Rechs knew that despite his armor’s heavy-duty ability to stand up to just about anything thrown at it, it enabled him to move with absolute stealth. As they began their slow descent, his feet made as much noise as a cat’s paw. And his breathing was utterly silent, each exhalation masked behind his full-cover helmet, all noise kept away from outside ears.
But the others, Rechs could hear. They weren’t being loud, but in so much stillness, so much empty dark silence, the only way to be completely quiet was to stop moving—or be Tyrus Rechs.
“Hold,” Rechs said over the comm.
Everyone froze.
They’d gone down two levels and Rechs didn’t know if anyone else could see what he’d seen. His HUD had picked up the heat signatures in the dark. And at the instant the team froze, so did whatever was in front of them.
“Eight of them,” Rechs said. Wan light from sources still running off subterranean power illuminated some of the lower walkways, and Rechs’s HUD fed him the data it acquired. “Reinforced neoprene suits—light armor. Armed.”
“New Vega military operating down here?” whispered Sergeant Major Andres.
“Negative.” Rechs had irised in with his armor’s enhanced vision. “Savages.”
“Then they’re hunters,” said Captain Davis. “A subspecies of the marines you faced on the surface. More like animals than humans. Guard dogs.”
And indeed, the troop of eight started forward like a pack, cautiously, as though sensing the intruders’ presence in the bare movement of air down here. They didn’t walk like humans. They didn’t walk at all. Instead they pulled themselves forward on arms and hands where their legs and feet should have been. Four arms in total. Two for locomotion, and two—the ones where you’d expect them to be—holding their rifles.
“What the…” began Makaffie as he stared hard into his NVGs. “They look like morlocks.” His voice seeming loud in the quiet silence of the cavern here at sub-level five.
And perhaps it was loud. Loud enough for the Savage beast-man-things in any case. Because the troop went suddenly wild. Hooting like monkeys and flinging themselves in all directions. It was clear they knew there was someone else in the dark with them.
The leader, bigger than the others, raised up, lengthening its spine in a way no human ever would, and scented the air. Then it howled in something that might have once been one of the many languages of mankind but which now sounded much more… animal. Holding its rifle in one hand, it pointed a necrotic white figure at the team on the stairs high above.
Wild Man reacted fast, firing a shot from his massive rifle that smashed into the beast and sent it tumbling. The boom in the confined space was deafening, and seemed to set the pack on edge, drowning out their howls until its noise dispersed up and down the stairwell in successive echoes.
The hunters came swarming up the stairs, eschewing the path meant for a sane and rational mind and climbing instead with the arms, all four of them, up along the railings and pylons like parasites in a feeding frenzy. Their rifles clattered and smacked against the steps, but it seemed the beasts had no interest in using them, intent instead on dispatching the intruders with tooth and claw.
From other unknown spaces within the vast tunnel complex the shrieking hoots of more of the beast-like Savages resounded against the deep concrete walls and descended into cyclopean darkness.
Greenhill engaged and dragged the pulse rife ahead of the closest leaping monkey-like post-human. He shot on target and the thing howled and fell over the guardrail and into the void.
“Fall back to the level above,” ordered Rechs. “We’ll fight from there.”
Andres and Davis covered Greenhill and Makaffie as they retreated, slipping through the narrow portal that led out onto the level. Greenhill ejected the charge pack from his pulse rifle and slapped in another. Makaffie, humping a ruck that seemed three sizes too big for him, flung himself forward with heedless abandon, swearing all the way and apologizing for having drawn attention in the first place. No one responded. They were too busy firing at the closing hunters.
“Martin!” shouted Rechs. The point man was the farthest down the stairs and anchoring the base of return fire. On full auto he was dumping pulse fire in bursts. “Fall back now!”
The point man came to himself, ejected a pack, and ran up the stairs just as a Savage hunter pulled itself over the rail where he stood. Clawed hands reached out greedily to snag his ruck.
That was when Rechs got his first good look at the thing.
Its eyes were of a human taken by madness long ago. But its mouth was pure animal. Fangs, yellow and crooked, dripping bubbly foam. Its white skin took on an almost sickly green cast in the wan light of night vision.
Rechs pulled the trigger of his hand cannon and exploded the thing’s head at five meters. Martin dashed past him. More and more of things were climbing over the rails all around them.
Wild bullet fire chased Rechs up a couple of steps, striking some of the advancing hunters in the process and skipping along the metals steps on either side of Rechs. He barely had time to toss himself around the corner of the next landing to avoid being hit. Popping a frag, he dropped it down the steps below, then pushed Martin farther up. “Move!”
The long-nailed scrabbling of the Savages’ hand-feet clickety-clacked up through the darkness. It sounded like they were many, many more than the initial eight spotted. And who knew? The place was a vast and winding labyrinth. There could have been multiple patrols all within a short distance of one another, prepared to swarm any enemy encountered.
The grenade exploded, blowing Savages and concrete and even some of the stair structure off and out into the void. A vast cavern Rechs couldn’t even see the edges of.
“We’re coming up!” Rechs shouted into his comm. They needed only to cover two more flights of stairs, but the fire from the targeted landing already sounded intense. He didn’t want either of them to get hit coming in.
The swarm of Savage hunters, whatever they’d become, was intensifying. Greenhill, who’d slung a light automatic pulse rifle carried by squad heavy gunners, laid down suppressive fire in intervals as Rechs and Martin squeezed past the door onto the escape level.
Beyond the doorway was a long balcony that ran alongside an open reservoir of dark water. The water was black, the concrete floor gray, and a lone white light somewhere high above gave the whole place an atmosphere of a forsaken gloomy well.
An immense underground cistern.
The rest of the team was already halfway down the balcony’s curving length, running for another security door.
“Fall back, cover fire, reload, and fall back,” ordered Rechs, pointing at Greenhill and Martin. “I’ll go first.”
Greenhill jogged backward, swapping in a new drum charge for the heavier weapon, while Martin sprinted out ahead.
The Savages came swarming through the door, heedless of the automatic weapons they were carrying. Except they didn’t come through the portal like a normal human might—they clutched the corners and pulled themselves around the sides. Rechs was back on his primary, burning pulse shots with economy, sometimes having to pull three more times just to get a particularly fast mover.
Rechs took aim at a hunter darting past the one he’d just dropped. The thing was climbing up the wall, howling like an insane gibbon as it raced along unseen handholds toward the ceiling. They were inhuman in that way, performing animal feats of agility that came from something far removed from their humanity. Rechs hit the thing with pulse fire.
Another Savage hunter took position in the doorway and began firing on full auto down the length of the balcony, forcing Rechs to throw himself into an alcove. Perhaps this one had kept more of its humanity than the others, and remembered the power of the tool in its hands. Bullets whistled past in the darkness. The ancient sound of brass dribbling out onto the dry gray concrete filled the air.
As Rechs swapped a charge pack, he saw Greenhill get grazed along his shoulder. Greenhill let go of his weapon, which dangled from a sling, grabbed at his wounded arm, and stumbled into the cover of another alcove.
Martin was just turning to fire from the top of the landing.
Someone is gonna catch it full on, thought Rechs.
The massive BOOM of the Wild Man’s rifle echoed out over the underground cistern. The Savage firing from the doorway was flung back out of sight, probably right off the landing and into the void beyond.
That gave the rest of the team the time they needed to get their fire and movement coordinated, and moments later they were falling back under covering fire.
The Savages continued to pour through the entrance—raging, charging beasts—and the combined task force Rechs had brought into this complex met their charge with deadly cones of unrelenting pulse fire. Hunters tumbled back, went over the rail, or lay dead where they were hit only to be trampled by those behind them.
“Keep comin’!” shouted Andres, his rifle pausing only long enough for him to swap out charge packs.
The Savage charge failed as the last of them died. The hunters’ high-water mark was halfway down the long curving balcony. The ensuing silence was ominous.
“Climbing past all those bodies,” de Macha said, searching his webbing for a new charge pack, “will be difficult. We must take care not to slip and fall over the rail, my friends.”
“Going back is still the only way?” Rechs asked Davis.
“It was the easy way—”
Greenhill laughed while Makaffie applied field dressings to his wounded arm.
“—but not the only way. We can follow a door on this level to an elevator that will take us close to where the Savages were doing their dig. But that means going through open spaces with lots of visual angles. Lots of exposure.”
The sergeant major made a sound, a sort of grunt as he felt under his chest protection to feel the wounded pectoral he’d suffered earlier in the fighting. “If they’re communicating, and they sure had time to, means we’ll run into more. They’ll be looking for us. Maybe waiting for us to keep on going the way we was starting before we ran into them. But we go this new way, we gonna cut ourselves off if they come up along our back trail.”
“Or,” added Greenhill, “they’ll just cut the elevators off when we try and use ’em. Kill us all.”
Andres nodded. “What’s it gonna be, Colonel? Ain’t no good choice I can see.”
Rechs thought for a moment.
Martin watched their six with the Wild Man.
“Let’s take the elevator ride and hope we get lost near the dig site,” said Rechs. “Chances are they were watching the outer tunnels for infiltrators. We may have gotten through their initial defenses by knocking out their patrol and everything else that came running.”
“Those things sure didn’t look like they’d be using comms,” said Martin over his shoulder. “I bet they were just responding to the howls and noise.”
“I agree with Rechs,” Davis said. “The elevators are the fastest option now that we’ve lost the element of surprise.”
“All due respect, Colonel,” said Sergeant Major Andres, “but all this is a lot of wishful thinking. Sir.”
“Agree, Sergeant Major. But it’s an option forward,” Rechs replied. “And I damn sure ain’t turning back.”
The sergeant major nodded to himself as though that was all he needed. The chance to express his concerns and the indication that they had been noted.
Captain Davis led them to a door with a pop-out keyboard. “Through here and then we’re on our way.”
After a few swift keystrokes, they went through to the darkness on the other side.
49
They moved through a warren of corridors, past rooms both furnished and empty. Rooms that looked like they might once have served some specific purpose—disaster-event temporary housing, emergency medical, or just plain office space. Everything was clean and bare and silent. As though only waiting for someone to come along and refill the space after a sudden crisis.
They found the elevator, and took it down to its lowest level: sub-level seven. A thirty-second ride.
“Be ready to go when you hear the ding,” said Rechs.
The elevator slowed and settled, but wasn’t the type to give a chime. Its doors slid open silently to reveal an open floor space, cavernous like a warehouse but with no racks or shelves. Just… empty.
“This is underwhelming,” said Martin.
“I’d rather that than more of those… things,” replied de Macha.
“Morlocks,” insisted Makaffie. “We should call them morlocks.”
Rechs took a few steps forward. “You’ve been here before, Captain Davis?”
“Yes.” She walked past Rechs, her guard down, as though the idea of encountering trouble was completely out of her mind. “This is what I’d call the last safe area. This place is sort of like two levels in one. It looks down on the level below, like the engineers wanted space for some big equipment to be in here when they were first building. I couldn’t say.”
She paused, several strides ahead of the main force. “You coming?”
Martin hustled forward and took point, creeping across the wide, abandoned warehouse-like floor of polished concrete.
They reached the edge together, and looked down at a vast space with its floor far below. But it was not an empty space, and the structure that filled it was both unexpected and alien. It was immediately clear that over the past few weeks, the Savages had been doing much more down here than simply trying to infiltrate the old colony ship.
They had been… building.
At first it was hard to tell what it was. It was like looking at a series of liquid-filled bubbles stacked in hives and clusters, one atop the other. Stacks and stacks and stacks, several stories high, extending in all directions.
“What… is all that?” asked Sergeant Greenhill. His voice hovered between awe… and something else.
Fear, Rechs thought.
It was one thing to fight the Savages. It was entirely something else to get a glimpse of what happened within their secluded communities. To see what they did when the galaxy wasn’t watching.
No one seemed to have an answer for Greenhill until Makaffie spoke up. He’d almost begun to whistle, long and slow like he had before, but Rechs put his gauntleted hand up, signaling the man to remain quiet. Best not to bring another patrol down on them with no space to retreat into that wasn’t secure.
So Makaffie spoke low and quiet, with quaking disbelief verging on a kind of horror. As though what they were seeing was something beyond the ken of sanity and order.
“It’s… a freezer,” he said. “See ’em inside?”
The task force put their eyes to the scopes of their weapons or looked through ’nocs at the bizarre Savage structure. It was like looking at the eyes of a fly. But magnified to the point that it seemed colossal.
Rechs had seen it too. Probably before Makaffie. His armor’s imaging enhancement had picked up the heat signatures within each tiny bubble. “Not frozen,” he said. “More like some kind of stasis. Dunno how.”
“These more Savvies, Colonel?”
Rechs shook his head. “Humans. Thousands of them.”
“The Savages,” said Captain Davis, “are cannibals. At least the ones from the Nest. I don’t know if the newer arrivals are, too, but the ones who first invaded, the advance force… they are.”
“How do you know that?” asked Makaffie.
She turned sharply on him, but her face was emotionless and her eyes dead.
“I had a crew and complement of twenty-four when we set down here five weeks ago. Now it’s just me. Trust me, grunt, I know.”
“Just asking, lady,” Makaffie said. “Y’know, co
nfirmation of intel. Didn’t expect to get my head bitten off for it.”
And from the look on Davis’s face, she was aware that what she’d tried to bottle up had suddenly slipped out despite her best efforts to bury it.
“Sorry…”
It was a word that didn’t seem to come naturally to her.
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Makaffie smiled. “No offense taken, man. We’re all surfin’ the same wave through the cosmos.”
“My theory,” she said, turning away from the artillery man, her voice controlled and low now, all of them watching the bubbles of humans floating in some kind of greenish fluid over there along the wall, “is that they, the Savages in that ship on the side of Hilltop, had hab problems out there in the dark.”
“All that time,” said de Macha, “and something is bound to go wrong. We were lucky for our tanks to stay together from one battle to the next. Imagine a ship so large for so long…”
Davis nodded. “Maybe they had a population explosion they couldn’t control. And their answer… their answer was to get rid of their bodies. Dial it back to the brains, feed those, and keep going on a minimum of nutrients and calories. So calories must be the driving force of their culture. Their biggest priority, once they finally set down on a planet, is to make sure they have calories to spare.”
She nodded at the bubbles across the way.
“They… might not even be capable of understanding how wrong what they’re doing is. Or that it’s wrong at all, depending on how many generations we’re looking at. Hell, they’ve probably already done this on other planets, to other species we’ve never encountered. They’re eaters. They show up and they eat. To them, this was one big shopping trip. Now they’re icing everyone they can get their hands on, for either the long haul to the next planet or whatever it is they’re going to do here.”
“Hey,” Andres said, squeezing his pulse rifle with both hands. “You think some of the strike force is down there, too?”
“I wouldn’t bet against it.”
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 24