A pair of Savage marines ran down the ramp , reaching the APC before the first wave of attackers Davis had spotted farther out were close enough to engage. They sent a storm of hurried shots, all of which danced alongside their target, hitting only dirt, road, and APC.
The Savages had reason to be excited. Tyrus Rechs had come to settle up for what they’d done.
Rechs aimed his hand cannon and, with a sweeping motion, shattered their helmets and pulped their brains, leaving them to collapse and roll down the ramp. More would be coming from the same direction. It was time to move.
Rechs climbed into the APC and moved toward the gunnery station. “They’ve never had a chance, Captain. When the trigger-nuke goes, the whole planet gets cooked. Now get us back into the tunnels. We’re going to go down there and try to get ours out.”
The Savages were only now responding to the new threat that had arrived at their very doors. Their business and focus had no doubt been elsewhere. Out along the lines. Down in the tunnel complex. Rechs and Davis had had the area to themselves for a time, but that time was clearly coming to a close—quickly. More small arms fire pinged against their vehicle’s outer hull.
And soon, larger munitions would be used.
The APC howled to life and spun a hard turn back the way they came, traveling over rough and ruined streets, leaving its precious gift behind.
“Oh…” Davis began, the start of a cry that just choked away as she stared at the instrument panel.
Rechs could see it too from his gunnery station. The hornets’ nest—the Savage Nest—had awoken. A solid mass of hostile targets were in pursuit now. Savage marines of every size and type, big hulking fighters, what looked like mechs—just about everything the Savvies had. And all coming right after them.
From the troop compartment Rechs could feel the eyes of the two little girls watching him. He’d heard it said that children saw and heard everything. They always did.
And they understood far more than adults ever gave them credit for.
63
The bread truck loaded down with liberated captives hadn’t quite made it to the lift that would take them down through the various levels of Old Colony’s outer complex before it gave out again—the result of constant Savage attacks. Martin and Greenhill had managed to put the attackers down, but not before the tires and engine compartment were ruined.
“Everybody off the truck!” Sergeant Major Andres ordered. He pulled the survivors off the smoking vehicle and hustled them forward down the big tunnel they’d been traversing.
More Savages appeared, dismounting from the back of a civilian pickup truck and firing on the stationary bread truck moments after the last of the former prisoners had jumped off. Greenhill and Martin laid down a base of interlocking fire from both sides of the tunnel, and despite the poor physical condition of the refugees, they moved with haste.
Bullets skipped up into the path of a straggling clump of survivors, narrowly missing Greenhill. “Martin! Time to drop back!” He ran to an alcove, turned, and set up a steady stream of pulse fire with his heavy assault rifle while Martin in turn fell back.
The rest of the team moved forward, trying to outrun the din of blaster fire that seemed to haunt their steps. A din that grew louder as Martin and Greenhill added their own steady pulse fire into the pursuing elements.
As soon as they had all reached the lift—a disc the size of a carrier’s bridge—Andres activated it. Everyone with a blaster rifle fired until the large doors shut behind them and the lift began to descend.
“They must’ve used this to move heavy construction equipment and bulk cargo down into the lower tunnels,” announced Makaffie, still panting from the running firefight.
But no one else cared what the government had used it for before the entire world was ruined by the Savage invasion. They only cared about surviving. And the only hope any of them had was the high-speed rail that might take them back to the LZ—if they could reach it in time.
The Chang was due back in less than three hours.
The disc moved slowly, groaning mechanically and occasionally echoing out with loud titanic booms as locks at various levels slipped in and out of place. The survivors huddled along one edge of the disc while Martin, Greenhill, and the sergeant major scanned the darkness of the abandoned levels they passed through, watching for more Savages to come at them in some fresh new assault.
Time and charge packs were running out.
They’d lost three survivors in the running fight to reach the disc. People who’d been hit and bled out alone because there was no time for the soldiers to give them aid and no way to carry them along. The other ragged and dirty survivors, those without weapons and nothing else to do, had tried to help them, but to no avail. In two cases, the wounds didn’t even seem all that bad. Didn’t seem like they should have been fatal. But they were. Like maybe those poor souls had simply been through too much already over the last six weeks. Their time in the galaxy was done.
At the bottom of the well, they arrived into a vast underground domed vault from which several tunnels, guarded by impressive vault doors two and three stories high, led off in different directions.
“Last stop,” announced Andres, and ordered everyone off the lift.
“Should be that way, guys!” said Makaffie. He was using a battle board on which Davis had sketched a rudimentary map, and so far her sketches were proving more or less accurate.
“No kidding,” said Greenhill. He pointed up at an overhead sign showing the way to the transit tunnel trains.
Makaffie put the board away. “Well. We didn’t know those signs would be there, man.”
That was when the morlocks announced their presence once more. They couldn’t yet be seen, but their howls warbled and whooped out across the dark caverns.
Andres cursed the all-too-familiar sound and attempted to hush the screaming survivors. “Not so loud!” the sergeant major called out. “Damn it, be quiet!”
At his urging, the panicked survivors hustled forward and bunched up to get onto the frozen escalator.
“Moving up,” said Martin. He bounded down the escalator, pushing through the survivors. “They sound like they’re still a ways off yet. Maybe not even on this level.”
“Greenhill,” Andres called out, “you stay back with me. Don’ want nothin’ sneaking up on us. ‘Kaffie—keep with the locals.”
Makaffie was being used as a sort of ad hoc military/civilian interface liaison. Listening to their grievances, agreeing with them, and then at the same time trying to explain why the military did the things it did, the way that it did them. Which, it seemed, he usually didn’t agree with. And then explaining to them the mysteries of the cosmos, and how it could be understood by looking through the fourth eye of the mind, but only when you “unlocked the potentiality of spiritual vision hidden inside us all. Man.”
All of a sudden bright government lighting, dull and soulless, filled the terminal. The power had come back on. The escalator lurched to life, jostling the already panicked survivors. Some screamed, others cried or moaned. A few fell and were in danger of being trampled in the rush to get away to any place other than the one they had come from.
And yet no place seemed safe anymore.
Martin, out of sight down below, opened fire.
“Contact!”
“Get down!” shouted the sergeant major at the civilians. “Get your heads down and stay down until I tell you otherwise!”
The sergeant major moved through the huddled press as best he could to reach the bottom of the long escalator. Citizens crouched and cowered around him. Greenhill was left to cover the rear on his own. And now the sound of the big cav sergeant’s heavy fire echoed out over the transportation hub too, sounding harsh and brutal to the ears.
Enemies up front and in the rear.
Surrounded.
On the subway platform below, the Savage morlocks had made the mistake of charging across open ground with no cover, likely enticed by the screams of the prisoners. They’d entered the area from another platform across the tracks, and Martin, covering behind a directory board that now read ERROR for every point in the line and DELAYED for every time, cut down three before they even left the platform, catching them in a sweep of burst fire, then dropped four more as they crossed the wide canyon of the tracks. But five made it far enough to get cover as they disappeared below platform level.
If they’re smart, Martin thought as he went to pull a frag off his carrying system, they’ll stay down there, hold their automatic slug-throwing rifles over the lip of the platform, and just pray and spray.
But he’d seen before that these hunters had traded smarts for bloodthirsty aggression. And the constant noise of pulse fire and frantic survivors was whipping them into a frenzy.
The sergeant major raced forward, blazing away with his weapon until he was literally at the edge of the platform shooting down into the Savage hunters. He’d rushed them, and they hadn’t expected that. After six weeks of being the new alpha predator on New Vega, they were used to being the hunter and not the hunted.
Martin cooked the spool on the grenade and yelled, “Frag out! Hit the deck, Sergeant Major!”
Andres jumped back as the grenade bounced onto the tracks and went off a second later. Any Savages that had survived his shooting spree were now a bloody mess—and Martin came forward and made good and sure of it. But up above, Greenhill was firing in longer bursts.
“No rail cars, Sergeant Major,” said Specialist Martin matter-of-factly.
Andres was bent over, catching his breath. He waved at Martin. “Get ’em moving down the tracks on foot. That’s all we can do now. I’m gonna go back up and help Greenhill.”
***
Soon the bulk of the survivors were moving again, almost running for their lives down the long, dark subway tunnel. But the Savage hunters still had the scent, and they would not give up the chase no matter how many were mowed down by Greenhill and the sergeant major. Martin was ahead, scouting the tunnel and hoping some rail train didn’t bear down out of the darkness and slaughter them all.
After what seemed at least a kilometer of moving, the sounds of the hunters faded.
“Think they’re gone?” Greenhill asked, taking the opportunity to check his charge packs. “Shit. I’m almost spent.”
“Not much better.” Andres looked around. “We definitely movin’ out of the hillside, though. I wonder…”
He activated his comm. “This is Sergeant Major Andres. Colonel—Tyrus Rechs—do you read me?”
He paused and looked to Greenhill. “Not gettin’ a response.”
“Let’s get going, Sergeant Major.”
Andres held up a finger. “One more try. This is Sergeant Major Andres. Colonel, do you read me?”
And then pulse fire erupted from farther down the tunnel. Either the hunters remembered their weapons, or Savage marines had joined the hunt.
“Gotta go!” shouted Greenhill, answering with his pulse rifle.
“In case you’re still operational, sir, we’re proceeding on foot in the government transit tube.”
Bullets snapped and hissed around Andres. Close. They were close.
The sergeant major ran, catching up to Greenhill, then turned and added his own fire to the mix.
“Contact rear!” Greenhill yelled into his comm.
“You need me to come back or send ’Kaffie?” asked Martin.
“Negative!” growled Andres. “Keep that column moving!”
Greenhill took a knee to better fire at the sporadic muzzle flashes erupting in the tunnel’s distant darkness.
Andres sat down right next to him. It was an odd way to set up and fire. And then Greenhill realized that Andres’s pulse rifle wasn’t firing. He looked over and saw the sergeant major clutching his stomach. His uniform was already dark and wet with blood.
Greenhill didn’t give aid to the sergeant major—he couldn’t. Instead he kept up a steady stream of covering fire and activated his comm. “Sergeant Major is hit! I need someone back here to pull him back!”
“I’m on it!” shouted Makaffie. He came sprinting back with a few of the more capable survivors to carry the gut-shot NCO farther down the tunnel.
Martin continued firing, skipping backward as he shot, moving as fast as he could while keeping eyes on the enemy. This was going from bad to worse. And the only way he could see out of it was to try once more to reach the man they’d known as the colonel. Hoping he was still the kind of man who would get them out of there, even if Tyrus Rechs was not.
“Be advised: Any surviving assets on New Vega. We are engaged near the underground subway access at the bottom level of the Hilltop subterranean complex. We are on foot with civilian survivors. Sergeant Major Andres is down.”
But the specialist got no answer over the static-distorted comm down in the clutching close darkness of that deep tunnel leading off into the unknown. Behind them, the Savages were closing in once more.
“Colonel… if you’re out there… we need help, sir. We’re not gonna make it.”
64
They’d lobbed an explosive at the Wild Man covering behind his improvised fighting position of ruined Savage scout cycles. He’d felt it go over his head in the darkness. That was the last thing he remembered. Remembered that silence between his shots and their return fire. Remembered the sound of the grenade bouncing on the tunnel floor.
How many? she asked.
Twenty.
He always knew the number.
He always knew… because he knew any number of dead Savages made her happy. And so he kept track. Because her happiness meant everything to him. Nothing else in the galaxy really mattered anymore.
Twenty.
I killed twenty for you.
She was saying what she always said when he felt the grenade go flying over his head in the dark. Heard it bounce around.
And in that moment he’d had a choice.
Scramble for it and get it away from him. Or…
Go ahead and kill one more with the seconds that remained of the sometimes dream and sometimes nightmare of his life.
His mind had done the math. A flung grenade had already cooked for at least three seconds. Who knew how long the Savages ran their fuses, but five or six was standard for most militaries. Finding it and then getting it away from him with little more than a hurl just to get it down tunnel… in the dark… no, three seconds wasn’t much. And he’d already just burned one on the math. The fatal math. So much of life and death was math. Cold, relentless math.
Maybe that was why miracles were miracles. Because they defied the math. And maybe her voice was its own kind of miracle. After all, it had made a dead man want to live a little longer, if only just for vengeance.
Do another one…
He pulled the trigger one last time.
… babe.
Boooom.
Lights out and waiting to feel your flesh torn to shreds by hundreds of pieces of shrapnel… or needles, like some frags used. And then… maybe then… maybe… well, just maybe she’d be waiting for him on the other side of whatever. Smiling. Glad that he’d finally caught up with them in the place of miracles. Holding out their baby for him to dandle on his knee and exchange coos with.
That’s not so bad, he thought as his mind was suddenly scrambled. There was a bang. Lights flashed, and it felt like he was going to have a stroke. Or rather… it felt like reality had just stuttered. Like the game had frozen. Or the signal had locked on an image. Or the sun had refused to go down.
Yeah. That’s what it felt like. Reality had just stuttered. Skipped a beat. Missed a groove. Taken a bad step.
He couldn’t move and he couldn’t see. Coul
dn’t hear either. Except he could. He could do all those things. He could do them where he was at now because he was no longer in the tunnel where he’d been shooting down Savages. No one-shot-and-gone. It had been a gallery back in the tunnel. A shooting gallery like the star carnies sometimes set up when they made planetside on Stendahl.
Shoot the ducks! Win a prize for your lady, hoss!
Do another one, babe. She’d said that that summer night when the stars were close. Red hair and that green dress. And those eyes.
He was back on their stead now in this place where reality had just stuttered. And he was smiling the biggest dopey grin he could smile. It was so big and dumb even he could feel it. And here’s how it felt.
Remember the best day you ever had. The day when everything was perfect, and only good times were ever had. And everyone you ever truly loved was there with you. Safe and happy at home. Remember that day when the future seemed like a good thing you weren’t always so constantly afraid of. Remember that simple day of good things you took for granted. When darkness and evil had not touched you. When the love in your heart had not grown cold. Remember that.
That was how he felt at that moment. He could feel how unreasonably happy he was. Like every bone in his body was turned to jelly and every pain that had been there, the scars both real and emotional—those were all just gone now. And it was afternoon turning to evening at the end of a long week.
He was finishing up organizing some rope out along the corral in front of their old stead. Getting it set up for a horse that he’d need to break come first of the next week. A beautiful horse that half of him wanted to just turn loose and let go to run the plains of Stendahl forever. One of the mustang stock brought up with the first colonists and let go to run the planet and go where they would. He wanted to let that horse go. But he needed it. So he’d break it.
But part of him just wanted to let the beautiful creature go.
Later she came out onto the front porch, and he was struck dumb by how beautiful she was in that moment of every good thing you want to take with you forever. And he had to stop and wonder why she’d ever wanted him.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 32