Instant division on demand.
The UW super-carrier was the workhorse, and hero, of old Earth, and she’d delivered in almost all of the great old battles. I-Day at Centaur. The Breach. The Red Pirate Wars, back in the day.
Within moments, the dawn sky was filled with an army dropped right at the Savages’ front door.
“Yeah,” said Greenhill to no one. The blood from Burke’s body was still as wet as the morning dew atop the ATAV. “We got a chance. Jes’ gotta do this the right way.”
07
Twenty-Fifth Spilursan Light
North Arch, Objective Rio
Colonel Marks had sent the sergeant major to gather a reaction force to support the defense of Delta’s position in case it was overrun. The quickly organized QRF would be staged near the Porter and ready to move as soon as possible.
The colonel arrived on scene to find wounded infantry already being dragged back from the heavy fighting at the north gate. Two platoons had been significantly reduced, and the crawler had taken at least three hits from incoming anti-armor fire. Captain Moreaux had been killed, leaving First Sergeant Watt in charge of the defense. The first sergeant himself was bleeding from a shrapnel wound and his arm was in a sling due to a compound fracture.
“Watt,” Marks said upon assessing the first sergeant’s injuries. “Pull back. In your condition, it’s best to organize the mess developing at the rear of the crawler.”
“I’m still good to go, sir!” replied the first sergeant. And he kept fighting.
Heavy-duty charge packs lay discarded all alongside the crawler, ejected during the death machine’s blazing fury against the Savages that constantly moved and fired in an attempt to take the gate.
“We got this,” insisted Watt as the colonel stood and considered whether the man really should remain in the fight. “Our best LT is forward and holding.”
Marks nodded at the wounded NCO and moved off at a crouch to link up with the LT. A sniper team, shooter and spotter, signaled the colonel as he moved forward.
“Safest way forward, sir, is through the ticketing entrance inside the wall of the tunnel. Savvies got snipers out there and they’re zeroed in on the arch-tunnel itself.”
“Thanks,” said the colonel.
He moved off into the darkness of ticketing booths that had been blasted open. A labyrinth of booths, barricades, and turnstiles girded both sides of the arch, providing cover from incoming fire.
He checked his watch.
Fifteen minutes until dawn.
All his experiences with the Savages told him that if they could hold until then, things might turn around. But the truth was you never really knew when it came to the Savages. “Expect the unexpected” wasn’t just a saying. It was a rule. And the dead had paid to learn it.
Inside the warren beyond the ticketing booths, Marks found the medics, the wounded, the dying, and the dead. Those still drawing breath were being pulled farther back inside the lines. The dead would remain. There was no time to remove them.
“Where’s Lieutenant Maydoon?” Marks called out.
“Lieutenant’s that way,” shouted one of the infantrymen tasked to assist and guard the medics. Pulse fire and incoming hard ammo ricocheted in the tunnel arch and whined on high-pitched, almost-hysterical notes.
The colonel nodded and continued on.
As he came up behind a heavy pulse gun team bleeding charge packs and rocking the enemy with a storm of blaster fire, he saw the problem with the battlefield at this end. This entrance to the stadium had been designed to accommodate traffic from the heavily populated northern portions of New Vega City. What must’ve seemed like a good defensive position to the Delta CO had turned into a turkey shoot from the various apartment blocks and hotels that girded this end of the complex. He’d made matters worse by digging in too far forward, and as a result had gotten murdered by ranged sniper fire.
Maydoon, the LT now in charge, had pulled back to a series of security barriers that formed a chokepoint. But there was an ample kill zone between the support weapons to the rear and the forward infantry fighting out there in the security barriers.
From the vantage of the support teams, who were raining fire on a staging mass of Savage troops, it was clear that there was a larger Savage attack brewing from an underground tunnel opening—probably an exit from the city’s subterranean transportation system.
Marks set up next to a weapons team sergeant, settling into cover against the wall of an alcove as the heavy weapon let loose a histrionic blare that echoed throughout the stadium complex.
“We’re runnin’ low on charge packs, sir. If they push the LT, we won’t be able to sustain fire to keep ’em off,” shouted the support weapons team leader.
The colonel peered out at the situation with his ’nocs. The weapons team sergeant was right. It would take no more than a fifty-meter dash for the staging Savage mass to overrun from the left flank. And the infantry fighting from inside the security barrier would never see it coming.
“To make matters worse, I got no comm,” said the sergeant as the nearby heavy pulse gun stopped roaring and a charge pack was swapped out amid much cursing from the team.
“C’mon, man!” shouted the gunner like a kid whose fun had just stopped. “I’m lit to go!”
Marks pulled his battle board off his chest plate and tapped his way down through the comm channels to get ahold of Lieutenant Maydoon out in the security barriers.
“You want me to send a man out there to connect?” asked the team leader, seeming impatient for the colonel to make some reply. “He’ll probably get killed trying. But…”
“Warmonger Actual to Delta Four-One,” said the colonel.
Nothing.
“Warmonger to Delta Four-One, over.”
Some static; a high-pitched whine. Perhaps someone saying “Go for Four-One” crackled through. But it was hard to say.
Marks debated what to do next. He could broadcast and hope they got the heads-up that they were about to be overrun. But all he’d be doing for sure to improve the situation was hope…
“Give me all the cover you’ve got,” he ordered the weapons sergeant.
“Roger that, sir. Wait, what?”
Colonel Marks vaulted the smashed ticket window the emplacement was firing from and ran for all he was worth down to the security barriers.
For a second, there was nothing but dead silence from the weapons team sergeant. Then the man screamed, “Covering fire, you bastards!”
The entire firing line opened up as the colonel crossed into the kill zone, sprinting as hard as he could through sniper fire to reach the security barriers where the lead element of Delta’s infantry was holding out.
08
“Inbound!” came the flash report over the command net. Concrete and glass exploded all around the colonel as he raced the last ten meters and practically threw himself into the wall of the security barrier.
He moved along the wall to a small overwatch building in the center of the stretch of barricade—most likely constructed to spot incoming terrorist attacks—and linked up with the remnants of the platoon fighting from within. The condition of the building reflected the condition of its occupants: it had been shot up in almost every place along its concrete walls, but like the platoon, it was still holding.
The moment he entered, as men fired from the windows at tangos across the plaza, someone shouted, “Incoming RP!”
The building shook as the micro-missile exploded against its outer wall. Across the plaza, Savage weapons teams opened up in earnest. And out there above it all, the colonel heard some ancient, familiar sound, like an electronic game from long ago, signaling out over the Savage masses. A sound so old the young would never recognize it. And the colonel barely did. Or rather didn’t at all. Just some old fading to forgotten memory that shouldn’t be here in this pr
esent madhouse.
That signal meant the Savages were coming now. The rush was on.
“Orient left flank!” Marks shouted. “Prepare to repel!”
He had no idea if a unit trained under the Spilursan military would understand that command. But the old Martian Light would have.
Maydoon started shouting out names and physically repositioning soldiers inside the bunker to meet the threat that wasn’t even seen yet.
Then hundreds of fast-moving armored Savages, cartwheeling, running, and firing all at once, came up out of the tunnel entrance and rushed the security barriers.
The colonel raised his pulse rifle, flipped to full auto, and started dumping fire into the swarming mass charging the left flank. The support teams from farther back were pouring in even more fire. And yet for all the firepower being expended, it wasn’t enough. Within twenty seconds the first shot-to-hell Savages had reached the barrier.
One of the Delta riflemen was dragged through a window and disappeared. A Savage stuck his weapon through a wide opening and sprayed automatic gunfire that should have killed more than it did. A Spilursan infantryman took a burst across the torso, screamed, and batted the Savage’s firing machine gun toward the ceiling, then with his last breath dumped his mag into the faceless enemy.
And still more Savages were coming.
Badly thrown incendiary devices were tossed from the Savage lines and managed to ignite some of their own in sudden streams of liquid lava. Yet incredibly, the Savages, with living fire crawling all over them, continued to shoot into the security barrier from just meters away.
A voice over the comm. “Wizard to Warlord Actual.”
The colonel racked a new charge pack, held his rifle out the fractured window, and dumped the entire pack into the surging mass. Thunder ripped the sky above, and the colonel recognized the telltale atmospheric reentry of a UW super-carrier entering the battlespace. A soldier was handing grenades to the LT, who was popping them and tossing them into the Savages. Explosions rocked the barrier, sending debris and fragments everywhere.
One of the infantrymen sat down and began to scream in the middle of it all.
“Go for Warlord,” said the colonel as he slapped in another charge pack. Noting there were not a lot of charge packs left.
“Air support on demand,” came the terse reply.
The colonel dropped his weapon and ordered an airstrike on his battle board. Not directly on the security barrier bunker, but close enough to be a real problem.
He marked it urgent.
A second later he got the confirm from the air boss running strikes with the newly entered interceptors and bombers that had come in with the super-carrier.
“Fast mover inbound, Warlord,” said Wizard. “Special delivery in twenty seconds.”
Which seemed, to the colonel, to be forever away.
A grenade came through the window, bounced off the far wall and landed near an infantryman whose head had been blown off.
“Grenade!” shouted the platoon sergeant.
The colonel had just put his battle board away and was reaching for his weapon. He was in no position to cover, or to do anything to protect himself.
He and a lot of other soldiers would take the blast full on.
But Lieutenant Maydoon was already moving.
He grabbed the body of the dead headless infantrymen and in one swift motion slammed it down on top of the tomahawk-shaped explosive.
Then he threw his own body on top of the other.
The grenade went off.
Body parts showered the defenders.
Above all this, beyond the automatic gunfire of the Savages, the scream of an inbound Valkyrie close-air-support strike bomber erupted across the sky.
“Heads down on the ground,” warned the dry voice of the pilot over comm. Like it was just another day at work for the guy. And not the end of the galaxy for some.
The colonel looked up and saw the four-tailed bomber with forward-swept wings lining up for her run. It came in steep and fast as the wings suddenly swept back, putting it in a slower flight configuration. Then the lethally famous AGM-98 pulse pod system opened up with her intuitive targeting, dumping twenty thousand high-cycle pulse shots across the Savages swarming the security bunker.
Archival footage of the battle, studied from every angle in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the new Savage threat, would reveal that over three hundred Savages were killed in that pass. The AGM-98 system’s AI targeted and spent at least fifty high-velocity blasts on each target in a sudden blur of fire. It was so much fire that it even slowed the Valkyrie’s approach—which in turn only allowed the targeting AI to be even more thorough in its lethal work.
A moment later it was gone. And so was the sound of gunfire from the Savage lines.
The colonel scrambled forward across the bodies inside the barrier. He reached Maydoon’s body and pulled him over onto his back, hoping there was some treatable wound that meant the kid was still alive. Or at least had the chance to go on living.
But it wasn’t a body.
It was a live young LT with no visible damage. The headless infantryman, whoever he was, had saved his platoon one last time.
09
Dawn broke as the colonel made his way back into the stadium. The once-pristine sports complex, the jewel of the galaxy even just a few years back, looked now like a post-apocalyptic ruin from some destabilized colony world. Or a movie set.
The Three-Six Cav’s drone recon detachment was sending back reports that the Savage assault that had begun in the last half hour had broken. The streets surrounding the stadium were mostly clear, and it looked like some of the larger enemy concentrations were pulling back under the cover of the massive Savage ship located near Hilltop.
The jaw-droppingly massive mech that had been spotted coming down the hill toward the park had fired three barrages against the stadium before Coalition bombers off the Indomitable, flanked by interceptors, had made a decisive run and knocked it out.
This streak of good news was immediately dampened by casualty reports. The disconnected units that had been dropped almost willy-nilly by the super-carrier all across the battlefield were hurting. To make matters worse, the supreme Coalition commander, appointed as overall leader for this action, had ordered all units to hunker in place for the next two hours until he could assess the situation now that he was on the ground.
“He should pull them back to the stadium,” muttered Marks after the operations briefing over the comm net had ended.
“Makes sense to me, sir,” said SGM Andres. “But the big dog says we got to hold on to what we got. Like General Ogilvie thinks we got lucky and gained ground with that ate-up drop going bad like it did and all.”
The colonel pounded a coffee someone had handed him and studied his battle board. “He just doesn’t want to admit he was wrong,” he muttered to himself—though the sergeant major and everyone else nearby heard him just the same.
The colonel almost added something else, thought better of it, and drank more coffee instead.
For the next hour, he and the sergeant major checked the lines of their unit, making sure the surviving command teams were linked up with the units on their flanks.
At Delta once again, which was verging on total ruin with now less than twenty-five percent of its original troops, the sergeant major remarked, “They’re gonna put us on guard duty in the rear, sir, once they get a look at our numbers.”
This made the colonel none too happy.
Another hour later they arrived at the ad hoc Combat Information Center set up on the troop deck of the Porter. What had started out as a grand operation to deal with the new, oddly concentrated Savage problem was now looking to the colonel like an absolute and utter failure. And the situation was getting worse by the second.
“Everythin
g is going according to plan,” announced Ogilvie to a collection of commanders and staff officers.
General Ogilvie. Supreme Commander of Coalition Forces.
“It may look dire,” he continued, shaking his head slightly, but not enough to dislodge a strand of his well-manicured iron-gray hair, “but we couldn’t have asked for a better drop on the board. Some of our units have established forward operating spheres within direct striking distance of the Savage Nest. I’m greenlighting offensive…”
He paused as he noticed Colonel Marks and SGM Andres, covered in dust and dried blood, without proper chest armor, carrying rifles inside the TOC. Which had been expressly forbidden by executive correction to the Coalition SOP.
“… operations immediately,” finished the general. Then, on a droll note of disapproval: “Colonel Marks, so very glad you could join us. I’ll chalk up your heavy casualties to your last-minute appointment of command to your unit. Still, all things considered, you did a commendable job holding the primary insertion point. Though it would seem that we no longer need Objective Rio as a staging base now that we’re switching over to the offensive in…”
He murmured to an aide. The aide murmured quietly back after consulting one of three battle boards he was carrying.
“Just under two hours,” finished the general as though some expectedly delightful party would commence round about that time.
Instead of the bloodbath and death that would reach industrialized proportions.
The colonel cleared his throat.
Only because it was dry.
“As I was saying,” continued the general, having registered his quiet disapproval with the colonel’s late arrival to his sacred briefing hour in the way he kept looking the man up and down, “because most of our lead infantry units jumped first and centered around the original markers, we have a unique opportunity”—he said this brightly—“to form an assault force that will pass through our support units, which are now the most forwarding operating elements, and form a combined arms assault team as we drive in on the enemy Nest… and destroy it forthwithly.”
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 4
