The colonel entered the briefing room to find his five company commanders studying their battle boards with their helmets tucked under their arms. All of them were young, high-speed infantry officers. There were no weak links. Marks had made sure of that. And so had Admiral Sulla, the United Worlds liaison who’d been the prime motivator behind the whole operation.
“Gentlemen,” began Marks.
The officers turned to face their commander. He’d ordered saluting dispensed with for the duration of the op, and none of them even twitched a muscle. Considering how military courtesy had been drilled into them by the professional Spilursan army, one of the best in the Coalition, Marks was impressed with their ability to quickly adapt.
But he didn’t let it show in the least on his stern face.
“Things don’t look good.” Marks’s face didn’t show concern over the fact. “Obviously you’re watching Fleet CIC. Three transports destroyed already. That leaves us with the Three-Six Armored Cav. We will hold Objective Rio until the fleet arrives in full. You have your sectors; if the situation changes on the ground, be ready to adapt. Join your companies in the MTACs. And be ready for anything. I’ll remind you once again: every Savage ship is a different thing. Expect the unexpected, and you won’t be surprised.”
“Yes, sir,” the men boomed in reply.
As the captains departed to join their companies aboard the mobile tactical assault crawlers, Sergeant Major Andres led Marks to the headquarters MTAC, where he joined the HQ command team and plugged into Fleet CIC.
Multiple images showed every Strike Force Warhammer asset in system. There were half as many as there were supposed to be, and most were coming in drips and dribbles. Task Force Wrath would arrive shortly, once the initial insertion LZ was secure, but many of the ships coming through in the first wave were getting shot up by what Fleet CIC was now tagging as Savage interceptors.
“How they have ships the size of our fighters that are both space and atmo-capable is a mystery to me,” muttered the S-2 officer, shaking his head over a battle board.
Marks was more concerned with the approach to Objective Rio and the city that surrounded it. It was pre-dawn dark—oh-three-twenty-four local time. Much of the fantastic city was in complete blackout. The feed from the cockpit sensors wasn’t good. Lots of disturbance.
“Is that from us, or local effect?” someone asked regarding the quality of the feed.
“Probably us,” said the S-2. “Ship got hit pretty hard coming in. But the flies are holding her together on three engines.”
“Good for Navy,” someone noted dourly.
Then they all saw it.
Some gawped. Others cursed.
The Savage ship was massive. Easily ten kilometers long. It was just a shadowy shape down there on the surface, but that shape revealed a slender bow, a fat and stacked midships, angular decks carved and rotating cylindrically along rising planes, and massive sub-light engines flaring away from the rear. Almost like an old-school rocket made high-tech if your perspective of such things was five hundred years old. And somehow it had managed to set down inside the city. Like it wasn’t going anywhere ever again.
“Should just pave this place with nukes. That’s what Rechs would’ve done.”
“Yeah, and then we’d be war criminals too.”
The lighthugger was a thing as old as space flight itself. Something from the Earth of long ago. They’d called them colony ships back when the world was falling apart. Now the galaxy called them the Savage hulks.
“We dead,” noted some NCO.
“Cut that,” said Sergeant Major Andres sharply.
“Thirty seconds, Colonel,” said Goss over the comm. “Good luck, and it was nice knowin’ you.” Then the captain coughed, and it didn’t sound good.
Marks could tell the captain of the Montague was wounded. That much was clear. But he was a hell of a pilot, and he would get them down and into the action. Which was all any infantryman could ever ask for. A chance to show and fight without getting killed on the way.
That, and to be shown where the enemy was so that the shooting could start. After that, it was anybody’s game.
“You too,” Marks said tersely. And then the comm was cut.
“Thirty seconds!” shouted the loadmaster over the assault bay speakers. “Be advised—”
A massive explosion somewhere along the hull sent the ship lurching violently, but it continued its approach to Objective Rio over the outer suburbs of New Vega City. They were almost there. The LZ was lit by the invisible neon green of the Pathfinder’s marking lasers. But the rest of the city was shadowed in blues and grays.
“Strap in!” yelled the sergeant major. “This is the big show!”
Marks did a weapons check on the Twenty-Fifth’s issue pulse rifle while he made his way to his crash chair. The pulse rifle was a good weapon. Forty-shot charge pack. Full auto and semi. Two-hundred-watt pulse. Good weapon. Boxy and workmanlike. Prone to mag dump if not cautious.
But to the colonel, a weapon was a weapon. He’d killed with lots of them. In the end, everything was the same. Point and shoot. Don’t miss. Be quick about it. Life and death depended on such basics.
And he would use anything he could get his hands on to kill every Savage there was. Even if he had to reduce the galaxy down to its Stone Age components.
03
It could have been any four of the MTAC crawlers that went up first. But it was the Alpha Company crawler that took the high-speed rail gun round fired from within the city. It cooked off the fuel tanks, immolating two hundred plus men in an instant. And all of this only twenty seconds after being down and clear of the Montague.
That was often said to be the official beginning of the Battle of New Vega. Alpha going up in an instant. Or so the moment would be defined by the few who would survive to tell what had happened.
The Twenty-Fifth was experienced. Mostly a lot of brushfire stuff—violent, short, and brutal. They’d fought on Kimshana against guerilla insurgents trying to take the colony for themselves, and they’d done their share of bug-hunting on some outer worlds in the Spilursan sphere. But they’d always had support superiority in the form of tac air and artillery.
Nothing had prepared them to see Alpha get smoked within seconds. Nor to see the wounded Montague smoking from several different sections. Its engines were spooling down and its lift repulsors were inactive. It didn’t look like the crew was even making an effort to get off the LZ.
And Marks was pretty sure that Goss was dead.
He turned to the operations sergeant in the command team. “Tell them to get off the LZ. Three-Six needs to put down.”
Enemy fire was coming at the four surviving crawlers as they moved toward different sections of the massive sports complex designated Objective Rio. The insertion LZ for Strike Force Warhammer. At its center was a stadium capable of seating a million spectators watching up to ten different games at once. This was the only place in New Vega large enough to be a landing zone while also providing cover to the vulnerable ships once they set down.
The Porter was circling overhead and taking fire from both within the city and from the Savage hulk beached near the Hilltop District. And even higher up, way above the stadium battlespace, the tac support carrier Indomitable was fighting her way down through the cloudscape. She was getting swarmed by those new interceptors, but she had PDC fire to spare. The Rigelian escorts that should have accompanied her in would’ve been nice, though.
“Drop the ramps and get the men off. Tell the crawlers to keep moving to secure the complex perimeter,” Marks ordered. “Fire and move into position. The Savages don’t get this stadium!”
Someone aboard the Montague must’ve slaved the bridge to the emergency bridge, because the three huge engines spooled up into an urgent whine and the massive repulsors on the underside thrummed to life. Slowly, amid the spray of grit and
dust and incoming fire, the squat snub-nosed assault frigate lifted off.
It had just cleared the rim of the fantastic stadium when a missile hit it amidships. The pilot, or whoever was flying, added power; the engines glowed brighter as they struggled to push upward. But the damage was catastrophic. The ship pitched over and smashed into the residential neighborhoods beyond the stadium. Its reactor exploded, sending shock waves throughout the area that leveled homes and buildings.
“Big bird down!” someone called over the command net.
Colonel Marks disembarked from the crawler with Headquarters Company and followed the four-story, gray-camoed MTAC toward a massive triumphal arch that had been the complex’s featured centerpiece for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Galaxy Games just two years earlier.
Search and rescue was trying to get a sitrep and clogging up the command channel. Colonel Marks keyed in a command override, and his voice played over all other traffic. “Get off the net. They’re all dead.”
Whether that was true or not, now wasn’t the time to send in search and rescue ships. The LZ was hot, there were no formal lines or influence or controlled sectors established, and there was effective anti-air in play. Sending in rescue ships would only get more people killed.
“Delta engaging the enemy,” came a message over the command net.
Marks and HQ Company reached the mouth of the arch at the stadium’s western approach.
First contact.
Marks knew this was the most important moment in the battle. Because they didn’t know what they were facing yet. Or how to fight it. He’d fought Savages before and every battle was different, because every Savage ship had evolved along different lines of technological development for close to five hundred years.
He stopped and scanned the dark sports complex. The only source of illumination was Alpha’s burning crawler. After battering its way through a stadium exit, away from the LZ, it had been met almost immediately with a direct hit from the rail gun.
At the north end of the complex, Delta’s crawler was unloading with her secondary pulse turrets on tangos the colonel was trying to image with his ’nocs. Whatever they were, they moved fast. Like four-legged spiders. But just as Marks thought that, he saw one stand up on two legs. The other legs were suddenly arms, firing some sort of rifle. Then it ran in a crouch off between a massive line of turnstiles that led into the stadium itself.
More and more of them were swarming into the complex, all rushing for the stadium like a rabid throng of seamball hooligans. These Savages could scamper over surfaces fast, as though they had some kind of innate climbing tech. Which meant they’d have no difficulty quickly reaching the tops of the hundred-plus-story super towers that were strung out across the once-incredible jewel of New Vega City. These looked directly down into the stadium, and sniper or ranged fire assets positioned there could easily acquire targets covering within Objective Rio. Like Alpha Crawler.
From above, the Porter came in fast, flaring her repulsors hard, her reverse thrusters howling like a squadron of banshees. The Three-Six Cav were also Spilursan regular army units, and having some light armor and scouts moving in would help give a better picture of the battle in the hours to come.
If they made it off the LZ.
Behind Marks, the HQ crawler’s turrets dumped copious amounts of pulse fire beyond the arch. The colonel turned and ran toward the MTAC’s rear door. Now he would get a better look at what these particular Savages had decided to become out there in the dark.
04
Headquarters Company consisted of three infantry platoons assigned to protecting the staff officers of the Twenty-Fifth. All of them were shooters. As were the staff officers; each had entered an officer candidate program only after serving at least one tour as enlisted and being recommended for promotion by their NCOs. That was standard across the Spilursan military, which had merged old elements of the original Earth militaries with some of the old Martian units and brought them together to form an effective fighting force.
As Marks moved forward, lead elements of Headquarters were already engaged in a heavy firefight with forces beyond the arch. He tapped his comm.
“Platoon leaders, tell your NCOs to watch the flanks. Walls of the stadium and then the seating. Be advised… enemy has the ability to rapidly climb over obstacles.”
An anti-armor missile streaked past the crawler and sidewindered off into the night sky. At least the vehicle’s ECM algorithms were having some luck scrambling incoming tracking.
Marks linked up with SGM Andres.
“I need the SDMs to move into counter-sniper mode,” he told his senior-most NCO. “Watch those three buildings.” He tagged three slender downtown super towers within weapons range of the stadium. All their windows were dark; power was down across large sections of the city.
“Roger, sir.” Then Andres was off to pull the squad-designated marksmen back and reorient them to this possible threat.
A fusillade of actual gunfire, a thing Marks hadn’t heard in years, resounded off the sides of the stadium and out across the cityscape. It sounded ominous and hollow in that way that only gunfire can. Some type of heavy weapon was moving forward and spitting death.
The wounded were starting to be dragged to the rear. Each platoon had a designated medic, and a casualty collection point was set up at the rear of each MTAC. Marks got sitreps from Delta, Charlie, and Bravo, then moved forward to link up with the Headquarters Company commander, who was supervising an emplaced grenade launcher mech that hurled belt-fed micro-grenades all across the front of their line. Buying time to get the rest of the company into protected firing positions.
The company commander had his helmet’s SmartEye flipped down and was scanning the enemy on biometric IR. Marks threw himself down behind a pile of rubble that had been turned into a fighting position and pulled out his battle board. He linked into the CO’s SmartEye feed and studied the terrain beyond the stadium.
It was a wide pavilion that opened up into a massive transportation station. Dead Savages lay out there, their bodies illuminated by their fading body heat. Except… not exactly. Marks expanded the image and studied a specific corpse as ghostly rounds and lightning streaks of tracer fire zipped past their heads.
The dead Savage showed fading body heat in its head, fully covered by a helmet. The rest of its body was already well below body temperature, except in those spots where it had been hit by streaking pulse rifle blasts or impaled by hot shrapnel from the GLM.
Interesting.
The grenade-launcher mech positioned forward of the crawler took an RPG round and exploded in a sudden shower of sparks. Thankfully the ammo clamshell that fed grenades to the GLM didn’t cook off and blow everyone nearby all to hell.
“Sergeant Baz!” shouted the CO, Captain Forrester. “GLM’s down. Send in the secondary.” No doubt the platoon sergeant had the platoon’s assets at the rear along with the mounting casualties.
Marks watched as a trooper took a hot smoking round right through the helmet and simply fell over. Ricochets and close fire zinged and streaked across the entrance to the arch.
“Leave First Platoon here,” Marks ordered Forrester. “Get Second and Third up on the stadium rim, right and left flank. The crawler will hold, along with First.”
When the captain didn’t reply, Marks looked over. “Steve! Did you—”
Captain Forrester was dead. A round had smashed right through his ablative chest armor. The plate was effective against the blaster and pulse fire most military units found themselves facing in modern warfare, and it was rated to withstand ballistic impacts from most projectile weapons. Which meant the Savages must be hurling some particularly fierce slugs into the lines.
Marks took over.
“Captain Forrester is KIA. This is the colonel. I’m taking command of Headquarters. Second and Third Platoons, pull back and climb up
to the stadium rim. Set up firing positions from there. Second on the left, Third on the right. Signal when you’re in position.”
He got confirms from both platoon leaders before switching over to the platoon sergeant on the company net, who reported that Headquarters had six KIAs and three wounded.
“Medics ain’t used to treating this many gunshot wounds, sir.”
Marks ignored the comment. It didn’t matter. Gunshots were what they would have to deal with. “Send me your reserves forward. Tell them to hug the tunnel and stay away from the crawler.”
“Wilco, sir.”
The reserve GLM, a tiny little mech that deployed and spat out micro-grenades, was trundling forward when the surge came. When the Savages stormed the arch.
Marks steadied the pulse rifle behind a chunk of concrete and aimed at one of the approaching Savages working its way up behind an abutment that guarded a wide set of stairs. Center mass with the micro-dot scope, and he squeezed the trigger.
The first round nailed the thing in the leg and did nothing.
Marks reentered and fired again, this time nailing the thing in the upper chest. Still nothing. The hot round zipped through the thing’s body, but it merely dragged away a spray of metal debris.
Heat signatures in the head, he told himself.
Tougher shot.
Marks had always been a shooter.
He let go of his breath and zeroed a shot right into the thing’s helmeted face. Truth be told, the first two shots had slowed it. Like some machine suddenly switching from turbo to cruise.
But the last shot dropped it completely. At less than eighty meters Marks saw the dark silhouette of brain matter and helmet fragments cross the night through his scope.
More were coming.
He turned his aim to a trio of Savages getting close with what looked like a large recoilless rifle. Some sort of anti-armor team, if he had to guess. The leader went down when Marks squeezed off five quick shots to see if enough body damage would do the trick just as well as a headshot. It did. Sparks and explosions erupted from the thing, and it shifted into its spider configuration and tried to scuttle under a dark advertising display, but Marks kept nailing the beast until it went down and didn’t move.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 2
