And so he spent a lot of time thinking things forward. Never looking back unless he was tactically assessing some situation from the past with the intent of figuring out some problem of the present or the impending future.
Right now he was thinking about Captain Davis and her hard words. And Sulla, who’d said pretty much all the same things to him over the years about finally getting humanity together to deal with the Savage problem instead of emulating Tyrus Rechs and employing the most extreme of measures.
But it took extreme measures. Because, when you thought it all the way forward, that was all that one man could do. He couldn’t fight a battle on his own. But he could wage a one-man war. And trigger-nukes evened the playing field when it was one against upwards of forty thousand combat troops at a go, not to mention all the high-tech surprises the Savages brought to the battlefield—always an unknown variable.
Not even Tyrus Rechs could beat those odds. No soldier could. It would take an army. A collection of warriors with a unity of purpose.
And in lieu of that… trigger-nukes.
They were a necessity. So he had said, many times. And he had been right.
They were a necessity because he’d been fighting alone. Forced to wage the war that no one else would.
Forced there by the indifference, unwillingness, or shortsightedness of others.
One soldier against a thousand armies.
You’re not a soldier anymore, he told himself.
At first he wanted to say it was Sulla’s voice that had stung him, reminding him that he was no longer what he’d once thought only of. It might have even been the voice of the pretty yet austere starship captain telling him that he hadn’t been a soldier for a long time. But in the end, as the lift slowly crawled up through the half-lit shadows, he had to admit it was his own voice.
His own voice telling him the truth.
“You’re not a soldier anymore,” he whispered. “You’re just an assassin.”
The small ramshackle cage shuddered to a halt, and the security gate swung open.
As Tyrus Rechs stepped out into the darkness of a multi-level warehouse, IR signatures flared to life in his HUD.
There were hundreds of Savages waiting here in ambush.
As though they’d known he’d come this way all along.
71
The Chang came in hot through New Vega’s atmosphere. She was burning up O2 through reentry effect when they fell out of micro-jump at almost full cruising speed.
The ship’s captain, who was now acting as co-pilot to Admiral Sulla, called out the bow angle and altitude. Overspeed indicators moved to alarm, direly warning of impending impact with the ground below.
Sulla, who had his hand on the throttle, pulled back all four levers connecting to the main four engines. “Bring in inertial reversers!” he commanded.
For the first few seconds, flying reentry was all the crew could do. Micro-jumps with a destination exit inside an atmosphere were the trickiest of feats to pull off when it came to jump navigation. It took everything you had, and a little bit of blind luck, not to leave a crater in some world’s face. The ship was shaking violently, and automated damage-control reports flared across the digital HUD along the forward window of the cockpit.
Radar and sensors called out from the CIC at the rear of Chang’s bridge. “Contact! We got a hulk in the air, Admiral!”
“Find the LZ!” ordered Sulla. He sat up in his chair, straining to see the ground over the controls and instruments in front of him. Atmosphere howled and whistled beyond the fuselage.
“Multiple lock-ons detected!” shouted another tech from back in CIC.
“I have it,” said the Chang’s captain from the co-pilot seat. “Our two o’clock.”
Sulla spotted it and heeled the ship over to pick up the course track.
“PDCs warming up,” announced the weapons officer prophetically while at the same moment the radar and sensor tech shouted that the Savage hulk had sent missiles incoming.
A moment later the belch of the Chang’s PDCs erupted across the hull as the defensive weapons system tried to fill the air between the ship and the incoming missiles with hundreds of thousands of tiny projectiles. Any hit would detonate a ship’s missile.
“Multiple splashes,” called out a tech operating the PDC assessment grid, indicating the weapons were doing their job of keeping the incoming missiles at bay.
“Hulk leaving the battlespace!” cried out the navigation officer. “Their intercept was all wrong.”
There’s a break, thought Sulla.
He flew the course toward the LZ, dropping the ship down through the billowing black smoke and the scud of atmospheric layers.
“We got lucky!” said the captain, and laughed nervously.
Sulla’s eyes went wide as right behind the man, out the co-pilot’s window, Savage interceptors swooped out of the smoke-filled afternoon. Hot bright lines of incoming fire raked the Chang’s hull with just three kilometers to the LZ.
“Weapons hot on all turrets!” announced the CIC’s tactical officer. “Engaging!”
72
There was no retreat. No safe place to fall back to. Tyrus Rechs knew the only way through… was through.
He bumped his jets in the instant before the Savages began to fire at him, crossing the floor to a pyramid of stacked supply freight containers each the size of a rail car.
That quick movement instantly denied a firing solution to at least seventy-five percent of the Savages involved in the ambush. Or so Rechs’s helmet told him.
His back pinned to a container, Rechs raised the heavy rifle and cut loose with a blur of fire on a team of Savages to his right. Within seconds he’d pulsed them to shreds.
But the Savages were reacting quickly. They swarmed the container from all sides to get at the crevice he’d found. He shot three with quick bursts and bumped his jets once to hit the next level as he let the heavy dangle from its sling.
He’d used those jump jets a lot. Like the defense bubble, they couldn’t go on forever without a recharge. And neither could he.
He popped a fragger and dropped it where he’d been, then ran along the side of the container.
Farther back and higher up in the darkened warehouse, the Savage version of squad-designated marksmen had taken up support positions for the close-infantry assault teams. Now these snipers fired crack shots from old-school weapon systems that reminded Rechs of the ancient Barrett rifle of his earliest days. Any one of those rounds would do a serious number on his armor—and the body beneath. That was the thing about the Savages: it was their anachronistic tech in this bright brilliant modern age of the galaxy, an age of energy-efficient blasters and older-model pulse rifles, that made them so vicious. Old-school chemical firearms were still the most violent thing the galaxy could produce. They went beyond simply killing—like a blaster or pulse rifle—and inflicted maximum damage.
Huge holes appeared in the cargo container Rechs ran along as the snipers sent down shots from the upper reaches of the warehouse. Rechs popped more grenades, bumped his jets, and tried to stay a moving target. There was neither room nor time to bring the heavy into play.
Explosions ripped through the warehouse as his grenades detonated. Small sprays of shredded metal were turned into projectiles with their own terminal velocity as Savages were ripped apart.
All was chaos and madness within the subterranean cave of the storage facility.
Rechs hunkered low, raised the heavy, and sprayed the area where a sniper was shooting from. Vicious pulse fire ripped through the atmosphere of the warehouse and the Savage working the old Barrett-like rifle.
Charge pack out, Rechs swapped in a new one and shifted position. A squad of Savages tried to block his escape route, but he was guns up on them as they almost collided into one another in the tight quarters. At point-bl
ank range he dumped the whole charge pack on high-cycle fire and ventilated the entire squad because there was no room in all the chaos for precision or economy.
There was no room for anything but extreme violence.
Just how you like it, Tyrus.
He wasn’t sure whose voice that was. But it was right.
Another charge pack out, and Rechs had no time to swap in a new one before an additional team came at him from another quarter, honing in on the carnage of the seconds before. He pulled the hand cannon and auto-fired it into the surging mass. Heavy-caliber slugs tore through the Savages’ armor. Rechs’s fifty-caliber rounds disintegrated systems and brains, sending misty metallic sprays from the helmets of the Savage marines and the skulls of the morlock attackers. Their demise was brutal and without mercy.
If only because there was no other way.
For a moment Rechs caught a break, but not enough of one to load in a new charge pack. The armor was picking up the sound of more boots and creating an overlay of where everyone might be in the battlespace. Which was, to put it simply, everywhere.
His only way out was straight up.
He chain-ripped a bando of fraggers and left them right where he’d been as he rocketed skyward with what remained of his jump juice—and there was precious little of it left.
The swift jump brought him to the top of the pyramid stack of containers just as the bando exploded, devastating the two swarms of Savage infantry who’d tried to close in on his last known position in a coordinated effort.
From up here he could get better a look at the squad-designated marksmen teams. The armor tagged them, and Rechs burned the last of his jump juice to reach a crane balcony where a team was operating. Hand cannon ready, he started putting rounds into snipers up here in the heights. They couldn’t react fast enough to his sudden proximity and died on their bellies.
Moving along the gantry beneath the ceiling of the warehouse, taking badly aimed fire from scrambling sniper teams at the far end, he returned fire with the hand cannon. Switching back to single fire and doling out head and upper torso shots with the armor’s targeting assist. He shot them down mercilessly as he climbed up through the shaky network of catwalks that formed the support walkways for the loading tractor that supervised this bay.
Not all of the Savages were dead by the time he reached the main control room at the top and climbed a ladder up through its ceiling into silent darkness. But the Savage ambush had been effectively ruined, and for the most part they were doing little more than laying down covering fire in order to pull their wounded off the deck.
Which seemed odd to Rechs. Because why should they care about the wounded? He put the unbidden thought away—he didn’t need to humanize these post-human monsters. Not now. Not ever.
He crouched down behind a control panel and checked his charge packs. He was down to half, and just a few grenades. Ammo for the hand cannon was solid. Zero jump juice.
And three more levels to reach the Wild Man.
An hour and twenty-seven minutes until official sunset.
A lot of ground to cover and a short time to do it in.
73
The Wild Man came to while they were immersing him. Just before, in fact. The Savages had their hard, cold metal gauntlets all over him. And for a moment as he came out of that terrible nightmare of the old place where he had lived with her, he thought they were rescuing him.
The Savages were again humans—just like him—in those first unclear seconds as he struggled to breathe while they drowned him. Not the galactic boogeymen that parents used in order to frighten their children into good behavior, leveraging tales of abduction and slavery if vegetables weren’t eaten and studies not performed.
Clean off your plate or the Savages will come and snatch you straight out of bed, I promise you that.
In hindsight, years later, every parent knows they shouldn’t have done that. But in the exasperation and fatigue of constantly trying to make some little version of yourself into something better than you’d become in order to survive a galaxy with an appetite for destruction… well, sometimes you used all the cards. Even the bad ones. Even the nuclear ones.
You can feel guilty later, when they’re safe.
Like Tyrus Rechs, thought the Wild Man as he came up from the sickly sour-sweet maple syrup pool gasping for a new lungful of air before they managed to plunge him back down. Like Tyrus Rechs using nukes to save the galaxy when no one else, except him and his rifle, would do anything to stop another family from disappearing.
Do another one, babe.
In that moment they, the Savages, seemed just as human as he was. Or even like the angels some talked of.
But then his mind came to full alertness and he realized they weren’t angels.
They were demons from the outer dark.
He’d kill them all, except he couldn’t move. There were too many hands. Cold, metal hands. Everywhere.
They’d taken him to a subterranean road much like the ones he and Tyrus Rechs’s soldiers had traveled through during that seemingly endless night and day. The ones that ran alongside the vast walls of bubble-stored New Vega civilians.
Maybe it was the same road, he thought, as they forced his head and limbs beneath the gel. For good this time. No coming back up. They held on too tight and were too strong.
And in the moment before his eyes went under, his head and neck straining to the last in this vat shaped like a sarcophagus, he saw the floating dirigible and the loading gantry. And the wall of bubbles. A wall of humans. Waiting to be eaten by eaters who were once human.
He tried to move. Tried to fight them in some way.
Fight back, babe! Do something. You have to do something!
But the body would not listen. And all he could do was watch helplessly as he was drowned in their gel-solution. Their horrible gauntlets holding him beneath its goopy surface. His body completely restrained—not only from the hands, but from the gel itself. It was grabbing hold of him. Pulling him down. His mind screaming as his lungs filled up with gel. And those soulless faces, alien things no human mind could have ever conceived of, stared down at him with no pity, remorse, mercy… or even grace. The sound of their harsh electronic barking carried through the gel, and it was like they were laughing at him as they did their drowning work. Laughing along with one another like bullies having their fun with some stray child they’d caught to torment. Out beyond the edge of town where no one can save you.
In the late afternoon turning to evening dark. The feeling that you’ll never see home, or your family, again.
Helplessness filled him. He knew he was drowning… dying… but not just yet. It would take a horrible long time for him to die. The gel had a narcotic effect that overwhelmed every sense… taking him away from that horrible place to a promised future of a thousand unending nightmare lifetimes.
A future of bleak hopelessness and unending torture without end. Waking up from one nightmare only to find yourself in one even worse.
“It’s an endless well!” his drug-ravaged mind screamed as he got a look at it.
And then words he could not contain struggled up out of him and into the dense gel. Sounding nothing like words but needing to be cried out, if only for the horror of what was happening.
“It’s forever in here…” he screamed to no one.
74
The twin-barreled defensive gun of the APC was literally smoking by the time they made the end of the rail line at the stadium terminal, and the vehicle’s drive train was a mess of hard clanks and reeking, burning lubricants.
But they’d made it. Wave after wave of Savages had sought to overtake them, and had been beaten back on the strength of their up-top weapon’s devastating effect in the enclosed tunnels they escaped through.
They’d made it.
There was no longer any pursuit. In the cours
e of fighting off the last wave of Savages, Martin, operating the turret, had over-cycled just to smash to pieces a lumbering mech that looked like some great mechanical troll thundering after them on hands and knees while lobbing missile salvos the APC’s onboard defensive ECM system barely managed to scramble. The tunnel had been ripped to shreds by the missile strikes and collapsed in sections behind the fleeing APC. Blocking further pursuit.
For now.
“Everybody out!” shouted Captain Davis.
Makaffie, who’d been wedged into the boarding well, popped the hatch and rolled out onto the high-speed magnetic tracks beneath the platform. Carrying details were quickly organized for Greenhill, who was tranqed out, and for Sergeant Major Andres, who’d turned gray and was barely breathing. Neither man was conscious.
“He don’t look so good,” commented Makaffie as they hoisted the senior NCO up onto the platform.
“Sergeant major’s tough. Don’t mind him,” said Martin. “He’s gonna make it all right.” He was covering the retreat with the only two remaining sidearms that had charge packs. All charge packs for the rifles had been expended.
The soldiers and civilians made their way up through the still-pristine levels the Savages had apparently not tried to breach during their initial counterassault against Objective Rio. That was, until they reached the last set of protected escalators that led up from the secure government access to the stadium and the high-profile dignitary seating. The security had been state-of-the-art for the Galaxy Games that had captured the collective galactic worlds’ attention just two years back. New Vega had been the place to be that glittering summer.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 35