“You’re safe now, ma’am,” said Andres, trying to deal with her quickly and get things moving. He knew that they were anything but what he’d just promised.
“We… uh…” she continued, heedless of the NCO’s desire to hustle. Swallowing hard and trying to find the words she needed. Her eyes were hollow and haunted. But there was a fire. Deep down and awakening. “We come from a sea-ag research center out on the Marguez Sea. We’ve been hiding from the Savages for weeks. In communication with the resistance until that collapsed about two weeks ago. We… we… had a pretty good idea what was…”
She stopped. Turned back to the others and waved her hand, sobbing silently, her bony shoulders heaving once. Then she caught herself.
“We know what’s going on down here. We knew where they were taking us. I’ll be honest…” Big tears filled her haunted eyes. “I didn’t have much hope left. Not for our world. Not even for us.”
Rechs stood there listening and running through the HUD’s map functions. Truth be told, he was busy trying to find a way for them to drive themselves out of here. So that they could get back to the mission.
Then he heard the sergeant major say, “We’ll get you outta here, ma’am.”
“What about the rest?” she asked. “Half the planet’s down here. That was the resistance’s last estimate.”
“Ah…” began the sergeant major. “We don’t have a plan for that… at present, but… uh… we’re going to do our best.”
She nodded, thanked them again, and returned to the cluster of survivors.
“There’s no way they have half the planetary population down here,” said Captain Davis. “Not that it really matters how many—it’s still far more than we can help. We couldn’t rescue them if we tried.”
“I know that, ma’am. But… what are we gonna say right now?” Andres kept his voice low so the survivors wouldn’t overhear. “We got to move or we’ll be joining them in those bubbles before long.”
Rechs spoke.
“Sergeant Major, get the truck ready to move. I’ll take Sergeant Greenhill and Specialist Martin in the APC. We’ll go for the Nest. That should draw their fire. I want you and Captain Davis to get the survivors out of here. Access that private government subway the captain mentioned. Commandeer a train, drive the tracks, or make them all march and leave the stragglers. I don’t care, but make it back to the LZ. We’ll plant the nuke and join you by the time the Chang arrives.”
The sergeant major seemed unsure about this sudden change of mission. Not unwilling. But unsure.
“Make it happen, Sergeant Major. You came here with the Twenty-Fifth to rescue the survivors. You can rescue these. And I came here to destroy that ship. I’ll do that.”
The sergeant major nodded slowly. Then he gave a “Roger” and went off to make it happen.
Captain Davis turned toward Rechs. But she didn’t face him directly. She cleared her throat and looked off into the darkness of one of the tunnels.
“I’ll say this once. And then you can do whatever it is that you’re going to do. Which, because you’re Tyrus Rechs… well, that means what it means. Doesn’t it?”
Rechs said nothing.
“There are probably millions of survivors on this planet, right now, in various states. Not everyone died in the fighting, and if they didn’t die, and they weren’t captured, then they’re alive. Somewhere. If you set off your trigger-nuke, and if what I know about those things is correct… then yes. You’ll probably take out the Savage ship. Fine. But have you considered that this entire world, as every hydrogen molecule cascades into a chain nuclear reaction, will become lifeless within an hour?”
She stopped. Waiting for Rechs to say something. Or indicate some human gesture from behind his immobile armor. But he did nothing and said nothing.
“Are you really willing to kill so many innocent people in the process, Rechs? This isn’t some backwater planet with just a few thousand from a colony ship still getting their footing. This is New Vega. You will kill millions. I’m sure of that, Tyrus. I’m one hundred percent positive. The only thing I’m asking is… and I’ve…”
She stopped and turned away from him, lowering her head and pinching her eyes. He heard her suppress some cry. Maybe.
“I think I’ve earned at least the right to ask what I’m going to ask next. I lost my crew. My ship. Here. Hell”—she laughed and threw out her arms—“probably even my career. And believe me, I feel shallow just saying that in light of the situation of the people that crazy man just rescued. You’d have to have known me before the last five weeks to understand what it all meant to me. How far I was willing to go to do whatever it takes for one more pay grade. But… the last six weeks have changed me. Life has changed me. Every life is precious in a galaxy that does nothing but chew us up and spit us out. And we keep trying, Tyrus. We keep throwing ourselves into hyperspace to beat the odds. Running into hostile and strange worlds, deadly aliens, and even our nightmare selves. Why?”
She stopped. As though waiting for an answer. As though realizing how foolish it would be to expect one. Not from Tyrus Rechs. War criminal. Or savior. Depending on whom you asked.
“We almost beat them here. The Coalition did. We almost beat them. And I know there were mistakes made. But that’s not the best of us. That was a bunch of rink-knocker glory hounds seeking to promote themselves. Everyone looking out for their own skin. We didn’t send our best. Not by a long shot. And if we did… well, then maybe we need to get better. But nuking worlds into useless oblivion isn’t the answer. The answer is we get good and beat the Savages without resorting to doomsday weapons, because one day, Tyrus… one day, we’ll be down to one last world. Just like Earth once was before we seeded the galaxy. Is that when we start fighting? When there’s almost nothing left to fight over?”
She stopped.
Made a face that said she was disgusted with herself and was about to walk away. But she didn’t.
“I watched you lead,” she said. “I watched these men, and myself, fight under you. I even heard them talking about you when they thought you were the colonel. Where the idiots who ran their little attack yesterday failed… you’d have won. If you had been in charge, things would have been different. So I’m asking you, Tyrus… no, I’m begging you… let’s leave. I’ll help you forge… an… a force. Even if the other governments won’t support it. A foreign legion. And we’ll come back here and beat the Savages on the ground and pull those people out of the storage bubbles. We save this world… then we can save the galaxy. Because, Tyrus Rechs… every life… every life is damn important. The galaxy has an edge, and it’s always trying to kill us. Every day.”
58
Davis stood back, watching for some change she’d effected in the armored man and known war criminal standing in front of her. Some sign that she’d… well, not necessarily changed the fate of the galaxy, or even of this planet… but that maybe, just maybe… she’d changed one man’s heart.
And perhaps that was all the difference it actually took to change the galaxy.
Tyrus Rechs removed his battle-scratched and worn helmet. The face beneath it was just as stoic as the iron mask of death the helmet presented to every enemy the galaxy could throw at one person. What she saw was a man slightly into middle age. Normal almost to the point of being nondescript. A professional soldier. No more and no less than all the others who served in all the different military organizations throughout the hyperdrive-connected worlds. In that, he was like them all, and you would have been hard-pressed to pick out anything particularly remarkable about him.
Other than the eyes.
It was the gunfighter-blue eyes that made him different. Not because they were blue. No. Not that at all. But because they’d been everywhere there was to go. Seen everything there was to be seen. Even the things you didn’t want to see and hoped you’d soon forget. In those eyes there was
that, and all the rest of it too.
People always remembered the eyes of Tyrus Rechs when recalling some happenstance meeting in some unlikely combat backwater. They were like looking into a well of endless worlds you’d never know the deeps of.
And then he began to answer her. And each word he spoke was like a gunshot that slammed into her and made her realize how little she understood. Of him. The conflict. And the galaxy.
“Stark 247.”
That’s how he began. The words meant nothing to her. And probably no one else living in the galaxy at the current moment in its turn about the spiral understood their significance anymore.
“Fifty years after the destruction of Mars,” continued Tyrus, “I was on a scout trader working security along the old Bandos Run. Big Denver-class Q-freighter. We were running first contact and survey out that way for the New Horizon Company. Captain was doing trade where he could. The ship’s astrogator picked up a previously unsurveyed world that looked life-habitable. It was a short jump from our last destination, so the captain made for it. His name was Stark. It was the two hundred and forty-seventh world he’d surveyed.”
Tyrus Rechs paused and looked away. Watched the others working on the wheeled vehicle truck as though he had little confidence they’d ever get it started. And with an apprehensive conviction that at any moment they’d get jumped by more Savages and everything would get just a little bit harder.
Without looking back at Davis, he began to speak again. Low and just between the two of them. But the words were powerful in their clarity and truth. They dispelled what was known and the fiction of history, because, as she’d come to understand… she was talking to an eyewitness. No slick reproduced entertainment manufactured by the winners. No agenda-driven scholarly tome that begged to be taken seriously just because of its price tag in the store.
“On all spectrums the planet looked dead. No signatures. But as we got close, we were seeing structures. No life, but structures. At first we thought… dead civilization that nuked itself out of existence. We’d seen that before. But this society was on par with Earth in her heyday. Still had operational satellites running in degrading orbits. Cities easily could have topped out at twenty million. Estimated global population of at least seven billion. And there wasn’t a single living thing we could find.
“We flew the surface for about two weeks. Setting down inside cities that hadn’t heard the sound of an engine in years. There’d been a fight of some sort in a few of the cities. Nothing major. No global nuclear exchange between factions. So we looked closer. Went in and checked out the buildings. Stark wanted to find out what had happened.
“From their art we could tell they’d been equine humanoids. Horse-men, we called them. Beautiful art. Advanced early-stage solar exploration. But no tech anywhere. From a simple circuit and wiring all the way up to their computer systems, it was all missing. Completely stripped and gone across the entire planet.”
“How?” asked Davis, her voice tight with emotion, hanging on the story.
“It was a mystery. One we didn’t think we’d solve because of a mandatory rendezvous window closing in on us. The captain made his report on our last orbital pass.
“And then… almost by accident, we spotted it.” Rechs turned his head back to her, staring at her with those depthless blue eyes that had seen everything there was to see. Done everything that needed to be done when no one else was willing to do it.
“Out in the desert wastes we spotted the remains of a large camp, along with a rough cargo star port that had been built in a hurry. Something like that was well beyond this civilization’s ability. Extra-planetary launch was still a big effort for them. It was out of place.
“So we set down and explored it. We found prison camps hundreds of miles wide. And cramped quarters even at that. There were anchor pads for micro-forge printers where raw materials could be broken down and packaged for long-term storage, like for stellar flight.”
Davis rubbed her shoulders as if the tale was making her cold. “The Savages had that tech before they left Earth.”
Rechs nodded. “Then we found the ovens. And the pits. Trenches, really. We put it all together after that: Savages had set down on that world and stripped it clean.
“We documented everything we could, then left. I followed the investigation for a long time afterwards. A scientist with a knack for history ran the planetary research for twenty-two years, just putting the pieces together.”
Davis inclined her head and squinted at Rechs. She’d thought she misheard him when he mentioned the destruction of Mars. And she’d wondered why she’d never heard of Stark 247. She stood now wondering just how old the man before her was, but she didn’t dare ask the question and break up his narrative. This was the most she’d ever heard Tyrus Rechs speak—by orders of magnitude.
“On the day when we stood there looking at all the cages that ran for those hundreds of miles, and listened to the wind moaning across the plain and through the tattered camps, as we looked down at rivers of bones… we didn’t understand it all. But in the end we figured it out. It just took time.
“You see, about the time Earth hit Mars with a crustbuster to restore order to the home system, the Savages discovered Stark 247. They set down with a small flotilla of ships. At first they tried to convince the equii—that’s the name the scientist gave them—that they were friends come from another world to help. The equii fell for it, and in time the Savages were worshipped as gods. Which was fine by them. They already think they’re gods. It suited them. And for the next thirty years they played factions off one against the other until they controlled the entire planet through a complex overstate.
“Then they built the camps and said that anyone who didn’t think like them was mentally ill and needed to be… reeducated. But really they were just death camps. And a little more: a factory of sorts, along with a shipping terminal. Large sections of the population over the course of many years began disappearing to the camps with the help of equii ‘loyalists.’ These loyalists worked a whole production queue set up to break down every technological material on-planet and package it for long-term storage during space flight. It was all shuttled up to the hulk in orbit until nothing was left.
“Probably not more than ten thousand Savages in that hulk. They made the equii turn on themselves and assist in their own genocide. And everyone thought they were doing it for the greater good. But the Savages couldn’t have cared less about any of that.”
“They needed supplies,” said Davis, looking around as if expecting to see more Savage marines walking right into their midst. “Just like these.”
“Yeah,” said Rechs. “So they stopped over for thirty years to top off their inventory, like they were at some roadside market and power station.”
“And the… equii? They never even resisted? Never fought back?”
Rechs checked his hand cannon. “By the time the equii came to their senses, it was too late. That scientist speculated that the last of them perished a good five years before the Savages finally pushed off for deep space again.”
“I don’t understand. They had a developed world. Why not just… make their little Utopia there?”
“You know why.”
“No,” said Davis, shaking her head. “I don’t.”
“The answer is easy and no one likes it because they want to think there’s some other reasonable explanation to the madness… but there isn’t. Trust me. I know better than anyone. The answer is because they’re not human anymore. The Savages gave that up for whatever they’ve found out there in the dark. So they spent those last five years strip-mining on a scale we’ve never seen, and they poisoned every river and ocean doing it. We thought it was just the lay of the land when we were first circling. But it wasn’t. They killed the equii, then killed all life on the planet. You can still go there. It’s a dead world. It’s ruined. But it’s the
re. That’s the Savages.”
He paused and watched her. Like he was looking for something that wasn’t disbelief because he didn’t care whether she believed him or not. Like he was looking to see if she was someone who’d do something about what he was telling her. If she was one of the rare few who cared enough to wake up. Or if even now her mind was trying to find a way to go back to sleep and let someone else handle the Savage problem. Which was most people as far as Tyrus Rechs was concerned. He’d learned that from experience.
“They’ve progressed beyond all this.” His voice was stone-cold truth. He spoke slowly, clearly. Making sure she was getting every word and that there was no mistake. Because this was the important part. This was the part she needed to hear.
“They cannot be given an inch, a moment, even a week to fester. If you find them, you destroy them as fast as possible, because they are masters of exploiting your weakness. I’ve seen it all. I’ve worked with others. I’ve watched people try to bargain with them, reason with them, deal with them. And in the end, it’s the same. They’re destroyed or they win. I’ve personally seen them ruin a dozen human worlds, three alien worlds, and four undiscovered species’ worlds that were like stumbling into a graveyard where there should have been a town. The galaxy is a big place that doesn’t talk a lot. Even among the Coalition worlds. Just imagine all the things they’ve done and gotten up to out there in the dark where we’ve never been. They’ve been out there a long time, and they risk destruction every time one of their hulks shows itself to strip all that tech and raw materials. What are they doing out there?”
Davis turned down her head, then looked back up at Rechs as he continued.
“What we remember about the time they left Earth is fuzzy at best. Things were falling apart. Keeping records wasn’t a priority. Survival was. But most accept that there were over three thousand lighthugger-class colony vessels. Sure… some died out there. Found the wrong civilization to mess with. Hit a star. Wiped themselves out. But out of three thousand… that leaves plenty that have survived. And the one thing in common—the one thing—is complete insular belief. Total xenophobia. Even for other Savages. We aren’t human to them. And they’re not even human anymore.”
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 29