Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars

by Jason Anspach

  Specialist Makneil, Private Hurr, and Sergeant Major Andres alternated fire from the bank’s smashed security entrance. The running, cartwheeling Savages died halfway to their objective.

  “Colonel Marks,” Andres attempted over the comm, “how copy?”

  In the fortress-like confines of the bank, the comm was going in and out. The sergeant major could reach some of the squads clearing the building, but he’d lost contact with Colonel Marks altogether. It was the senior NCO’s conclusion that either the colonel had been killed or that something more than the building itself was interfering with comms. Maybe the Savages were using some kind of sophisticated directional jamming equipment to isolate the defenders at the main entrance. He suspected the latter. Or maybe just hoped. Colonel Marks didn’t seem like he was gonna die all that easy, but in war, strange things happened. Amateurs got lucky, and incoming fire didn’t discriminate.

  “They comin’ at us again, boys,” Andres yelled after dumping a charge on full auto to keep a Savage’s head down out there. “I get killed, you hold this position with your lives. Is that understood? We can’t have ’em cutting off the rest of our boys from escape if they need to pull out. Got me?”

  Both soldiers, one checking the sights on his rifle, murmured their understanding of the standing order they’d just been given.

  About a minute later a high-powered round, fired from some Savage sniper weapon system out along the eastern side of the square, probably from back in the recessed dark of the one the artillery-smashed buildings, took off Private Hurr’s head. Or rather it blew the back half off, leaving a red spray of mist hanging in the dry and smoky air. Painting the rear wall of the security entrance in gray matter.

  “Oh, shit!” Makneil shouted.

  The sergeant major, who was crouching beneath Hurr while the kid scanned the street for the next assault, caught the boy’s body and lowered him to the floor. He knew the private was dead already. Time in grade and various hot spots had taught him thus.

  “Stay back and watch,” Andres told Specialist Makneil as he dragged Hurr’s body over toward the other side of the room where it would be out of the way for the rest of the fight. Where some recovery team would come and find him once the battle was done and all the Savages were dead. He took the kid’s weapon, charge packs, and remaining explosives. The rest of his platoon would need those. He quickly folded the young man’s arms across his chest.

  “You just rest now,” Andres heard himself say from some distant part of his mind. His voice a wheezy gasp in the hot afternoon of this unending day. The other part of his mind, the present situation part, had been working the NCO’s constant problem of supply and redistribution to care for those who remained. To get as many as he could home.

  He stopped when he heard himself.

  And then he decided that was okay. As long as he kept moving.

  “That’s all right,” he whispered to himself, leaving the body and rejoining Makneil. “It’s okay if you tell ’em it’s over now.”

  That too is an NCO’s job.

  Then he was back to the present and all its demands of attention, return fire, and constant supply.

  Another Savage assault pushed from a building closer at hand. Near the restaurant Team Ranger had initially assaulted from. Firing as they moved. A heavy gunner at their center unloaded a brutal hail of gunfire at the entrance while two teams spread out and rushed forward from the gunner’s flanks.

  “’Nades, young specialist,” hissed the sergeant major with his hands out. “Sense of urgency would be good right about now, in fact.”

  Makneil pulled a frag from off his vest and handed it to the sergeant major, who fluidly armed it and rolled it into the pit the Savages were racing for. Then his hands were out for another. Makneil held it out, and the sergeant major took it and waved the specialist back against the wall.

  The serjeant major waited, kneeling, one hand holding the fragger, the other with his fingers out and ready to arm it.

  The first explosive detonated and probably killed some of the Savages as they swarmed the empty weapons pit. But their heavy gunner was still shooting, still moving forward slowly, raking the door with as much fire as he could place there despite the jumping weapon. He was smart. He was firing for suppression, keeping the defenders back from the entrance so the Savages could get close enough to put their own grenades in play.

  An explosion in a tight confined space like the security lobby would be more than enough to do the job.

  Andres bided his time. “Keep comin’, you mother.”

  At the last second the sergeant major tossed the grenade out the door and onto the front steps, hoping the Savages were getting close now. Hoping that after the first grenade the Savages would suddenly surge forward, seeking to seize the momentum. Recognizing that the window for another grenade was just bare enough for them to breach and spray the lobby. To get their kills and meet their objective.

  That’s what Sergeant Major Andres wanted some lost human part of the Savages might still be thinking. Grabbing for moments of desperate survival and not weighing the odds. Surrendering to time and chance. As though there were cosmic do-overs for the losers.

  The sergeant brought up his rifle and fired on the doorway without waiting for a target to appear. His pulses were already hurtling toward the doorway as the first Savage filled the smashed frame of the entrance in its hulking faceless armor. Andres’s pulse fire tore the thing’s head from its torso.

  A split second later the frag exploded violently and a little too close for comfort.

  “Ah! Dammit!” Andres shouted.

  “You hit, Sergeant Major?” Makneil yelled above the din of his own rifle firing.

  Andres felt a sharp pain in his chest and for a chaotic moment thought he might be having a heart attack. But when he pulled away a probing hand and saw it bloodied, he knew a fragment had struck his left pectoral muscle. He could feel it now, sticking out of muscle and skin. He grunted in agitation each time it brushed against his clothing and armor.

  “I’m all right,” he yelled back, sitting with his back facing the wall, watching the entrance. “More’re comin’!”

  A Savage stumbled through, missing both its arms, half its helmet sheared away, its brain smoking from within the ruin of its head.

  SGM Andres would remember that. Could never forget it.

  The thing’s brain, buried inside that faceless helmet, was on fire as it stumbled through the doorway.

  Makneil opened up and dropped it with a brutal burst from his pulse rifle.

  And they waited for more. And waited. But none came.

  For now.

  The plan had involved the colonel and fire teams reaching defensive positions quickly. The three—now two—soldiers at the entrance couldn’t keep the Savages at bay all by themselves. That wave had only been barely fought off.

  “Let me help you, Sergeant Major,” said the specialist. “Hold on while I clear the door.”

  Makneil stepped almost gingerly through the debris, hugged wall near the entrance, and checked the opposite side of the street from an angle just below line of sight and along the bottom of the entrance. Then he ducked and crossed to the other side of the frame quickly. He stood, carefully, and checked the street once more.

  The sergeant major distantly remembered that was not far from where Hurr had been killed.

  Poor kid.

  But Makneil’s head didn’t explode.

  A second later he was back to the sergeant major and assessing the wound.

  “Ain’t bad, Sergeant Major. I can treat this.” He pulled out his basic medical kit. “You just watch the entrance. Anything shows up, tell me to get out of the way and end it. Okay, Sergeant Major?”

  Andres felt cold and sweaty, but he managed to nod.

  He’d never been hit.

  Nineteen years in, an
d he’d never been hit.

  Don’t that beat everything.

  Makneil worked fast getting a clot-shot in near the wound and stopping the bleeding. Then he pulled the shrapnel and hit the ragged tear in the sergeant major’s skin with superplastic from a one-shot injector every soldier carried. Finally he slapped a self-adhesive pressure dressing across it. The smart bandage ran through its diagnostic and turned green, indicating a good seal.

  “You want some Chill, Sergeant Major?”

  Yeah… thought Andres distantly. That’d be real good. ’Cause this is gonna hurt like… well… like a….

  He stopped.

  He knew he was getting foggy. Maybe a little shock. Checkin’ out and getting evacked might be nice. But not now. He had troops who needed him. It wasn’t time to go home yet.

  “Ain’t got time for that, Specialist. Good to go. Help me get up.”

  The sergeant major used the butt of his pulse rifle to help get to his feet. His left arm didn’t want to work, and he was afraid of tearing the bandage. That was something he didn’t have time for either.

  Then comms went live, confirming Andres’s suspicion that it was the Savages outside the entrance that had jammed it. But before the sergeant major could check in on his men—and the colonel—the Coalition air boss, call sign Wizard Actual, gave a priority address across all channels.

  “Targeted airstrike inbound. Heads down on the ground.”

  A moment later the roar of inbound strike fighters off the Indomitable came in, weapons hot. They filled the street with as much pulse fire as they could lay down along their pass. It sounded like they were coming down the middle of Grand Avenue, shooting at everything as they blazed by before streaking off, roaring into the late afternoon smoke and haze.

  “It’s good to be infantry,” said the sergeant major as he and Makneil fell back to their next position—an inner office designed as a final bunker before access to the bank was granted. Covering behind concrete slabs that had been installed as barriers against the long-lost days when pirate merchant princes had blasted off with an entire planet’s worth of cash and gems in their old pirate junks.

  The Golden Age of Intergalactic Piracy, someone had once called it.

  “Infantry seems like a pretty lousy place to be this afternoon if you ask me, Sergeant Major.”

  “Nah,” said the old NCO with a wry smile. “My ex digs scars.”

  On the other side of this, he wanted to look her up. Maybe say he was sorry. Maybe get another chance.

  Or just show her his new scar and see where things went.

  28

  The Wild Man

  Hilltop District

  The streets were empty and desolate. At least between the major battles and the smaller flanking skirmishes of both opposing sides, Savage and Coalition. Everything the Wild Man looked at appeared haunted, abandoned. Weeks earlier this had been a thriving metropolis of close to ten million.

  Now it was lonely and forsaken.

  It reminded him of Stendahl.

  After the big battles the local militia had lost against the Savages that had come out of the skies one rainy night.

  In the weeks after the street fighting, back on Stendahl, the world that didn’t exist on the stellar shipping lanes anymore, the Savage haulers and heavy cargo lifters came in, carried off their stolen booty—looted wealth, plundered food, and loaded newfound slaves. The world became emptier and emptier by the day.

  The Savages set up massive detention camps beyond the limits of the burning cities, remarkable in their sudden appearance and horrifying in their purpose. What few remaining forces of Stendahl’s government-in-exile tried to retake those locations through guerilla raids, often joined by bands of local militia made up of crazed family members or grief-stricken survivors willing to do anything on the chance that just maybe, possibly, their relatives might be in the next camp. Might still be alive.

  Storming the wire at night had been standard operating procedure in those last moments. Doomsday klaxons and bone-white searchlights from the big ships winding up as the Savage marines reacted to the incursion. Their reaction… was to leave. To herd the desperate and captured aboard as the militia came through the wire in force. Then those heavy lifters and cargo ships, under fire and full of newfound slaves, climbed up into the night and disappeared forever. Taking lost family members with them.

  He always told himself they’d been killed.

  That they hadn’t been taken.

  That they’d been murdered by the Savages.

  But here, in the silent quarters of ruined New Vega, where he’d come to fight the Savages once again, he wondered. Was that really true? Had they died in the fire that swept their township? Or had they, too, been taken up in the big lifters, burning for rendezvous with the Savage hulk? Hauling out of orbit and making for the dark between stars.

  Lost forever now. Lost.

  He wondered about wife and baby.

  It’s got to be that way, he thought as he ran along the empty street and under a shadowy arcade that must once have been filled with shoppers and tourists coming to the gem of this sector to see the latest shows and attractions, spending their vacations and accumulated wealth on a day they were supposed to remember for all the rest. Behind windows, smashed and un-smashed, lay all the luxury goods anyone could ever want.

  The Wild Man stopped suddenly and listened to the yawning silence that hung across this section of the city.

  In the distance more Savage artillery left the gun tubes. A moment later it fell somewhere to the rear, on what must be the Coalition lines, because there was no one else. Except him.

  Tall buildings rose up from wide sprawling blocks of commerce and prestige in the streets ahead. Grand palaces of business towered over opulent hotels and once-optimistic design and advertising firms. Farther down the street one of these proud buildings had collapsed into the street, forming a great frozen wave of debris and wild beams.

  Coalition interceptors streaked through the sky overhead. Tearing the air to atoms as they ripped across the heights of the tall towers.

  They’ll come in soon to hit their targets, he told himself. They’re just takin’ a high-altitude peek before they make their attack runs.

  He’d seen it all before.

  Seen it on Stendahl, the home that no longer existed. Seen it in other battles on other worlds where the Savages had come to loot and plunder. Seen it on archival footage of past Savage attacks, going back to what seemed like the dawn of intergalactic space flight. Only it was closer back then. Those short jumps.

  Yes, he’d seen it all. Had seen them. The very real boogeymen who came out of the dark… and carried away…

  Wife and Baby?

  He was moving again. He didn’t want to stay in the shadows of the silent arcade any longer. He needed to do another. Needed to feel her smile once again at what he could do.

  Hear her.

  Do another one, babe.

  He needed to hear that.

  His massive rifle was held at port arms as he stuck close to the sides of the tall silent brooding buildings, making his way toward the fringes of the big conflict shaping up at a triangle of open space. From atop his lofty perch, raining down single-shot death on the Savages that had the misfortune to enter the world of the scope mounted on the big rifle, he’d spotted that big empty triangle within the packed urban sprawl. An open grand plaza kind of space that Stendahl had never had the chance to getting around to developing. That lost colony world had been too new in the grand scheme of things. Everything had been utilitarian.

  Stendahl had been a hard world.

  But that triangle, grand as it was, was where the big fight was going to go down between the Savages and the Coalition. Both sides, whether they knew it or not, were committing everything to that small space. You just had to have a bird’s-eye view to see it
and to know what was coming from both sides. Like two storm fronts on the local weather radar when it was time to go out and round up the cattle to come in. You could see it all shaping up, and it put a nervous fear in your gut that was kind of electric and exciting at the same time.

  He wondered why the Coalition, with their fighters and orbiting ships, didn’t see it. But maybe they did. Maybe they wanted to have it out right there. Fighting on battlegrounds of their own choosing.

  As he’d picked up the spent brass from around his last hide, he’d also seen the Big Walker, the mech the Savages had deployed at the top of the hill, moving down along the streets, firing smoky barrages of rockets and rounds over the tops of the tallest buildings to land in the Coalition rear. After losing a few fighters, the Coalition had given up trying to take it down. They just took what the beast had to dish out, trusting in attrition to win the day. Two other walkers had also deployed from the belly of the massive Savage hulk, and he was willing to bet that old ship was full of surprises like a carnie show come in to fleece the local rubes on a death-rattle freighter that didn’t look so much like a spaceship as it did a junkyard in loose agreement with itself.

  In the middle of a side street he found a dead UW soldier. Matte-gray body armor. PDB Type 76 blaster rifle. He’d only been dead a few hours. Probably came in with the first wave to breach the no man’s land and either got separated or picked off by a drone. Probably the latter, judging by the look of the man’s torn-open abdomen.

  Despite the fresh gore turning putrid in the late afternoon heat, the Wild Man stripped the body of what gear he could find. Mainly rations. Someone had taken the charge packs for the rifle and whatever explosives the man had carried. But he did find the comm that attached the dead soldier’s helmet, and he quickly stripped that out too.

  He could hear unit chatter, tinny and small, still being exchanged.

  Might be good to know what’s going on, he thought to himself as he finished up.

  He looked around watchfully, guilty almost, then left the dead man in the street and headed off once more toward the battle.