Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars

by Jason Anspach

  Whatever it was, it was coming toward him.

  The Troll was on its way.

  And now he saw it.

  Thermal overlays within his HUD showed him a tall inverted triangle with two massive multi-barrel weapons forming armlike appendages. Working its way through the massive space inside the ancient starship to arrive at the target it had sensed within its designated patrol.

  Rechs began high-crawling across the bodies of the Savages.

  Another blur of low electrical snaps rang out, short, sharp, and hissing. More angry bees smashed into the ruined plastic partitions, even shattering some in great sheets that caved in across his path.

  Rechs popped a frag and bounced it back in the direction from which he’d come. Not to hit the sentry system, but to get it to target and fire. Which it did. Both of its arms spun up with five heavy barrels apiece and decimated that section of the lab in a sudden blur of destruction. The air it was firing into shimmered as its very fabric was ripped apart from the effect of so many rounds passing through at relativistic speeds. Ricochets and stray rounds were rebounding and smacking into other smashed areas of the lab.

  The grenade went off and Rechs popped up and dumped the whole pack from the pulse rifle into the automated sentry robot. The Troll. Watching as his fire was harmlessly deflected and sent off in other directions.

  Without a pause in its firing, the robot swiveled on its creaky treads and waved its spitting destruction all across the area where Rechs was standing. He had no other option, no other cover, than to activate his armor’s defensive bubble. A technology that had defied his ability to understand it. It survived everything, for sometimes upwards of forty-five seconds. And, once, even a nuclear blast.

  But since then… it would also collapse without warning.

  So…

  You never knew.

  Rechs hoped it would handle whatever the death-spitting automated sentry was throwing at him. And if it did, that was only half the battle. He still had to figure out what to do after it disappeared—without warning, as always.

  The wave of swarming death covered the ball of translucent defensive energy that suddenly erupted from Rechs’s armor. He didn’t waste time. He ran deeper into the lab, the death machine hissing out its litany of angry swarming bees after him, smashing to pieces everything that stood in their way. Desperate to catch up to their target.

  Just as he passed out of view of the Troll, the bubble capriciously failed.

  Ten seconds. If that.

  Truth was, the devices inside his armor had been acting up more and more often as of late. Who knew how much longer the armor would even work? And in time, someone would invent something better.

  He swapped in a new charge pack as he hugged wall, then let his pulse rifle fall on its sling carry. He pulled the hand cannon and moved deeper into the ruined lab as the thing came for him, smashing barriers with volcanoes of fire. Hopefully there wasn’t a second Troll active farther in.

  Project Telos.

  The project title was stamped into a door. A vault door.

  “Must be the place,” muttered Rechs.

  Several other such doors lined this wide, clean, vaulted section of the lab. Each had its own enigmatic project title. This must have been the hub for New Vega’s most secret R&D. The big tech leaps and doomsday machines every civilization Rechs had ever known eventually got around to playing with.

  The important stuff, or so they thought before they started using it to annihilate one another.

  The machine was coming closer.

  Rechs told the armor to call up an image off its feed of the bot. “Predict weak points. Last target,” he growled into the armor’s system commands.

  A replay of the last action taken against the bot spun past his eyes in a corner of the HUD. Every shot against it was calculated and graphed. Sensor overlays swam across the bot. All this was automatic. Rechs had learned not to pay too much attention when the armor started its quantum voodoo. The lunatics who’d designed the thing had touched the various essence of the unknown and had come back with something that wasn’t supposed to exist.

  Go figure.

  But then again, you probably shouldn’t, because, as had been explained to him by a very smart woman once…

  That way lies madness, Rechs.

  She always called you Rechs.

  Didn’t she?

  Reina.

  He powered up the armor’s cybernetic interface to full, knowing he’d blow twenty-five percent of his available power doing what needed to be done next. But there was no time left for anything else.

  The killing machine was coming.

  He grabbed the vault wheel, ignoring the security-code entry request flashing holographically on emergency reserve, and yanked with all the armor’s might.

  The door came off its massive bolted hinges. Just a bit. He shifted position, still holding the hand cannon, pushed into the bent section of the vault door, and folded it away from its titanium frame. When enough of an entrance had been forced, he squeezed through.

  Target Analysis Complete, the HUD informed him.

  The image of the bot expanded, showing Rechs where vulnerabilities in the Troll might exist.

  Might.

  Optical sensors.

  Main power plant.

  Both were tagged as possible targets.

  No sooner had Rechs slipped inside than the Troll revealed itself to have a few surprises of its own. Twin rockets screamed toward the vault door without warning, blowing Rechs into the side wall of the pristine clean room for the Telos Project.

  As Rechs was thrown through the air, he spotted what had to be the experimental hypercomm device on a backlit pedestal at the rear of the lab. Behind another safety partition. It had to be the device, because it was illuminated reverently, like some holy relic.

  That was the thought he had as he smashed helmet-first into the wall, slamming hard to the ground and then rolling onto his back, leaning against the wall he’d just struck in a daze.

  A moment later the massive form of the sentry bot, its triangular body the primal shape of all the dark devils that had ever plagued mankind, filled the now gaping vault doorway with its shadow.

  In Rechs’s HUD, the analyzed potentially vulnerable target areas were tagged.

  Rechs raised his massive hand cannon and fired on full auto, the armor stabilizing his gauntleted aim. Powerful depleted-uranium fifty-caliber slugs smashed into the machine’s power plant located at the bottom of the triangle.

  The Troll exploded, sending shards of metal and fragments of circuitry in every direction, devastating a large section of the lab. And leaving a hot burning metal fragment in Rechs’s thigh as a parting gift.

  52

  After Rechs went down the well inside the buried starship, Sergeant Major Andres had taken charge, setting up firing positions and getting everyone settled to wait for however long it took the “colonel” to come back up. Food and water were broken out and consumed in pairs, with one person watching and the other eating.

  It was Martin, paired up with the sergeant major, and checking the dressing on his wound, who spotted movement in the green light of night vision. “Someone’s coming,” he whispered over comm.

  “Where?” asked Greenhill.

  “From the left… corridors leading off the office spaces we just came through.”

  The team hastily shifted position. Reorienting itself to the newly spotted threat and watching their flanks in case it was a feint.

  “I don’t see nothing,” said Makaffie. “Just dark.”

  “There was some kind of electronic distortion. A blue flash of light for just a second…” Martin paused, searching around the exact location he’d seen movement. “Now more of ’em on the right. Two teams. Bounding overwatch.”

  “I see them now,” said de M
acha. “They do not seem to see us, though, no?”

  What was coming, or rather who was coming, wasn’t totally invisible. The team’s NVGs could see the distortion of a human shape refracting light and bending it away from itself. Crouched low and moving like a soldier. Holding an assault rifle.

  Martin nodded, though no one could have seen the motion. “Yeah. Looks like a scout from each side. Picking up more distortion to the rear, so there could be squads behind the points, following them in.”

  “Got ’em,” said the sergeant major. “Coming right at us. Get ready and wait for the main body. Then open up on my fire.”

  He got confirm clicks as the Savages moved forward in teams of two like the shadowy images of forgotten ghosts.

  “They’re pros,” observed Martin in a whisper. “That’s for sure. And they move in twos like they were trained aboard ships. Fighting in tight quarters.”

  “They’re Savages,” said Davis. “All they’ve ever known are ships.”

  That was when the sergeant major opened up on them, steadying his rifle on a trash receptacle he’d turned over earlier for cover. Pulse fire raced out across the dark like hot streaks of lightning in the green wash of night vision. One of the shapes went down, and as it did, it suddenly materialized into full visibility. It was like… like a shrouded mummy augmented by a chassis of metal.

  “Some sort of cybernetic interface rig!” shouted Davis as she cut loose with a burst on the team closing on the right. She thought she hit one, but she didn’t get any solid knockdowns.

  Captain de Macha fired, hit one, and yelled, “Got one!” As a tanker, he was used to communicating with a team when he fired. Davis, a navy captain, was much the same. The other soldiers worked their weapons in near silence, only speaking to alert their teammates that they were swapping out charge packs.

  Makaffie fired a blaster pistol he’d picked up before leaving the Chang, swore something at the incoming wraiths, and flung a grenade he’d probably forgotten to pull the pin on. It hit one of them and bounced around without exploding. The one it hit stopped, examined what had been flung at it in the middle of the barrage of fire, and caught a full burst in the torso from Greenhill.

  Nearby the Wild Man cracked off a shot at close range with his big cannon rifle. But down here, in almost pitch black, and with no NVG interface for his scope, the powerful weapon was all but useless.

  They could hear the electronic chitter of some kind of comm system on ambient. It made the Savages sound like a swarm of angry dub-step locusts raging at one another about how they were going to kill their prey. But it also sounded almost human at moments. As though if you only could have slowed it down, you might have understood what was being communicated. If you’d once spoken every language Earth had ever known.

  Captain de Macha got hit by return fire coming in from the Savages. He doubled over and croaked, “Hit…” in obvious pain.

  Keeping low, the sergeant major left his weapon, pulled his sidearm, and fired back at the Savages as he and Makaffie moved quickly to de Macha’s position.

  “Got one in the leg!” shouted a hyper Makaffie. He switched from his pistol to the pulse rifle he’d been carrying and started firing back with psychotic abandon.

  “Is it bad?” asked de Macha, who had rolled over onto his back.

  “Nah,” Andres said. “Got you in the meat of the quad. Bet it hurts like a bastard, though. Checkin’ the artery now… it looks good, Captain.”

  Fire continued to come in hot and fast, ricocheting off the railing of the well they were covering in front of.

  “Need a new pack!” shouted Makaffie as he ejected an empty. Evidently he’d spent all his. Or perhaps he simply didn’t know where they were.

  De Macha groaned, fished one out of the LCE on his chest, and handed it up as the sergeant major set to work on the wound. Above them the Wild Man stood tall, blazing away intermittently at any Savages that dared to come close. He may not have been able to aim, but the fearsome roar of the weapon alone was enough to keep them back for the moment needed to attend to de Macha’s injuries.

  “All right!” shouted Makaffie. “Yer good people, Cap’n!” Then he was cutting loose again.

  The sergeant major worked a self-adhesive smart tourniquet over the wound and activated the system. Without asking, he injected the captain with some Chill. “You’re good to go, sir. Stay on the ground and provide cover,” he said, handing the captain his rifle.

  The firefight had gone wild, and it was looking like they’d set up in a bad place. Nowhere to fall back, and backs against the well deep inside the ship. Greenhill and Davis on the right got rushed. Davis was firing toward center, chasing a mover who kept shifting from desk to desk back in the main room, when Greenhill burned through a heavy charge pack on a cluster getting ready to move up on them. In that same instant an explosive was tossed and rolled right at them.

  “Grenade!” shouted Greenhill as he let go of the heavy rifle’s sling, stepped forward, and kicked the fragger off in another direction. A near-unseen blur tackled him with all the force a truck, sending him crashing down hard, his weapon pinned between himself and the attacker. The two grappled for control.

  It was like wrestling with an invisible man. And a strong one at that. Both of Greenhill’s hands were controlled by the powerful figure, so he tried to slam his helmet into what he thought might be the invisible opponent’s head. But he missed, and the figure slowly moved him back to the edge of the balcony and bent him backward over the void.

  Greenhill felt his helmet slipping from the back of his head, felt his shoulders threatening to dip down as they inched away from the stabilizing balcony rail. It was a long fall to the bottom.

  “Need help?” asked Davis as she engaged more. Still busy acquiring targets, not realizing how dire Greenhill’s position was. The Savages were closing in groups, firing from cover but unable to get a good angle on the defenders because of all the obstacles and partitions in the divvied-up office space.

  “Grrggghhh!” grunted Greenhill as the invisible warrior lifted him up into the air.

  He knew in the next instant the Savage was going to throw him over the edge. He slammed his knee into the thing’s midsection, hoping it had a groin. And though the Savage didn’t so much as flinch, its stealth tech faded slightly. Greenhill could for the first time make out the shape of his assailant.

  Captain Davis let go of her primary, pulled her secondary, and capped two rounds in the soldier’s head. The first round splashed brain matter out over the dark void of the well and shut off the thing’s stealth camo completely. The second round was for good measure.

  The dead Savage let go of Greenhill, who tumbled over the balcony railing, screaming.

  Davis only barely caught him by his LCE.

  Still, Greenhill was much larger and heavier, and in the next instant they were both being pulled down by covetous gravity with the very real possibility of going over together. Greenhill folded his legs at the same time that Davis kicked off from the balcony rail, and they both ended up rolling onto the floor in the middle of the hectic firefight.

  Two Savages crouch-ran forward, light bending and refracting off their armor in the green of night vision. And then the barrel of a wicked subcompact machine gun was pressing against Greenhill’s dark, sweaty cheek. Another was against Captain Davis’s midsection.

  One Savage chittered frenetically. Electronically. Like several languages saying the same word over and over.

  “Kōfuku!”

  “Uppgjöf!”

  “Surrender!”

  “Aistislam!”

  “Kapituliacyja!”

  And then something that sounded like a long string of ones and zeroes spat out a high speed.

  More Savages rushed forward, charging through the gaps in the defenders’ firing lines now that Greenhill and Davis were down and gathering them
selves. They chittered electronically at one another in their strange mishmash of ancient languages. Their active camo was switching off, revealing Savages like the blue they’d put down beside the shuttle aboveground.

  Martin swore, never ceasing to fire. “No surrender!”

  Savages went down at point blank. Wild Man shot one in the gut, and it doubled over, its intestines blown away in a dark spray. Makaffie tore another to shreds by rushing forward and pulling the trigger on every shot in his charge pack until the thing was dead by multiple ventilations.

  But those who had pushed through on the right flank aimed their weapons at Greenhill and Davis. The one covering Greenhill screamed for the team to put their weapons down. It spoke like no normal human spoke, and in twenty different languages, but its meaning was clear: some of them, or all of them, were coming back as prisoners, and continued fighting meant the deaths of Davis and Greenhill.

  And then, from behind them, came a great roar. Rockets flaring, Rechs shot up from the depths of the well and hovered there, jump jets burning blue flame. He was holding a clamshell case and his hand cannon. And he was already firing at the Savages even as he hung in midair.

  The first shot from the powerful sidearm vaped the head of the Savage covering Captain Davis. The next two smashed into the rising chest of the one covering Greenhill.

  Rechs bumped his jets and landed on the floor, forward of the team, firing into the Savages, who were now fleeing into the darkness. Their rush to take prisoners had cost them too many casualties to stand up to this new wave, this one-man reinforcement.

  The Savages switched on their stealth tech again, but their active camo didn’t deceive Rechs’s HUD. He could see them plain as day and didn’t waste time putting rounds in every one he could draw a bead on. The fifty-caliber slugs shot straight through the flimsy office workspace obstacles they tried to cover behind. Only a few Savages made it out of there alive.

  In the silence that followed, Rechs walked over to Captain Davis. She was lying on her back, breathing heavily, her face pale and sweaty.

  Rechs pulled her to her feet. “You okay?”