and Alpha One’s electronic warfare operator was given the green light to scramble the battlefield. Meaning any directional or wireless weapons were about to become useless for the next two minutes as the tank emitted a powerful EMP pulse. The infantry turned off their comms and switched off the electronic scopes on their pulse rifles to protect against the effects.

  There was nothing to indicate the pulse had gone off above the din of Savage gunfire ripping up the dirt and bouncing off the bent rebar and chunks of concrete.

  As the colonel scanned the battlefield, he spotted the eruption of a massive muzzle flash from high up along a nearby tower. He was about to call in a report that there was a Savage sniper operating in the rear when he noted that whoever it was that was firing, they were firing into the Savages ahead of his position. Slow. Methodical. Smooth. Incredible shots of an almost titanic nature. And not blaster fire.

  As far as the colonel knew, none of the militaries in the Coalition used old-school firearms.

  Alpha One was still engaging Savage troops huddling in the rubble ahead when Captain de Macha came over the comm.

  “Forward right tread is feathered. But we can’t move ahead until we have something to cross the obstacle.”

  “Ideas!” shouted the colonel over another concussive BOOOOM from the main gun.

  “Stand by,” said de Macha.

  A few seconds later the rearmost Sentinel came forward at a rush. A shovel-scoop unfolded itself from along the sides and rear of the armor, then it was plowing into the ruined debris and dirt, pushing forward a growing wave of material almost effortlessly. A medic dashed out under enemy fire and grabbed a wounded infantryman lying directly in the path of the oncoming behemoth and dragged the man out of the way. Infantry from across the field provided covering fire for the brave medic.

  Despite having gathered what seemed an impossible amount of mass to move forward, the tank didn’t even slow, leaving a steadily declining trench in its wake. When it reached the chasm, it pushed the debris down into the gap, filling it. Then it reversed slowly, raising its scoop, and launched itself forward over the filled-in gap with a burst of speed.

  The colonel didn’t think the gap was quite filled in enough, but the utility tank managed to grab the wall on the other side—deploying some kind of internal spike-climbing system embedded within its treads—and pull itself up and over.

  “Well, I’ll be…” said a soldier hunkered down next to the colonel as gunfire ricocheted off nearby piles of debris and exposed metal bars.

  “Moving now,” said de Macha over the comm.

  Alpha One lurched toward the gap, meters ahead of the main body. It had fewer problems scaling up the ruined far side of the trench than did the dismounted infantry.

  With just fifty meters to go until the crushed and ruined buildings that made up the Savage line of defense, the tanks flashed and thundered with their main guns, showering the debris wall with clouds of spinning micro-grenades. Gunners deployed from hatches and fired into the Savages shooting from positions inside the rubble. Pulse fire rang out in staccato bursts as the heavier weapons of Team Ranger contributed to the developing crescendo of chaos.

  The colonel was on the run and moving forward, issuing orders for his team to assault into the debris. He grabbed the sergeant of the assault team and pointed to a gap in the ruins. “Send your men through that gap, right now! Send frags and flashbangs first for breach! Don’t be stingy with them!”

  Teams of men raced forward, found cover, and tossed in explosives and flashbangs before rising up with shouts and storming the positions. Other soldiers stacked around their targets’ ingresses and waited for the bangs to go off. They swarmed inward right behind the booms, spraying blaster fire and praying that they were covering every possible angle.

  And behind them lay all the dead who had not made it that far.

  19

  Three-Six Armored Cavalry (Fast Attack)

  931st Artillery Perimeter

  Sergeant Greenhill had been ordered by command to get the artillery up and providing fire support ASAP.

  Problem was, everyone trained on the guns was dead.

  Or so it had seemed at first. Until the lone survivor of a gun battery literally climbed out of an open breach to avoid being torn in half during the Savage anti-personnel drone strike.

  Private Donal Makaffie was one sketchy dude as far as the no-nonsense Sergeant Greenhill was convinced. He’d seen the type before. Had been given the choice between prison and military service. You got the “Serve or Serve Time” from a lot from the enlisted UW types. And apparently Makaffie had been convicted of attempting to overthrow the government at some point in his pre-military days.

  Nice.

  It was some nothing rebellion of a couple of dozen junkies back on Earth. And Makaffie, with his degrees in chemical engineering, computer science, and speculative fiction with an emphasis on golden age pulp sci-fi, financed it by manufacturing and distributing drugs. Something Greenhill had never heard of.

  “Call it H8, man!” Makaffie whined, giving everyone who didn’t ask his life story. “It’s my special blend. Lot of synthetics, which the galaxy is full of if you know where to look, that really get you there. Know what I mean? Make the world how it should be. How you want it to be. That’s why I call it H8. ’Cause you hate the way things are.”

  Curts, the driver, scratched his head. The rest of the surviving cav troop was either setting up a perimeter, or trying to find something that would teach them how to operate the 931st’s guns.

  “If it makes everything how you want it to be,” began a confused Curts, “then how come ya call it hate? That don’t make no sense.”

  Makaffie cackled like a goat. Grabbing his skinny belly as he did. He was shirtless and only wore combat pants and boots. From around his sunken chest dangled a necklace of ancient keys. His wild eyes stared out through crooked military-issue glasses that had been broken and taped back together at the bridge. That was a rarity: glasses. There were only a small number of eye problems that still required them.

  “Ha ha!” said the crazed private. “That’s because those are the chemical identifiers. It’s a play on that, man! But really, it makes you hate the world the way it is, and when you trip hard, you come out of it with a desire to make everything the way you saw it in the vision. It’s all vision. Everything’s vision. You gotta know that up front
.”

  “All vision?” asked Curts, who’d literally been a farm boy for some big collective on a backwater colony world before he joined up with the Spilursan army. “What do you see in these… visions?”

  “Doors, man. Doors to perception,” said Makaffie. He spoke in a hushed whisper like he was sharing the greatest secret the galaxy at large had never heard. “And to see ’em… you got to have the keys.” He grabbed his key necklace with one dirty hand and shook it frenetically. “And I got the keys, man.”

  Then the diminutive Makaffie devolved into wild, maniacal laughter.

  “That’s great, Private,” said Sergeant Greenhill easily. Now was not the time to play drill sergeant hard charger. Which he’d sent the application in for as his next duty assignment. He knew this low-speed all-drag private could care less about the mission, or that arty was desperately needed forward. But he was the only one present who might have an idea how to operate the guns.

  The guns that very much needed to be operated.

  As if to punctuate the point, an incoming Savage round fired from deep in Hilltop smashed into a luxury condo tower down the block, sending waterfalls of glass outward and down onto the street. Alarms went off along the avenue. Alarms that must have been hardwired into some kind of emergency backup power within the building.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed current events…. uh, Private Makaffie…” began Greenhill.

  “Call me Donal, Sarge,” said the emaciated private with a smile. “We should be more informal if we’re gonna do some synergy here.”

  “Uh… yeah… I don’t know nothin’ ’bout synergy, just a grunt who gets to ride around with the cav for this rotation and all, but if you hadn’t noticed, we are currently engaged with the, uh… enemy, as it were. And the higher-ups back at command would very much like us to shoot these guns at the, uh… Savages who are currently shooting at our boys forward.”

  “Ha… Savvies…” Makaffie goat-laughed once again. “Ain’t no such thing. We’re all Savages out there beyond the known, Sarge. Reality’s an illusion foisted on us by the Britiannia-UW military-technology complex. Mind if I smoke a joint, Sarge?”

  Greenhill couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. He felt himself rise up on the balls of his feet and suck in a deep breath in order to light this little dirt weasel up good and proper… and then thought better of it.

  He chuckled nervously. Except it wasn’t nervous. He was trying to hold in both disbelief and rage. And the thing that was making him do this was that every time he flicked his eyes away, like a good NCO constantly watching all his men, the perimeter, the skies and everything he was responsible for in order to get everyone back to base in one piece… he kept seeing the dead of the 931st lying on the street all about that battery.

  And that reminded him that he needed the little goat-laughing dirt weasel standing in front of him. He would have preferred to need any other man from the 931st. Any other man.

  But this one had an advantage over those other men.

  He was alive.

  For now.

  The fact that Makaffie was almost forty, or so he appeared, a private, and seemed to lack any kind of discipline—or a strong connection to reality for that matter—did not imbue Sergeant Greenhill with the confidence he would have liked to feel regarding his current mission at this particular moment. The mission to get the guns up and firing.

  “Well now,” began Greenhill affably, “now might not be a good time to… use… get high. Hey—!” he added, as though suddenly experiencing a lightning bolt of an idea. This was all play-acting on his part. “Any chance you know how to fire these guns, Private?”

  He added “Private” subtly, but with just enough emphasis to remind the dirt weasel he was still serving in the military.

  “Do I?” goat-laughed the dirt-weasel private standing before the powerfully built high-speed low-drag sergeant with dried blood all over his combat fatigues and boots. “I know how to run these things better than they ever did. Yes, sir. I mean, Sarge. You work for a living and all, I get it. We can do shot out… and everything in fact. Just get me some coordinates and tell me what you wanna hit it with, and I can oblige with some glorious destruction. You see, I’m all about destruction, Sarge and all. It’s when stuff’s breakin’ that you see the doors. And then we just drop a little H8… and you can slip through and disappear on over to the other side.”

  Greenhill stared at the private in bewilderment. But he caught the gist of what had been said. Mainly the part about operating the guns. He slowly nodded.

  “We, uh… can provide the coordinates and ordnance request, Private. I’m sure that won’t be a problem.”

  20

  The Wild Man

  Thirty-Second Floor, Cyrus Gardens Luxury Apartments

  Hilltop District

  He hadn’t had a good sight picture on anything in the main assault going down on the streets below; some heavy-duty financial high-rises, corporate headquarters types all sleek and curving, had blocked much of the action down that way. But he could see into Hilltop pretty clearly. The Savages were throwing everything they had at defending the corridor they’d tried to channel the Coalition forces into.

  A kill zone meat grinder. Entrenched positions all around.

  From his vantage point, the Wild Man could see the tall artillery mech the Savages had deployed in a park near the top of Hilltop—up around all the grand government buildings and the original landing site of the old colony ship. The big machine was shooting artillery at random along the Coalition’s flanks, just to make it clear that it was a bad idea to go any way but the way the Savages wanted their enemies to go. Savage ground troops were focusing on the one way the Coalition had up into Hilltop. The rest of their defenders were spread out along the flanks.

  It wasn’t until Team Ranger—of course he had no idea they were designated as Team Ranger—began its drive on the defended flanks that he decided to assist. From his vantage, he could put massive rounds into whatever key defenders he wanted on the Savage side. He’d already knocked out two machine-gun teams that had definite interlocking fields of fire set up and ready to go on the Coalition forces starting out across the no man’s land covered by tanks.

  First he hit the gunner, blowing a massive hole in the Savage’s mechanical-part-laden chest cavity. He calculated badly and came in too low. Then he adjusted for drop, chambered a new round, centered the reticle once more. Took a breath and pulled the trigger again. Just barely.

  The small cannon he called his rifle went off with a tremendous BOOM, despite the integral suppressor and landed the massive twenty-millimeter cartridge loaded with a sixteen-hundred-grain bullet right where he wanted it to land. The Savage weapons team had just sat down next to their ancient matte-black machine gun inside their fighting position when the round fired from the Wild Man’s big bore rifle, moving at almost a thousand meters per second, hit their comrade dead center. The bullet moved right through the body and sent dirt fountaining a fraction of a second before the Savage fell backward onto the ruined ground.

  Time enough to realize its end, he thought, as the massive rifle chambered another round.

  “Do another one, babe.”

  Yes, ma’am.

  He felt that smile. Her smile.

  Then rinse and repeat on the other Savage weapons team on the far side of no man’s land. Better shots that time. They realized it had ended, whatever it was for them, here. Because of him.

  Now, as he watched the Coalition tanks and infantry move out into the cleared space before the rubble barrier, he had a sickly sweet feeling. Like he’d eaten too much candy or something. Or drank too much. Or stayed too long at a party.

  Only he was behind his rifle. He’d had that feeling once long ago behind a rifle.

  In the woods at dusk back on the world he came from. Stendahl’s Bet. Trailing a viperfox that h
ad been raiding their calves. Hearing his ma’s dinner bell across the lonely hills and quiet groves. Knowing it was late and time to be home soon.

  He looked away from the scope his eye had been centered on. Took a breath and checked the sky to see what world he was on.

  It was New Vega. And it was almost noon.

  Not dusk.

  And there was no home to go to anymore.

  His face touched the familiar spot on the rifle, centering his eye through the scope, and he thought about that sickly sweet late-for-supper feeling he felt in his stomach. And he knew why it was there.

  Too many shots.

  Snipers—real snipers—didn’t take two shots in succession. Enemy could find you that way. The human mind could locate the likely firing position on just two shots. The first always surprised. Details and facts didn’t calculate in the equation of finding the sniper. The second shot helped the mind to reveal the shooter’s location.

  Two shots told too much.

  They’d come hunting soon.

  He’d learned that from a special weapons and tactics sergeant during his advanced training back on Stendahl.

  And that’s what he’d done ever since. Tracked, hunted, and found the Savages, and no matter how many there ever were… he’d only ever taken just the one shot.

  One was enough.

  And now…

  Do another one, babe.

  Sitting here above a real live battle the likes of which the galaxy in its modern form might not have ever seen… he was like that kid in the candy store with the opportunity to eat too much of all the sweet things on display.

  A shooter with a view to a kill, and ammo to burn.

  He loaded his own special cartridges. He took care to weigh every charge and precisely seat every sixteen-hundred-grain metal pill.

  They were too busy dying down there.