That had been an awesome sight.
Seeing those eight bat-winged bombers, among United Worlds’s most iconic war machines, sweeping in over the city at low altitude. And then beginning to drop.
Awesome… and terrible. A holdover from the old shock-and-awe glory days.
The colonel felt hard concrete steps underneath him, but he could see nothing. Just dark.
He felt for his battle board and activated the beam. Suddenly the stairwell was bathed in harsh white light. Dust swirling this way and that. Each mote a world. Surrounded by all the worlds the galaxy had to offer.
Distantly he heard alarm bells ringing. He wondered if that was just his ears. If his eardrums had been ruptured by the massive concussion effects and barometric drops that accompanied the fabled Alpha Strike the Titans had devastated other cities and worlds with.
He got to his knees and tried to stand.
The stairs above the one he was lying on had been damaged, but had not collapsed fully. Cracks showed ominously in the pristine white concrete. They had almost been crushed.
But he could stand. He had balance. He wasn’t dizzy. His eardrums hadn’t ruptured.
“Specialist Martin!” croaked the colonel as he waved his arms through the sea of floating dust.
Nothing.
“Martin!” barked the colonel hoarsely. His voice cracking as dust swam and swam with seemingly no place to go but around him while those distant alarm bells kept ringing as though someone would respond shortly and come to help. But he knew that would never happen.
He swept his hand from side to side to clear away more dust.
He saw the blood, mixing and congealing with the silty dust that powdered everything like an alabaster covering.
And he saw the source of the blood lying halfway down the stairs.
Moving cautiously, unsure how stable everything really was, he reached the kid. Martin wasn’t dead, but he’d taken a pretty good knock to the head. Maybe a concussion. Maybe a fracture.
The colonel sat down and thought about where he was. What the situation was. The ringing kept on, unabated.
The sergeant major sounded on the comm again.
“Sound off if you’re there.”
Then…
“Here, Sarge. Bryans.”
“Copy. Tark here. Got Sutton and Willis. Willis is hurt bad. Think his back is broke.”
“Norris here. Can’t find the rest of my team. Sixteenth floor.”
A few others. But nowhere near the entire team. Not at all.
Martin groaned.
If he threw up, it was a concussion. If he couldn’t see straight, it was a fracture. Maybe.
The colonel thought he’d see how good the kid did before he made an issue out of it.
Then he tapped his comm.
“Marks here. Twentieth. Sergeant Major, can you raise comm with Doghouse?”
Silence. Not just over comm. But everywhere out over the city. Except for those alarm bells that were still ringing in the distance. And those were always there—had always been there, in all the other wars and disasters he’d been through. Alarms crying out like they’d gone mad at the injustice of all the destruction that had suddenly come without warning.
But only after the fact.
Funny, you never heard them when it was rap and slap, run and gun. Only after, when you could see the dead bodies in the street. When the fighting was either over or on hold, as both sides caught their breath and prepared to come at each other once again.
“Uh… that’s a negative, sir,” replied Andres. “No contact with higher elements at this time. Not even the ships on the net. Thinking—hoping—maybe we just have squad comms. But from what I can see of the street, sir… uh, we might be the only ones left.”
Someone had messed up. That was for sure.
And the colonel had a pretty good idea who.
36
The Wild Man
Near Triangle Square
He’d been firing into the Savage lines along the complexes that lined the opposite side of the Triangle. Target-rich environment over there.
To say the least.
The fighting had wound up into a full-tilt, no-holds-barred battle royale for all the marbles in the moments before the Titans arrived overhead.
He’d taken up a position on the eighteenth floor of an office building that seemed to be the kind of place he and his wife had watched in one of the entertainments. A show about beautiful and successful people, lawyers, who worked in just such an office. They were always slapping each other and then kissing. A lot of crying too.
They’d watched those. She’d liked them. It was like peeking into a different world. Not the little stead they kept on the edges of Stendahl.
“Do you think that’s what the big cities on the top worlds are like?” she would ask him sometimes.
This office he was shooting from was that kind of place. The kind of place they, those people in the entertainments, would have worked in. Slapped in. Kissed in. Cried in.
Lived in.
That was what the entertainments made you think life was. Slapping, kissing, and crying.
In hindsight, he’d thought as he made his way with his big rifle up through the silent levels of the lifeless place, they might not have been so wrong. Maybe that was what life was supposed to be. Instead of killing each other.
Maybe.
The Wild Man landed the scope on a Savage hunkered in the ruin of a luxury tower across the way. The thing had some type of advanced tricky binoculars. A spotter of some sort.
Sure. Maybe life was something else. But not here.
Not today.
He blew the Savage’s head off. Thinning the population.
They’d stopped being human a long time ago. They were nothing but animals now. Pure and simple. Predators come in to prey on the herds.
He found another, because that’s what she wanted.
“You smilin’, babe?” he asked the quietly carpeted luxurious office he was firing from. A place they’d probably done all those kissing, crying, slapping things in. People who were now either dead, or…
He was shooting from well back near the wall, against the central elevator core. Almost in the hall. Just picking targets out between the desks and narrow spaces that opened up onto the Savage lines below and across the Triangle. One after the other.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Like some song perpetually on the edge of beginning the backbeat. The rhythm. The chorus line. The chord change. All that stuff that would never be.
BOOM.
He didn’t even hear the bombers come streaking in over the skyline. Vapor contrails rolling out aft of their howling engines.
He did see one of the United Worlds interceptors streak down the broad main street where everyone was fighting. Twin engines burning like a screaming banshee. Howling like one too.
That moment filled him with something.
Like…
Like he wasn’t alone, fighting these Savages all by himself. Which was what he’d been since Stendahl. Alone. Fighting. Killing them one at a time from range.
But now, here, with UW and whoever else throwing in on this, swarming the Savages together… he wasn’t alone. Even if they didn’t know he was here helping them.
He was helping them.
And they were helping him to kill all the Savages.
All of them.
And then what, babe? What’re you gonna do once they’re all gone?
“I don’t know,” he whispered as he sought another target.
Go there… he thought. Where you are.
He heard the incoming Titan bombers. But he’d never witnessed the fabled machines in action. So he had no idea that the hurricane of engines rolling in from the
south was about to devastate the city.
He found another Savage.
Took a breath.
Began to let go…
Boom.
This one had time to die.
It knew it. It sat down. Massive hole in its gut. And it looked up at the sky with its faceless helmet as the whistling sky-screams from the east, far down Grand Avenue in the low quarters of New Vega City, began to drop.
No boom here.
But colossal, titanic, whumps that successively hammered the world instead.
It was a badly timed chorus of monster whumps.
And then the secondary explosions.
They rocked the building he was in, and it felt, as he lifted his chin away from the stock of the massive rifle, that some great beast of justice, some monster as old as the galaxy itself, had had enough of humanity’s galactic insanity, and had finally come to dispense a verdict.
Like it was walking across the planet toward all the killing at Ground Zero. Intent on killing everything once and for all.
The Wild Man always used ear protection. His rifle was like a small cannon. The ear protection always helped him. Helped him to hear her in those moments after…
Do another one, babe.
So when the first GeeBee powered up to boost and drove itself down into the side of Hilltop District and then exploded skyward throwing the barometric pressure all out of whack along with several blocks of buildings in every direction… well, he didn’t go deaf.
The glass in the office window concussed inward as the building literally bent like a dandelion stalk in a strong wind. And he began to slide down the polished floor he’d been firing from.
Everything groaned. The superstructure of the building. The walls. Even the air, if that was possible. And for one brief unreal stomach-turning giddy second in which death seemed inevitable…
We’re here, babe. Come along now.
He was looking at the last of the afternoon sky out the same window that had moments before been staring into the Savage lines across the broad street. The building had swayed that far back.
He saw interceptors tearing off and away.
Titans on fire and going down.
One hit along her portside wing and going in.
A daisy chain of explosions rising out toward that massive, almost alien colony ship, hugging the side of the hill south of the battle.
Other buildings simply snapped and fell in on themselves or were blown to disintegrating bits in seconds. Hurtling out across the district. Orange blossoms of fire engulfed the street below and rose up to clutch at the sides of the surviving skyscrapers.
And then the Wild Man’s office building began to swing back the other way and he was sure, as he slid across the marble, clutching his rifle, and only the rifle, as he rolled end over end for the smashed window he was headed for, that the whole kissing-crying-slapping building would go over as he went down and out of it. Falling on top of him as he went.
He was sure of that in that seeming last of all moments.
Fine, he swore at the galaxy.
At the Savages.
I hope I crush them all.
That was his thought as it felt like the building was about to go over on its side.
But it didn’t.
It leaned. Wickedly so. Like it should go over. Like that was inevitable and there could be no other possible outcome. But it didn’t. Glass shattered and popped loose from gigantic captains-of-industry-sized panes. Furniture slid and whole office partitions collapsed.
But it didn’t go over.
And he didn’t slide out of it.
Not quite.
He got to his knees in the aftermath.
Things smashed all around him, filling the floors above and below with the sounds of things falling and slamming into one another. He heard the central core columns groaning like the spars of ancient ships. As though the very fibers that kept the building upright at even this crazy angle were ready to let go and slowly bend and break one by one.
Below there were explosions, but small ones. Black smoke filled the windows an instant later. Puffing and breathing like the belly of some great beast from the forgotten nether of the galaxy. Like something from a fairy tale meant to terrify wicked children. Something that came to take away the innocent forever. Something heroes fought and died for. Were summoned, sent for, and called to the stage for this moment and time.
There had always been a good-looking hero in the entertainments she watched. Someone not him.
“Aagh!” he groaned as he got to his feet. “I’m no hero.”
He pulled himself along the wall into the inner parts of the building.
“And I’m not dead yet, babe,” he whispered hoarsely, if only to remind himself of what was true and known.
He pulled his canteen and drank as he leaned against a leaning wall, unable to remember when he had last done so. He spared a glance out the window, now facing ominously downward. Twilight was coming. The day was done, and whatever had happened out there had ruined everyone’s plans.
“Not dead yet,” he rasped again.
No, babe. Not yet. But we’re waiting… when it’s time.
Do another one.
***
When he reached the streets below, he saw the dead. Or what remained of them. He saw tanks, full-sized Sentinels that had been tossed onto their sides like children’s discarded toys. Ash rained down from above like gently falling snow. Alarms rang out from every shattered building. As though screaming at the injustice of all that had happened.
Savage corpses were mixed in with the UW dead and all the dead of all the other military units. Many of them had been burned alive or blasted into fragments that could never possibly be reassembled.
He saw one Savage, missing its lower half, crawling through the falling ash snow. Leaving a trail in the bare scrim starting to gather on the blackened street. It was crawling back toward the mother ship that had brought it here.
It’s going home, he thought.
He’d unloaded the big rifle for the treacherous trek down the building’s twisted and bent stairwell. He’d slung it to crawl, hand over hand, along collapsed stairs that had become nothing but traitorous handholds, some of the shards of glass that had raked his body when the windows blew inward still lodged where they had struck. The blood had run down his arms and dripped into his eyes.
The Savage crawling away from him now wasn’t bleeding.
Not like us.
But it was trailing some sort of… slick mechanical-smelling fluid.
He unslung his rifle and pulled a massive round off his vest. He thumbed it into the breech as he walked toward the wounded Savage. His boots raised clouds of new ash. Crushed broken glass as he slowly closed the distance.
Not like us.
Not at all.
Do another one, babe.
He turned.
She was standing there with baby on her hip. Wearing that red Saturday-night dress. An apron. Her red hair and blue eyes always on the edge of bitter contempt and smoky lust.
“I can’t tell if you hate me, or like me,” he’d once said to her early on.
She’d laughed and told him there was a fine line between the two.
The ash was raining down on them. But passing through like they weren’t even there.
And right at that moment he just wanted to eat the barrel of his own weapon and go to where they were.
But she wasn’t smiling.
She only smiled when he did another one.
She was waiting.
And that smile… that smile had been everything to him. He’d move mountains for that smile.
He turned back to the crawling half-Savage.
The sky ripped in two as a group of starships came screaming in above the colony shi
p. Fast and hot, the clouds and smoke suddenly folding around them and their wakes, then flinging themselves out and away into nothing at the tremendous weight of ionic thrust.
Stunned by this sudden return to reality, the Wild Man stared skyward with his mouth open.
A fleet.
A fleet is what he would have called it.
Come to save New Vega. Come to smite the Savage ship.
All the ships high above him in the last of that fiery day bore down on the beached whale of a Savage hulk that was easily more massive than them all. Put together even. All of them.
Missile trails, smoking and sidewinding, were already racing down to hit the stranded monster ship that had come to ruin this world.
But that was their business.
Do another one, babe.
This was his.
He raised the rifle and targeted the crawling Savage that had been torn in half and had gone on living despite that. Dragging itself home like every wounded animal ever had since time began. Trailing little bits of machine and armor and oil. Little bits of itself.
Like no living thing.
The shot rang out across the empty ruined city. Its sound echoed and bounced from one wall to the next. As though looking for one other last living survivor to believe it. And then it faded out into nothing, because it had found no one.
The Savage’s head had disappeared in a black spray of ruined armor and misty brain.
Like no living thing that was ever human.
He turned back to see her…
To show her what he’d done for her.
To see the smile.
He didn’t see it. She was gone. There was only that ash falling as the massive battle began in the skies above.
Yet despite the end of that world, of everything…
He felt her smiling.
And to him… that was everything.
The End of the Way Things Were
Carrier Defiant
Task Force Wrath
Admiral Sulla was most concerned with fleet formation and positioning when they emerged from jump in the atmosphere over New Vega City. Quantum boost signal coupling had negated the early catastrophic errors that had plagued fleet ops of this type, but Sulla had been flying long enough to maintain a healthy fear of the horrors of formation jumping.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 16