Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2)

by Jason Anspach

  Maybe this was the final shedding of all sheddings.

  “No,” he said. Amazed that he had.

  This time was different than all the other do-overs, once-agains, from the top but with talent this time, sheddings…

  This.

  Was.

  Something.

  New.

  “There’s one last place,” he said.

  The mighty Commander Zero, armored like some titan of old and new all at once. Armed to the teeth with sidearm, battle rifle, and grenades, nodded at him and then held out her armored glove.

  He reached for her. Because this time was different. And maybe the last.

  “Good, Crometheus,” she said softly. “We’ll do this together.”

  And then she took his hand and led him to the arcade.

  Gods: Chapter Nineteen

  It wasn’t a long walk into the strip mall and the Lazer Command arcade. But the view was incredible. The whole entire world was on fire for just the two of them. The armored Eternal commander and the boy he’d once been.

  Distant neighborhoods went up in sheets of flame as other gas stations, doughnut shops, and businesses he’d never known but that had been familiar all the same exploded across the skyline.

  It was the end of the world… and it was beautiful.

  She didn’t enter the strip mall with him, but stood on the cracked and broken sidewalk near the freeway entrance. Bidding him to finish and be done. It was understood that he would go into the arcade and finish this alone. And then he would become what he was becoming.

  The last shedding.

  Godhood at hand.

  He left Commander Zero’s bizarrely comforting presence and made his way across the scorched and cracked parking lot as waves of heat came at him off the destruction all around. No one would ever again be coming to get their car washed over in the silent car wash that was already catching fire. Cleaning fluids transformed with chemical ignition into pretty death orchids of flame and then suddenly rising djinns of tempest and fire. The nearby Wendy’s, whose wooden shingle roof was on fire, looked like a burning asylum. No one would be coming for a sandwich from Togo’s. Flames sprang to life as he passed by those empty and iconic places of his youth, igniting and devouring those lost religions of commerce. Those lost Ozymandias statues would lie half-buried in the sands of his mind forever. Watching over the wastelands of his soul like quiet sentinels. Testaments to his eternality.

  He would be a god of destruction. And the accepted sacrifices would be the ruins of all the worlds in the galaxy.

  Making silent statements that could only be answered with more questions.

  He crossed the wide and empty parking lot, waves of heat shimmering out across the length of it even though it was early morning just after dawn. More houses within distant burning neighborhoods exploded as gas ranges and cars cooked off from within. Sudden sprays of shingled roofs sprang into the air with thunderous fracka-booms like the manufactured geysers at some Vegas water show from long ago. Black ash was beginning to rain down, and that was somehow perfect to Crometheus whether he liked it or not. He brushed away some of the burnt snowflakes that had landed on his face and found that he was crying.

  Tears of joy, or sadness, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. They were just falling from his eyes.

  That time, in his youth, he’d been obsessed with the end of the world. With the duck-and-cover drills in school. With the “day after” nuclear annihilation motif wending its way into everything from movies to games and comic books, even videos on MTV. The end of the world had seemed like some new beginning back then, instead of an end to everything that had gone before.

  And if one was attuned enough to unwrap the enigmas of such memories… then maybe they, those doomsday entertainments, were prophecies of hope, and not warnings of doom.

  He stepped from the parking lot onto the sidewalk in front of Lazer Command. Would the door even be open? What was he in control of now that it had all begun to burn? Would he have to toss some loose piece of concrete through the window to enter and burn down the last hidden place within himself for the final shedding to be complete? What metaphysical-restraint discard needed to be played for it all to burn?

  Everything.

  He tried the tinted glass door to the old arcade. To the old temple of the religion that worshipped the things he’d believed in. All the windows were so darkly tinted you couldn’t see in. In fact he never remembered seeing out. Arcades required darkness. The game graphics looked better in the gloom.

  Funny that, he thought.

  Maybe that was the psychological trick that had kept this place hidden through every shedding, and finally made it a reality he could inhabit inside the Pantheon. Maybe its tinted windows, inside his memories of the place, made it somehow not part of the whole. Unnoticed within the nondescript strip mall of his soul.

  The world was silent save for the distant crackle of burning fires out of control.

  The door to the arcade swung open easily and he felt a cool blast of air and the clean smell of working electronics and burnt ozone. The eight-bit ditties and sound effects of dying aliens and repeated blaster fire came at him all at once.

  He knew Old Man Webb was gone.

  Had to be.

  But there was someone here. Someone else was inside the arcade as the world burned down to nothing but ruin and ash. He turned toward that row of machines lined up along one wall. Knowing who he’d see. Seeing Jim Stepp at his machine. Devil’s Hollow. Staring right into it and working the joystick left to right as he tapped the fire button quickly and constantly. The screen was so black nothing could be seen within it.

  How, wondered boy Crometheus, did he know where to move?

  Stepp turned his head slowly and saw him standing there in the doorway. There was a strange light in his eye. A knowing twinkle only the bad kids get when they’re about to get up to trouble. Commit a crime, even.

  “Ready to go down to the tracks, kid?” asked Jim Stepp.

  Crometheus had come here to burn it all down. To burn down this part of his world, memories, himself, everything he’d kept back from his final becoming. As though he could have his cake and eat it too just like every sinner who’d ever crossed the lines, or torn down the walls, to have what they wanted, consequences be damned. Have your cake and eat it too. No repercussions.

  But that had all been a lie. Of course there were those things. And now he’d finally come to the end of himself, or so Crometheus hoped. Now, it was time to divest himself… of himself. Completely. Totally. So that he could become the thing he’d been meant to be all along. From lost kid to rock-and-roll god to movie star and all things in between. The final incarnation was the one he’d been aiming at even when he hadn’t known what he was trying to hit.

  A god, once and forever.

  Wasn’t that what this was about? Had been all about? Everything?

  The Animals call the Uplifted… Savages.

  Then yes.

  I’ll be a savage god. A ruler of them all. I’ll become that. I’ll be their god of destruction.

  Stepp looked at the can of gas in boy Crometheus’s hand. The book of matches in the other.

  “You need to know what’s down there first,” warned Jim Stepp. “Before you do this. You need to know, man. You’ve forgotten much more than you know right now.”

  But maybe forgotten wasn’t the word that got used as the arcade beeped, whirred, and whistled. Maybe the word had been deleted. And his mind had translated deleted into forgotten.

  The older boy was talking about the swamp. Crometheus knew that. And also something else. Something he had wanted to know. Something he’d buried even more than this place he tried to hide from them all. Keeping this world of his past safe for just himself for all time. A place where he never grew and never changed. A constant among the stars. And
somehow Jim Stepp was like a secret compartment within all that hidden data. A failsafe designed by him a long time ago for just such a moment as this. A keeper of all things forgotten.

  But why? Why had they been forgotten? Buried.

  “You really need to know,” said Stepp one last time. Like some kid telling him he needed to smoke his first joint. Or TP a house to be part of the crew. Or rip off some booze from Bagger’s liquor store just for kicks. Bad things that needed to be done as some sort of rite of passage if one was going to become.

  Crometheus set down the gas can on the carpet of the arcade.

  “How?”

  The older boy stepped away from the machine that was known as his. From “the Hollow,” as some had called it. With an uncharacteristic flourish he waved a hand at it while holding up one shiny brass token.

  “We can get there through this.”

  Crometheus stared at it for a moment. Then stepped forward and took the symbol. The token. The bronze disc. Readying himself as he always had any time he ever played a game, he stepped in front of the Hollow, dropped in the token, and readied himself to win.

  A moment later the darkness within the machine consumed him.

  * * *

  He was following Jim Stepp through a misty jungle. A swamp. Both of them dressed in subdued tiger-striped jungle fatigues.

  Just like the Uplifted had worn when they raided Cappella Three after Sirius Two. When they fought a brutal two-year war to dislodge the planet’s inhabitants, only to finally lose in the end by nuking the rock into uninhabitability. Being forced once more to retreat starward aboard the aging Pantheon. A ship barely running and falling apart as it did. Low on food. Calories. Every conversation had been about calories. There were already problems with the hab and farming systems. And how was one ship supposed to fight an entire planet for a small patch to live on? To start building the utopia they’d been readying themselves for. That’s what they’d been reduced to in those days. Begging for just a patch on someone else’s world to start over. And when the begging didn’t work, they tried to take it by force. And that had gone pretty badly.

  He was hungry back then. Everyone had been. All the time. Everyone in the Pantheon was always hungry.

  The jungle Jim Stepp led him through gave way to a clearing in the mist… and then the sides of buildings and streets came into view. The vast wide spaces of New Vega and the battle they’d just fought for it.

  The day was just like the actual day of the invasion. When they’d hit hard. Struck at all the command and control systems of that world in a week-long series of preemptive denial-of-service stealth attacks along with quiet bioweapon neutralizers to shut down half the population’s ability to fight back effectively. The Animals thought the bioweapons were just the flu. A suddenly bad one at that. And that the local comm net was just having sunspot problems with Vega’s bright star in the sky. That was why comms were funny. That was all the Animals thought in the few hours that remained to them of their free lives.

  But really it had been Uplifted. The Uplifted they called the Savages, waging a silent war on the ground weeks before the Animals even knew it was a shooting war. Always start the fight before the other guy knows he’s in one. TED 503:14. Easier to gain momentum.

  Crometheus the Uplifted marine had been part of a commando team with Clan Thunder Claw. Hitting military communications posts across the planet. Swift brief raids across the night side to knock out their comms network. All combatants neutralized by stealth and sudden violence of action. AI mimics installed in the local software to keep up the appearance of normal comm traffic while sowing a slow campaign of disinformation in preparation for the actual assault. New Vega going electronically dark at the critical moment of zero hour when they realized the “Savages” were attacking. When they were trying to get defensive batteries up and interceptors into the air. When hell was breaking loose, in other words.

  Now he was back in that memory. Leaving the mists of the swamp beyond the train tracks and following Jim Stepp into…

  … a banquet set up in front of New Vega mil-comm traffic station four. Stepp led him through the misty night jungle that surrounded that installation. That had been their biggest coup. The Thunder Claw commando team Crometheus had been part of. They’d dropped in by orbital glider and hit the target in the predawn hours before the main assault on the central population centers of New Vega. The combat model of G-97 had been swapped out for silenced MP5Xs with laser sights. Weaponry pulled out of deep storage. Old, but incredibly reliable for the wet-work they were being tasked with to knock out station four.

  The whole detachment had worked the problem in-game for weeks prior to the premier hit to kick off the assault. In the end Crometheus had been assigned by Maestro to be the strike leader. The tip of the spear, as it were. Then it was him leading a wedge of Uplifted marines kitted in camo-skinned light armor systems straight into the objective. They swept across the equatorial jungle mountain ridge in the dark, closing in on the massive comm relay that hung in the basin below. The central suspended dish in the basin was operated by a small tower within a tight security-controlled compound atop the ridge.

  The battle for New Vega, when it started, would be fought thousands of miles away. But this target was important for disrupting planetary military comms.

  The Animal sentries at the main gate had seen nothing but ghosts coming out of the misty jungle night, until sudden whispers of suppressed gunfire slammed into their skulls and chests in tight shot groupings.

  “Solid hits!” announced the in-game announcer over the team comm. Cash rained down across Crometheus’s HUD as two other Uplifted marines under him set to work on violating the gate’s security locks while the rest of the unit stacked along the outer walls beneath the comm tower’s glare. Hot white searchlights crossed out in the jungle, lazily searching for something to alert the auto-turrets to.

  He was hungry.

  He’d always remember that moment. Ravenously hungry. Hungry for a burger. He’d remember that feeling forever as the gates were hacked by two fellow marines. A second later they slithered open and the work of slaughter began in earnest as the Uplifted hit team neutralized everyone. It was over in under two minutes. Just as it was supposed to be. Just as it had been planned to be.

  Just… as it was going down all across the New Vega comm network on this last night of the pre-game for the invasion of an Animal world to make all their own.

  The first Uplifted world.

  The Pantheon’s new home world.

  They would not be dislodged as they had been from Cappella Three. They would not be thrown out. They were staying. They were keeping their patch this time. In fact, they were keeping the whole damned planet. This time. Centuries of raiding and retreating back to the empty voids of deep space were over.

  They were coming home. Their new home.

  Tomorrow would find them all, every Uplifted marine, fighting a full-scale battle against three heavy divisions of New Vega armor just to get a foothold inside the main city. But tonight, the game was theirs. They owned the darkness. And they reveled in its vastness.

  Working quickly, the hit team spread out across the compound to put down every Animal. Most of whom were sleeping in a small barracks near the main control tower. The duty room was hit by three marines at once and a short spat of firing broke out in the night silence as full mags were dumped into the three Animal soldiers standing night watch and drinking coffee, thinking nothing ever happened out here at the comm relay known as Four.

  “Prizes! Prizes! Prizes!” whooped the announcer inside their HUDs as each fatality was recorded for the Pantheon’s posterity and viewership. And enjoyment. But the “Big Vic” came when Crometheus at the head of an assault team breached the comm tower door and started shooting fast as they climbed the tower. Knocking out the smaller levels in seconds. There was no way for the station’s watch com
mander not to have heard the commotion as the team stormed the upper reaches of the control tower. And it was a close thing at the last as they burst through to the top level that looked out over the vast sleeping dish in the blue of the high jungle mountains’ late night. The Animal commander was reaching for the alert button, ready to send up an electronic signal flare that Four was under attack by unknowns, when Crometheus landed the tri-dot laser sight on the man’s head and pulled the trigger on the silenced MP5X.

  Single shot through the brainpan. Finesse. This was for all the achievement points.

  One in the head.

  Two in the body a single breath later.

  The Animal slithered down the wall badly. His eyes awash with fresh horror. His mouth silently forming the word “Savages!” As though he’d only just realized, and still couldn’t believe it, that their societal boogey monsters had actually come in from the dark to wrest their world away from them.

  That the devil was real. Evil did indeed exist.

  The in-game announcer went wild as the operation was called and the hit team was awarded a “Flawless Victory” in shimmering gold Las Vegas dazzle-style letters, all of it erupting across their HUDs.

  “You’ve just been upgraded to a fabulous gourmet feast!” shrieked the hyperactive announcer ecstatically.

  Jim Stepp, who’s been there all along, following the memory of that commando team as Crometheus led the assault on Four, whispers something in his ear. They’re both just boys, crouching in the darkness and watching the playlet unfold from beyond the security perimeter.

  Hidden in the jungle.

  “Is that what you think you got, kid? A fancy meal?”

  The other Uplifted marines can’t see them. And the image shifts to the banquet they received in honor of their victory. Flown in direct after the station was neutralized and the AI mimic was up and sowing discord in the comm stations of New Vega.

  Except, just before it does, just before the memory of that beautiful once-in-a-lifetime banquet inside an authentic German Ratskeller with sausages and beer and potatoes fried in mustard while buxom blond beauties brought forth more of everything, including a pig cooked whole from which they tore pieces shining with grease and bit into crackling skin while slaking their thirst with cold beer, beauties giggling and laughing while the victors dandled them on their armored knees… just before that best-ever meal of victory on the night before the war for the Pantheon’s new home began in earnest… the game in the arcade glitched and Crometheus saw something else.