Now, below that final set of escalators, they came across Savages who had died by the score. Ruined corpses and shattered armor littered the scorch-marked and carbon-scored marble flooring.
“Halt and identify!” came an enhanced voice from up at the top of the long escalator system. Temporary quick-deploy barricades had been erected up there, and it was clear several heavy-pulse muzzles were now centering on the ragtag group of soldiers and the wounded, desperate civilians who’d just shown up in their kill zone.
“It’s Captain Davis of United Worlds Navy, special sections. Admiral Sulla knows we’re coming through!”
For a long moment they were greeted by a tense silence. Someone up there was making a decision either to open fire or to take the time to check out the navy captain’s story.
“Where’s Tyrus Rechs?” came the reply. “Admiral wants to know.”
“I’ll tell him myself,” she shouted up. “Please let us through. We have wounded.”
Another long pause.
Some of the civilians began to whimper at this final obstacle when they had made it so far and come so close. The two twins had taken to sticking to close to Davis, and she heard the stronger one, the older one, whisper as her younger sister began to cry.
“Don’t worry,” the older one said. “They’re soldiers. Not monsters. And all soldiers are good. Just like Austin.”
In that moment of waiting, hearing the little girl express faith in a thing that wasn’t always true in Captain Davis’s experience, she wished for a better galaxy than the one she was handing off to the next generation. If there would even be a next generation.
She moved to both of the girls and took their hands in hers. Feeling their tininess as she covered them. Vowing to change things as best she could with what time remained to her.
“It’ll be okay,” she whispered as she continued to watch the barrels of the rifles of the sentries poking out from their fighting positions high above. Pointing at them. Pointing at the girls.
The voice shouted down once more. “Admiral says you’re clear. Come up one at a time. We’ll need to search you. Send the wounded up first—we have medics on the way.”
And then Captain Davis began to breathe, realizing she had not in those long moments between life and death when she’d wished for a better galaxy.
75
There was one charge pack for the heavy left. Ammunition for the hand cannon was depleted by a little less than fifty percent. A couple of fraggers. One tactical machete.
Tyrus Rechs had fought his way through the checkpoints and quick reaction forces that had responded to his journey through the levels surrounding the old colony ship. Leading the Savage teams along a running battle through an interconnected series of subterranean ventilation systems to keep the whole complex fed with oxygen, he’d decimated their forces by fractions as they dared to follow.
That they were aware he was still running around inside their complex was clear. They were very aware. The last wave to come at him was a group of heavy infantry Savages with much better armor, servo-assisted light machine guns, and some sort of energy shields. Rechs had led them into a narrow ventilation feed, climbed upward through the blades of a giant fan that fed into surface air chambers, and then shot them down as they pursued, falling back each time they attempted to dislodge him with grenades. In the end they’d paid a heavy price and pulled back due to losses.
He’d survived, but it had taken time. Time that was running out. And he’d purposefully taken a roundabout path, trying to stay away from his target destination so that they wouldn’t fortify there or send more reinforcements.
But now, with the Savage heavy assault teams pulling back until they could come at him from another angle, it was time to make his move. Time to rescue the big sniper. Less than an hour until the Chang departed and the whole planet got cooked.
No part of his mind doing the math told him he wasn’t going to make it despite the overwhelming evidence that he wasn’t going to. He had a plan, if Sulla was game. A way of maybe bringing about what the admiral—and Captain Davis—seemed to think would win the war. Not trigger-nukes, but a unified fighting force. But the plan was no good if he didn’t get the big sniper out of the deep freeze.
But that’s not true either, is it? his mind told him as he raced along a maintenance passage to get to a spot overlooking the last known position of the Wild Man’s transponder. Its signal had gone offline an hour ago.
You could just leave him, continued that other voice. Because you don’t need him for this plan. Not really. You can still make the rendezvous at the LZ. Or you can make it to Plan B. You don’t have to rescue him. Why throw yourself away?
He switched off that other part of his mind that always offered the easy way out. He’d learned to ignore it a long time ago. Even when it told him the truth.
He had said he’d do his best. Which meant if there was a chance… then he’d do everything he could.
A few minutes later he was in position near the last known ping. He’d come out above the roadway that ran alongside the massive vault of bubbles that were seemingly glued to one wall of the storage well. If you didn’t look closely, they just looked like a big expensive corporate office art decoration to make some company that was like all the rest seem somehow different. Individuals working together might have been the message.
But the armor didn’t tell lies.
Inside his HUD he was getting tags on the thousands of suspended lives floating in crystal-clear amber, as it were. They were barely alive in there. Hovering between life and death.
The transponder was still not pinging.
Rechs, who’d had to crawl the last hundred meters once the maintenance access turned to little more than a large air duct, ran through the armor’s functions. He called up an image of the one they’d all just called the Wild Man. Then he accessed the armor’s recognition algo. Something he’d used a lot during the frontier days of the galaxy—after the Savages had taken him and before they began to show up in earnest—when he worked as a bounty hunter and law enforcer for hire. When he’d grown tired of soldiering for generals who seemed indifferent to anything other than making sure their troops were good and killed in skirmishes between planets seeking domination the way nations and continents once did. Days long gone once the galaxy got civilized.
The armor, a thing that had come from the Savages, in a place they’d found inside the galaxy that didn’t exist in space-time—the Quantum Library, they’d called it—ran the search, using the HUD to examine the faces of the thousands of men, women, and children trapped inside the bubbles along the far wall. Searching every face for that of the Wild Man.
Within three seconds it had a match. A filled bubble halfway up the wall in a tiered cluster was the one the Wild Man had been stored within.
The processing dirigible was still floating along the tier, loading more survivors taken from a multi-wheeled cargo hauler. Seven Savages stood around the vehicle, but there was no other defensive force.
Rechs ran through his plan.
More than likely, once he extracted the sniper, he’d have to carry him. Couldn’t count on him to be of much help for the short term. So best to use the heavy now, because he’d need less weight when it came time to exfil. And he’d gone this way before. Within the tunnel leading past the storage well there was an access door that accessed a stairwell, a long one.
Davis had mentioned, as they passed it the first time, that it led right up to street level. A fire exit route up from the lower levels. Which hadn’t done them any good when they had an APC and a trigger-nuke to cart around. But now, it would do just fine.
A small sign outside the stairwell read Emergency Exit: Do Not Use Except in Case of Emergency. If ever there was one… now would qualify.
That was the best he could do to get them both out of here. If he could get them above ground, t
hen maybe there was a chance the comms would work and… something. Rechs hadn’t figured that part out yet.
He smashed out the cover of the air duct and dropped down onto the dark subterranean roadway across from the canyon of bubbles. Walking quickly toward the Savages surrounding the cargo truck, he raised the heavy on its sling and began to fire from the hip, his targeting HUD helping him to send rounds just as accurately as shoulder fire.
The first thing that happened was several Savages dropped, surprised, in death. Then those not initially hit by pulse fire scrambled for cover.
This was fine for Rechs’s purposes.
Now they would try to assess the situation by popping out for a look, or engaging to pin him down while a flanking team closed the distance from another angle. Standard tactics. Useful for what they were.
He unloaded a brutal burst on the first Savage to pop from around the truck. Pulse fire tore the head and torso to shreds at the same moment that three Savages on the opposite side of the cargo hauler began to fire from underneath. Hot rounds skipped off the pavement; their fire was wide and bad. He’d rattled them. But they’d recover.
If he gave them time. Which he wasn’t going to.
With barely a pause he bent over, lowered the heavy pulse gun, and swept the street beneath the truck. Pulse fire smashed into faceless helmets leaving horrible gaping holes in the dirty glass of the twitching bodies.
The rest of the team was spooled up and charged from behind the vehicle. Rechs merely stood, pivoted, and dumped the entire charge into over-cycle fire, cutting them all down before they even got five meters. The felled Savages were armored, so most weren’t killed outright, but they were all knocked down by the relativistic effects of the pulse gun, and most were left with smoking holes in their various systems.
Without slowing his pace, Rechs unclipped the empty heavy and dropped it onto the roadway. He pulled the hand cannon and put a single round in the helmet of each still-moving Savage. Then he rounded the truck and made for the gantry leading out to the processing dirigible.
Gunfire streamed down from a sentry team stationed onboard the dirigible. They had seen the carnage that had been done to their rear guard. But the shots missed, merely smashing the wide windows of the cargo hauler between Rechs and them.
Rechs waited for his armor to tag every armed Savage inside the dirigible. Then he scrambled up the gantry and used burst fire from his hand cannon to make sure that each defender had been cut down. He was burning through what precious little ammo he had left, but it was necessary.
He boarded the airship and pulled the tactical machete with its carbon-forged blade with his off hand. A Savage medical tech, who’d been processing the drugged-out citizens of New Vega, attacked him with two old-school metal scalpels, swinging them in wide vicious arcs as he advanced. The first one struck Rechs’s armor and snapped. The second one never made contact as a sudden slash from the machete brought the assault to an immediate halt. The Savage, unarmored, and wearing only some sort of biomechanical carapace, howled like a wounded dishwasher and went stumbling through pristine racks and trays.
There was one other tech remaining. This Savage came at Rechs with a spinning bone saw.
Rechs raised the hand cannon and blew the tech’s head off at point-blank range.
All resistance had been dealt with.
Time for extraction.
Sixty seconds later he’d used the dirigible’s rudimentary joystick controls to center the floating ship’s extraction portal with the bubble where the Wild Man was stored. He moved from the controls to the extraction portal and studied the bubble’s surface, aware that klaxons were reverberating throughout the tunnels. They were definitely on to his scent once more. It was one thing to wipe out their front-line troops in the running game of tag-with-weapons they’d been playing for the last few hours. It was quite another to go after their food source.
That was sure to trigger the direst of alarms.
The Savages didn’t mind taking, but they hated to be taken from.
Tells you volumes about what monsters they’ve become, that other voice told him. But he wasn’t interested. They were less than human to Tyrus Rechs, and he’d stopped trying to figure them out beyond tactical advantages he might use to kill them. He felt nothing when killing Savages. Even less than when he’d killed animals for survival or protection.
They were less than.
The bubble in front of him had a connecting hose, apparently for draining the gel in which the Wild Man was stored.
Rechs didn’t have time for that.
He smashed the machete into the glass. It was heavy glass, but the machete could cut ceramic armor like it was made of butter. Two more strikes and the glass collapsed into sheets of spider-webbing debris. As the gel flooded out in amber goopy waterfalls, he reached his gauntleted hand into the mess.
Over some PA system a Savage voice bellowed in its peculiar electronic shriek. It sounded like an old arcade game speaking twenty different languages at once and it went on and on about something.
He figured it boiled down to… Protect the Nest. All must respond.
But repeated a thousand times a minute and said with a frantic neuroticism.
The HUD identified dangerous narcotic compounds within the gel flooding out from the bubble that could have harmed him were the armor not protecting him. It was already suggesting a drug suite it could manufacture just in case there was an integrity breach in the armor.
No time for that either.
He sheathed his machete and pulled the Wild Man out through the bubble’s smashed front, clearing away as much fractured glass as he could, knowing there’d be some cuts.
For a moment Tyrus Rechs thought he’d caught a break. The big sniper’s eyes opened, wild and rolling, and he focused on Rechs as he coughed and retched and spewed out thick, viscous gel. And then, gel mixing with spittle on his chin and dripping from his nostrils, eyes, and ears, the Wild Man croaked, “It’s forever in there!”
Then he collapsed into unconsciousness once more.
Using the armor’s servo assist, Rechs got the bigger man over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He moved for the gantry to exit the madhouse floating hospital, or morgue, that was the dirigible, and drew his hand cannon. Best to have it ready. He was sure to meet more Savages soon.
Already he could hear Savage scout cycle teams streaking down the midnight black tunnels. Coming for him. And other things too. Big lumbering mechs that must be brimming with missiles and all kinds of weapons he’d didn’t have a tactical answer to right at this moment.
He only had one plan now.
Run.
Fast.
That was the best he could do.
76
Admiral Sulla met Captain Davis in the triage station that had been set up on the aft cargo deck of the Chang.
“Where is he?” asked Sulla.
A medic was treating a bad cut she’d sustained somewhere along the way and hadn’t even noticed.
“He went back in after one of our…” she began.
What were they? What had they been—that little fellowship of soldiers and a navy captain who’d suddenly formed up after the battle to complete one last denial-of-service mission? To deliver a doomsday weapon like no other weapon mankind had conceived of in all its years of turning things, forces, and concepts into weapons. A weapon that burned a planet up within hours.
A brotherhood, Rechs had called it. Brothers. Even her.
Thinking about each of them, the ones she’d journeyed with for the last night and a day, down there in the tunnels… it seemed like she’d always known them. Known them better than the crew she’d lost here. Or lovers she’d once known. Or family she’d left behind.
“One of us,” she finally finished. “He went back after the sniper who got captured.”
“Tyrus,�
�� said Sulla, saying the name as if it were a curse. His cool, calm, and at times stern admiral’s exterior was now gone. There was nothing but concern here.
The concern of one best friend for the other.
Who would’ve thought? Tyrus Rechs, galactic war criminal… and a senior ranking admiral in the United Worlds Navy.
Best friends.
“I don’t know what happened after that,” she said, wishing she could provide some relief or comfort to the now very human admiral standing before her. “He turned off comm after he left us. I don’t know why.”
Sulla made a face. A face that said something not pleasant. And best left unsaid.
“The sniper?” he asked.
She nodded, because there wasn’t anything else to say. Tyrus Rechs had gone back after one man who probably wasn’t even Coalition-attached.
And what about the doomsday weapon that’s about to go boom? That’s what you should really be asking about, Admiral.
“And the trigger-nuke?” asked Admiral Sulla.
She nodded tiredly and waved one dried blood-covered hand.
“It’s armed. Geo-trapped, too. It’s going to go off in… twenty minutes and thirty-three seconds. I wouldn’t expect anything else.”
Sulla nodded. But his eyes and his thoughts were far away.
“I probably don’t know him,” she said, “as well as you do, sir. But… I’d bank on that weapon detonating. From… well… he’s a hard man. A good man. Definitely not the war criminal the governments make him out to be with the help of the media. I know that… now. But he’s a hard one. He’ll let the trigger detonate because killing Savages seems to be what he lives for—besides the thing that sent him back after one… of us. Even if he has to die to do it. He’ll cook the planet to kill as many Savages as he can. That’s his end game, and it might as well be today.”
Sulla turned toward her. Staring at her. And she knew from the look in his eyes that she had correctly diagnosed his oldest and best friend. That the admiral had learned these things long ago.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 36