“Well,” began Immaculus over the comm. His voice the smooth cool British tone of a member of the aristocracy he’d once been. He’d opted for godhood over merely being a number in the line of succession to the old English monarchy that eventually fled Earth for the world the Animals now called New Britannia. And there’d been some colossal scandal if one remembered all the ancient gossip, thought Crometheus in those uncertain moments before the battle began. Some scandal regarding Immaculus back on Earth… but in the light of hundreds of years in the future from that long-ago fall from grace, now that the Uplifted had invaded the aforementioned New Britannia… it had been the wise choice on his part. Full of foresight in the months after the descendants he’d once come from had collapsed. That world that was now in ruins and being rebuilt by the Id, and the old monarchy had vanished in a single battle. To a man.
“They’ll come down along the main lift hub. Eight personnel lifts and one cargo. I’m guessing they can flog two hundred at a time down to our levels to throw at us once they identify resistance. And…” He sighed on a droll note. “Then there are the stairwells. Two on each side of the facility. Steady stream that way also, I suspect. We’ll have to cover everything or get rolled up on our flanks, chaps. And lady.”
He was right, thought Crometheus. Good tac assessment. But they’d all gotten months of downloaded training and simming in planning and execution on both the tactical and strategic level.
“We take all three. Three teams of two. One team per access point,” ordered Crometheus. “Wear them out and prevent a breach operation on the reactor and the flush controls. That’s what we’re here to do. Buy time until the main body can get closer.”
It was Marz who spoke next.
“Solid plan. I say we execute. Mind you, children… any of us fails and it’s all over for the rest. So kill them all and let the galaxy know who you are.” His voice over the comm had all the warmth of graveyard granite on a cold winter’s night. And it sounded just as dusty and worn as a tombstone too. Back on Earth he’d been an actual hard-bitten mercenary who destabilized third-world countries for corporate raiders to loot and rebuild in their own image. He also had the most experience at actual warfare. Or at least he had when the voyage began, coming in with the ex-German special operations hires. They’d all learned to become killers in the long years since. But Marz had been a killer from way back, learning the trade in bloody little African wars that no one was allowed to care about as the planet worked itself up toward its end.
Crometheus knew Marz was here, with the Chaos team, because the old soldier had never been able to resist a solid firefight. Not on Sirius, or any of the other worlds they’d visited in the Pantheon. Whenever and wherever it went down, Marz had always been in the thick of it. Burning magazines and taking lives.
Always in the thick of it.
And of course, that brought home to Crometheus at last that despite his vainglorious promise to buy the main body of Eternals time for something as ephemeral as honor and glory… that most likely he’d come to the end of himself. For this was indeed the thick of it. This was where it went down. If Marz was here, then this was where the real fighting was going to take place.
“Who wants what?” asked Crometheus, regarding their assignments to meet the oncoming enemy force.
In short order the lots were divvied and everyone took the section they’d defend to the death. Though that bit was left unspoken. Three teams of two. One team on each stairwell. One on the lifts. And nobody really wanted the lifts because that’s where the heaviest, most desperately outnumbered fighting was going to be done. So it fell to Marz, who said nothing, and Crometheus, who waited for everyone to make their choice.
Immaculus and Alantra on the southern stairwell. Zur and Smaug on the northern.
In the last moment of their being a collective whole, the first Chaos team found themselves in a circle they hadn’t intended to form. Each one had been too much of an individualist icon, or even an iconoclast, in their past life on Earth, to ever need to share the limelight with anyone else. But here they were and all of them sensed the real possibility of getting game-overed in what lay ahead. And so, like the humans they’d tried to shed every vestige of… they sought some final connection at the last of themselves.
Coming close and into the ancient circle though they’d never intended it.
“They’ll write songs about us,” muttered Smaug. “That’s got to be worth something, right?”
Marz laughed. He’d faced death a thousand times before and walked away each and every time. Maybe today would be different. Maybe not. His dry chuckle seemed to hint at something unspoken. Something that knew more about death and its finality than the rest of them were ready to accept.
No one offered anything else until finally it was time to go. Then it was Immaculus of all people who left them with this. His droll manner of speaking suddenly eloquent and somehow grand.
“A song wouldn’t be so bad, Smaug. There’s something immortal even in that. Someone once said, I forget who now, but they said forget all that nonsense about writing the laws of a nation. They said, let me write their songs and I’ll shape your people’s hearts. Let me tell them stories and I’ll teach them what’s important. Let me write their poems and I’ll show them what they’ve lost. It was something like that… though it’s hard to recall now after so many years. So yes, I’ll take a song about me if that’s in the offing. Maybe in the end that’s the immortality we’ve been looking for all along. Right, Cro? You were a rock star once. You know how it is when it’s time for your last show. Last curtain call, eh. Final bow. Feels like this might be that. Oh well, lads and lasses… tallyho, as we used to say in the RAF.”
Crometheus shuffled forward and lowered his weapon with one gauntlet. He stuck the other out in front of the rest. His armored glove forming a fist.
This would be the symbol of the Chaos teams, and in time the Eternals, and eventually the entire military force of the combined Uplifted tribes, over the next fifteen hundred years of hard fighting across the galaxy to come. The symbol would represent a fighting force that would almost annihilate the entire galaxy.
It would stand for the Uplifted… no, the Savage marines.
“All in,” he said softly. Then, “For honor and glory.”
And one by one they stuck their own armored fists into the circle. As every Savage marine would come to do for what remained of their time in the galactic lens. A time of horror and brutality for centuries to come.
Gods: Chapter Thirty
The Animals pushed from the two stairwells on opposite sides of the level the Chaos team was defending. Coming at Immaculus and Alantra first on the southern stairwell. Zur and Smaug on the north.
Reactor.
Main power.
This was the level that provided energy to the entire base. Three independent micro-reactors fed the rest of this station from this heavily shielded area. The Chaos team had chosen this area to defend because they knew the Animals would enter cautiously, hesitating to engage in order not to damage the power production systems. Fearful that they might even set off some kind of dangerous chain reaction that could detonate the base and kill them all. These were just soldiers and not scientists, after all, so Marz had reasoned that they’d be afraid of the advanced technology as soldiers were wont to be. But the truth was that most of the level was rather well protected from light arms fire, and the reactor shielding was even rated to stand up to heavy explosions and bunker-busting AGM munitions. Nothing anyone was bringing into this fight was going to damage anything, in Marz’s opinion.
“But the Animals will be worried all the same that they’re going to set something off. Do some real damage. You see, that’s the thing with Animals. They’re weak in the mind. They’re always trying to save their own skins no matter what. Even when they’ve got a job to do, they’ll still try to find a way to do it with as little
damage or self-harm as they can inflict. We’ll use that against them today. We’ll make their fear our ally. We’ll fight with violence, surprise, and aggression. Combine that with their fear and we might just walk away from this regardless of what Zero says our odds are. Or at least, some of us, perhaps, will walk away.”
The Spilursan special teams unit on the southern stairs, sweeping the area with red targeting lasers, armored in tactical gear, and moving in turtle formations, were the first to make contact.
Immaculus opened up with a full-auto burst from the 1000 and cut down the point man. No one was using the special HE rounds yet. They’d save those for when the Animals started coming at them in waves. The specialized ammo would cut through two and three ranks at a time, regardless of cover.
Still, in the opening moments of the massive firefight that was about to erupt, as Immaculus fired from the concealed position he and Alantra had set up for a crossfire on the stairwell, the first squad of Spilursan operators went down with little effort. Both Eternals worked over the mass of wounded and dying operators scrambling to get away from the maelstrom of bullets ripping into them. Smooth professionalism fled as the movement-to-contact turned into a desperate rout. Dozens of six-point-five-millimeter rounds shattered armor and bone, devastating and rag-dolling the bodies of the soldiers caught in the storm of lead moving at twenty-five hundred meters per second.
“Contact,” whispered Alantra softly over the comm.
Within seconds, enemy fire began at the northern stairwell. This time the Animal operators knew an ambush was waiting, and they lobbed flashbangs in to lead their assault. Zur and Smaug didn’t mind taking a little incoming. Certainly not the flashbangs. The reflex armor system had been refined after the battle on New Vega and was now quite adept at recognizing shock and bang weapons that disabled electronics and physical senses. Recognizing, tracking, analyzing… and then blipping its own power for a second, hardening itself against the effects of EMP by simply not being on in the calculated moment of the explosion. And the armor’s last act before shutting down was to opaque the mirrored visors to full midnight darkness, preventing the Eternal operators within from being visually disoriented. A ghostly sensor-generated image of the battlefield appeared during the brief downtime allowing the Uplifted to continue to engage last known and projected positions of the enemy. It involved a slight delay, but it was good enough. The helmet’s external auditory sensors were shut down as well, and so there was no compromise on that level either.
So it was that Zur and Smaug were not only protected but free to engage, employing fairly accurate guesses about where the enemy was, even as the flashbangs went off. Both Eternals immediately switched over to over-cycle auto-fire and let loose—for two reasons. Defensive measures was reason one. Effected in order to put as many rounds between the Eternals and their oncoming foes as possible. Reason two, accuracy through overwhelming firepower.
There were some survivors from the initial Spilursan assault team on that stairwell, but in no way, shape, or form did they manage to gain a foothold on eight. Wounded and pinned, the surviving Animals had advanced mere meters from the stairwell when the armor rebooted and allowed both Eternals full access to their enhanced targeting and acquisition systems. Seconds later those few survivors of the lead Animal squad died mid-sentence in their frantic sitreps back to command.
But these Animals were only the first. Within two minutes of first contact, heavy assault teams pressed down and forward, pushing through without remorse or thought of the dead dying all around them in the blur of incoming gunfire. Both wings of the Eternals’ Chaos team were engaged in relentless combat.
However, both assaults, as hacked comm traffic would later reveal, were in the end merely probes from the Spilursan commander. The main assault was coming directly at the two Eternals who guarded the central lift hub. Crometheus and Marz.
The main lift was an open well in which a massive hexagonal-shaped freight platform descended. Standard in much of that era’s utilitarian architecture, Ice Station Hades’s central core revolved around the transport system. Surrounding the hexagonal shaft, large enough to accommodate a small sports field, was a recessed walkway. The smaller personnel lifts opened up from the wall onto this walkway.
Once the Spilursan commander determined that he would meet Savage resistance on eight, he ordered the lift dropped to that level. At its center he’d parked the fortress’s only tank. A Spilursan Type-Seven Tiger, anti-air variant. Not known for its superior firepower, because that wasn’t what was needed on an island fortress in the middle of a frozen lake at the top of the world, but commended for its heavy armor shielding and quad anti-aircraft heavy pulse weapon systems. Which had also proven to be effective as anti-personnel weapons.
Surrounding the tank was an improvised fort. The Spilursan operators had erected portable blast field barriers, a recently developed defensive system that deployed charged shields that would stand up to both energy weapons and slug throwers in much the same way a starship’s defensive shielding did. Huddled Spilursan soldiers, each platoon augmented by a special forces operator, waited to engage the enemy under the protection of the Tiger’s quad pulse system. The level would be taken from within, starting at the lift.
Crometheus and Marz waited in the shadows, behind duracrete support pillars under the recessed walkway.
“Here they come,” noted Marz. In the background of their comm Alantra was screaming something about Immaculus being down. Things were going sideways over at the southern stairwell. But that was their problem, thought Crometheus.
The Animals were coming now.
Gods: Chapter Thirty-One
The Spilursan Tiger tank opened fire the instant the lift was down and locked into place on level eight. Four brilliant streams of high-speed pulse fire spat forth and undulating rays of what looked like searing lightning raked the industrial-gray concrete walls not far from the alcoves Crometheus and Marz were covering in.
At the same moment all of the lift doors began to open on empty shafts along the recessed walkways.
“They’ll drop in on static lines in the smaller lift shafts,” murmured Marz, cool as a cucumber despite the hectic scream of immense pulse fire flooding over ambient sound. “Stay ready, Crometheus.”
The fire from the tank was prepping an area on the opposite side of the hexagon for the huddling Spilursan soldiers to move into. It was clear their on-site commander had no idea how many Uplifted they were facing, or where exactly their enemies were, so they were relying on overwhelming firepower to establish position until they could ascertain the disposition of the forces arrayed against them.
As if on cue a detachment of Spilursan Animals, their sergeants shouting at them, hustled forward in wedge formation, heading directly away from Crometheus and Marz. Red targeting lasers danced across the smoke-filled darkness as the quad guns on the Type-Seven Tiger fell silent for a moment.
“They’re shifting fire,” murmured Marz. “Hold position.”
An expectant hydraulic hum could be heard as the tank’s turret rotated to a new firing arc. And at the same time rope lines fell into the empty shafts along the walls of the main lift. The Animals would be coming down those rappel lines soon. Arriving at the backs of the two Uplifted Eternals tasked with defending this point.
Crometheus shouldered his primary and pulled both hand cannons off their carries. The work would be tight and close here under the recessed walkway. Better with sidearms.
“Good move,” whispered Marz, noting Crometheus’s switch to CQB weapons. “If we lose here… fall back to the flow control station. A highlighted route appeared in Crometheus’s HUD.
Over ambient they could hear the thumps of the boots of the rappelers coming down the shafts. Then the quad pulse turret on the tank opened up again, blistering another section of the hexagonal main lift with overwhelming firepower. More troops rushed into the newly blasted area a se
cond later. Troops were shouting, but it was clear they had comm going on and there would be a lot of intel for the taking if the Chaos team could hack in.
“Alantra,” said Marz.
Nothing but silence came back over the comm for a long moment. Then… her voice was breathy and rushed. But not frightened. Crometheus had heard the exact same tone and rush from various junkies he’d once known. Possibly even himself, a time or two long ago.
“Die! Die! And you!” A series of loud bangs as the 1000 she was carrying unloaded on full auto in some tight space. The smash of gunfire echoed and repeated. “You’re next, vermin!” she screamed. And then fired again. Whatever was going on at her loc was unclear, but it sounded like she was on the distributing end of an epic slaughter.
“Alantra…” Marz tried again over the cacophony. His voice firmer this time. Trying to get her attention despite the adrenaline rush of her kill streak.
“What? What?” she shrieked emphatically. “Busy as a bee here, Marz.”
More automatic gunfire. Return pulse fire coming from close by.
“Need a hack on the Animal comm system. They’re coming down the lifts in force. The fight will be on our loc. Intel would be useful.”
“Immaculus is dead!” she shouted back as though she hadn’t heard the request from Marz. “Game-overed by the animals when we got overrun. I’m falling back to reactor three.” Then: “See what I can do!”
Two separate teams of Animal soldiers in the main lift were now working their way toward Crometheus and Marz from opposite directions along the recessed walkway, and the tank’s massive quad turret was now swiveling on a hydraulic tone, coming close to bearing down on them.
“Now! Engage! Engage!” shouted Marz over the comm. They would try to take the momentum before the tank started firing.
Their plan had been to fight from beneath the recessed walkway, using the solid support columns as cover. The duracrete pillars, blocky and angular with small status displays for various station functions glowing in the drifting smoke and darkness, would stand up to pulse fire. Crometheus and Marz could cover and fire in succession as they moved from pillar to pillar. It was a good plan.
Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Page 27