Rechs struggled to his feet. “Pull back and cover me.”
He staggered up and into the vehicle’s driver seat. The ignition card had been left in the start-up slot, and in moments Rechs had gunned the accelerator and sent the big semi toward the subterranean canyon at the side of the tunnel. He leapt out seconds before the cab went through a barrier and over the edge. The hitch and connectors snapped, and with a cry of wrenching metal, the cargo container bent and teetered on the edge as the tractor idled into the abyss.
Rechs picked himself up from the road and stumbled back to the APC with Martin and Greenhill.
“You all right?” asked Martin.
Rechs made a gesture indicating he was.
Makaffie was still holding position from behind the APC door, and he and the turret were engaging targets to the rear. Small bursts now. Nothing sustained. The Savages were being kept back.
“I think I can push through the opening you made for us,” Davis said. “Hurry and get back on.”
They hustled to the sideboards and unconsciously sucked in their stomachs as Davis squeezed the wide APC through the gap behind the dangling trailer now only partially blocking the road.
As they continued on, they encountered still more of the Savage storage racks on the left side. Pantries. Refrigerators. Little rooms crowding the road, waiting to be cross-loaded to the waiting hulk. And now the thousands of stored survivors were surely adding up to tens of thousands.
“Ma’am,” said Sergeant Major Andres. Everyone was listening over the comm as the APC whipped through the darkness of the tunnel. “How many of these… rooms are there?”
She was silent for a moment. Only the bare hiss of the comm and the low menacing hum of the vehicle’s engines could be heard. She was concentrating on the road. Driving into the darkness ahead and following the images laid in front of her by the APC’s sensors. When she spoke, it wasn’t in her command voice. The voice she’d used to run a starship. And it wasn’t in any other voice that she’d used among them yet. The voice that spoke was dead. Devoid of all emotion. Made lifeless by the horrors it had been forced to witness.
“I don’t know,” she said. “My guess is once they’d captured the major population centers, they started filling it from the bottom up. There may even be other storage sites in other smaller cities across New Vega. I’m not sure.”
“They got the whole planet,” Martin said, his voice hot. “Bastards took the entire populace.”
56
Captain Davis brought the APC to a halt when the lights of another vehicle appeared far ahead, shooting out of the darkness of an intersecting tunnel.
“Kill everything,” she ordered. “Go silent.”
It was some kind of utility vehicle local to the New Vega military or police force. And right behind it followed a long line of civilian cargo and delivery trucks.
A convoy.
Savage marines rode on top of the cargo and delivery vehicles, at least two or three per, automatic weapons at the ready, scanning the darkness to the sides of the route as each vehicle crossed the tunnel and disappeared on the other side. If not for Captain Davis’s quick reaction, pulling over and going dark the instant she saw the growing illumination of the lead vehicle’s high beams, they would have been spotted for sure.
“Wonder what that’s all about,” said Sergeant Major Andres over the comm. Whispering in the darkness.
No one said anything because everyone had a pretty good idea what the convoy was all about. Who was in the vehicles and where they were being taken. But it was de Macha, still under the influence of painkillers and Chill, in high doses, who spoke for them all.
“More survivors. Headed to cold storage bubbles. Very sad for them.”
A morose silence passed over the comm net as they waited for the convoy to pass by.
“Each of those trucks must have room for at least twenty… maybe forty of those bastards who lost at hide and seek with the Savvies,” opined Makaffie.
“Losers get eaten,” said Greenhill sullenly.
As they watched, one of the convoy vehicles pulled over to the side of the intersection and slowed to a stop. Other vehicles slowed too, but continued on around.
Two Savage marines were on top of the stopped vehicle, with a driver behind the wheel. A faceless Savage. The driver slid out and began to kick the front of the vehicle where the engine compartment was.
“Breakdown?” whispered Martin as he watched through his pulse rifle’s scope from alongside the APC.
“Must be,” said the sergeant major over the comm. “’Cept what would a Savage who’s lived all his life in a big ship with all kinds of internal automated transport know about fixin’ a ground vehicle?”
“Or how to even drive one?” offered Greenhill.
Now the Savage was tapping the various panels along the front of the truck. Based on the signage, the vehicle had once delivered bread.
In a way, it still did.
“Those ships are big enough to be worlds inside,” said Rechs. “Towns and cities and even roads.”
“Well, if they don’t get it started again, we’ll have to either take them out or find another way around,” said Captain Davis.
Without a word the Wild Man hauled himself to the top of the APC and crawled along its flat roof, dragging his big weapon forward.
***
Before he’d been the Wild Man, before the years of wandering across the worlds and killing Savages wherever he could find them, before all that and all that would come…
He’d just been some man with a name he didn’t want to hear anymore.
But he’d been her man.
And that was enough.
The night the Savages came to Stendahl’s Bet, the local broadcasts were filled with strange reports of settlements going dark, off-line, incommunicado. Strange lights in the sky. Fires and wrecks. Shooting. Things that made no sense in those first few hours. Things that made all the sense in the world once the Wild Man had the endless hours to look back and replay each detail.
They—him, her, and baby—lived in a farming collective out on the edge of civilization. Or what passed for civilization on Stendahl. It was fall when the Savages came out of the sky. Late fall and winter coming on. Evening dark making the vast spaces of that world cold and quiet.
He often wondered if that was why the Savages had attacked then. In fall. When it was cold. Deep space was cold and lightless. Maybe that was what they were used to. Maybe that was what was best for them.
“We got to go into town, baby,” she told him.
They’d been sitting by the sat-caster, listening all day for reports, the few that came through, and the long drone of music-on-demand that filled the in-between times. Waiting for information on what was happening. What could be done. What was true and what was known.
Later in the day, reports of fighting in the bigger cities around Stendahl came in. And then those reports just stopped. And they waited as a cold afternoon turned to early winter evening.
She made tea. Then soup. The baby played on the floor of their stead. They only had so much juice for the generator. The stove in the kitchen and the light from their lamps kept them warm. Or at least, he was warm. She kept folding her arms and saying she was cold. And when the sat-caster network went dead, he took down the big rifle and began to clean it on the kitchen table.
“We should go into town so we can talk to the others,” she said. “Find out what in the world is going on.”
The dark blue of twilight came through their lone kitchen window. He stood and stared out at the silhouette of rolling plains and the few dark shapes of scraggly trees down near the river. They looked like fingers clutching at the winter sky. But the world inside the kitchen was bright, warm, and everything that home was supposed to mean. Death and danger and darkness would never come here. Not pirates, not a
rmies. And certainly not Savages. This world, this tiny world, was the opposite of all that they were.
It was human.
“They’ll want to make a plan for whatever’s happening,” she continued. “Maybe an invasion. One of them confederacies—United Worlds—trying to take us over. And you got skills from your time in the military, baby.”
He’d never told her. She’d just known. And of course there were the scars. But he’d never told her how he got those either.
In this memory she’s not the smoky, cool seductress of death that approves of his killing from high places. She is frightened. She worries her favorite dishtowel between her hands. Pulling it through porcelain fingers.
There is not the Do another one, babe siren of snipers in this real moment inside the kitchen on the edge of night.
Because it is the edge of night in more ways than are understood at this particular moment. A darkness is falling, not just across Stendahl, but across its chances. And across the galaxy. The Savages have finally come in from the outer dark between the stars.
“I wish you’d say something!”
From the floor of the kitchen, the baby gurgles and shakes one of his toys.
Her eyes fall to their child, and she looks back at him as he oils the bolt carrier assembly for the big weapon.
“We have to do something.”
So they do. They dress in their warmest jackets. Fleece and leather. Gloves. The baby bundled in a blanket so cozy you’d think it was protected from all the horrors of the galaxy. And they walk into town. Him carrying the big rifle. Her watching the prairie and the trees. The baby laughing because he knows the world and the galaxy is only this. And that there are no Savages.
In town they hear nothing new. Nothing that hasn’t already chewed at the back of their minds.
But old Varney tells them, “It’s Savages more likely than less. Invaders from another government would’ve been telling us to be peaceable by now.”
“What will we do?” someone asks.
“Fight,” answers the head man all call Varney. “It’s all we can do now. We’re too far out for other worlds to make it in time. Fight together and we might last where others won’t.”
On the long late-night walk home through the dark, they see no strange lights in the distance—until they hear the roar of distant artillery out across the prairie. Or rocket strikes. The air is clear, and the altitude is just right, and so this might be happening hundreds of miles away to the north. Near Gallup, or even Crisco. Where the big mag-railyards are. Where the stock is driven in each season for off-world sale when the big lifters come in.
The night sky changes colors with sudden flashes. White and green mostly. Sometimes the flare of red or almost orange shimmering in waves like the Northern Lights. The Savages are using their strange weapons, and the end of everything has come to Stendahl.
At midnight they reach home and an emergency flash text comes through from the rarely used global network.
She’s putting baby to bed on that last of all homely evenings. He’s started a fire in the fireplace.
He stares at the text.
It’s a notice telling him he’s being recalled to active duty. Report to Paradise City out near Farthing. The army will force an engagement with the Savages and try to save the planet, or at least some of it, from the invaders.
He has never been a man of words. So he just shows her the text and watches as she begins to cry. She cries because he must go. Like Old Varney said, “Fight together.” It’s the only way.
They make love. He wonders if either of them really wants to. But they do.
Because it’s the last time.
The last night.
The fire stocked and wood brought in so she won’t have go out again until daybreak. The baby safe in his crib. This house on the edge of the world is the last safe place in a galaxy descending into madness.
After, her lying in his big arms, tracing the horrible scars he received the last time he was in the army, she says, “You won’t let them take us.”
“No,” he murmurs. Fading. Dreaming of any world for them not this one. Feeling the closeness of her beautiful body.
No.
“You’ll be safe here,” he tells her. “And I won’t let them take you.”
He feels her take a breath. One breath. As if there is nothing more to the galaxy than that single, perfect breath, that says… life.
Live. You must.
She trusts him.
“Promise?” she asks him.
“I promise.”
***
“I promised,” he whispered to the big rifle with his chin and face in the usual place, eye two inches back from the scope. Then he breathed and pulled the trigger as he let go of the air.
One of the Savages atop the distant bread truck exploded from the sternum up. The massive twenty-millimeter round just ruined him. These were the Wild Man’s most special loads. They disintegrated everything they hit as the round fractured inside the target and exploded in every direction at probably six to eight hundred miles per hour. There was no way to know, really. That was just his guess.
The concussive BOOOOM filled the subterranean tunnel. Echoing and reverberating across the deep and hollow spaces of the way down dark beneath the corpse of New Vega City.
Round ejected and everyone shouting over the comm. Shouting both “Who fired?” and an instant later, when their minds caught up with their mouths, “What’s he doing?”
In the same horrible moment of everything going off the rails.
The reticles inside the Wild Man’s scope found the other marine whose only move had been to stand now that his comrade had just disintegrated from the waist up. The Savage marine had just jerked his rifle up to start engaging targets it couldn’t detect when the Wild Man fired his next round.
This one went low but still connected. It blew the leg off the marine at the hip, taking a good chunk of the groin with it. The Savage promptly went helmet forward and over the side of the truck. Landing on the road at the exact wrong angle if one didn’t want to have a broken neck. Who knew what that did to these things? They didn’t have necks to break.
But whatever had happened, it wasn’t moving.
And that was good.
He ejected the shell.
The Savage driver in the cab was trying to make the engine turn. Maybe get away and warn the others? It didn’t matter.
Shot three was a head shot. Blowing helmet and brain across the inside of the cab. The round had been moving so fast that the body didn’t even move in one direction or another. The head disappeared, and the body of the Savage marine driver remained upright—as though the only thing wrong was that its head was missing.
“Did you give him the order to fire, sir?” shouted Andres, knowing damn well that no such order had been given. His tone was businesslike and military, ready to instill order into the developing chaos before it got completely out of hand.
“Negative,” said Rechs, who was crawling on top of the APC. Crawling toward the big sniper to stop the firing. Scrabbling really, as fast as he could. Each shot was a potential “come and get me” cry to every Savage for kilometers and kilometers.
But the Wild Man was already sliding off the front end of the APC and running for the stalled delivery truck. Ejecting a shell and sliding in a new one as fast as you please. His long loping strides taking him forward quickly.
“What do we do, sir?” Andres asked.
But Rechs was already running. Not to catch the out-of-control giant. But to support him in case he ran into more Savages they hadn’t seen. Yelling at himself because this wasn’t the mission. Knowing he should have taken the trigger-nuke into the Nest by himself. It would have been much easier that way. Even if he hadn’t survived. He could have detonated at any moment and probably ruined the ship. He d
efinitely would have ruined the planet. For the Savages, and humanity.
The APC started forward, cruising up slowly to speed, pursuing the two running men. But Wild Man made it to the stranded truck first.
Rechs could hear the big man breathing heavily, gasping something. Words. At the time he didn’t register it. He was too busy scanning the four directions of the intersection for any kind of Savage response to the shots.
The big man reached the back of the truck, smashed the lock with the butt of his rifle, and jerked open the cargo doors.
It was then that Rechs heard it. Heard what the sniper was mumbling almost incoherently.
“I promised.”
“I promised.”
“I promised.”
Rechs turned and saw what lay beyond the open doors.
Survivors huddling in the dark of the cargo vehicle. Scared and dirty. Staring wildly at the big man who was crying and repeating that he’d promised.
57
Makaffie was working on the delivery truck’s ignition cards. The little gnome had lifted the maintenance hood and was sticking butt-out and going on about it always being the “tarned ignition card!”
A moment later he had it out and was inspecting it, squinting behind his thick glasses at its surface. Then he spit on it, rubbed it along the leg of his dirty fatigues, and threw himself into the guts once more to reinstall it.
“We need to get off this road ASAP,” said Andres with no small amount of urgency.
Davis had left the APC to plot their next move with them. Greenhill and Martin had taken up overwatch positions to guard the two avenues the Savages had used in their convoy. And the Wild Man was standing near the civilians, who were alternately thanking him and sobbing. Several had come forward to hug him, and he seemed to awkwardly endure these overtures, made all the more difficult because he was so large and because he would not let go of his rife.
The civilians’ leader was a thin, almost emaciated woman. She came hesitantly over to Rechs, Andres, and Davis.
“I don’t know who you are… but… I just want to say thank you. I thought we were done for. Thank you.”
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 28