He could stay up here all day.
Do another one.
Babe.
He found one. An elite. Bigger than the rest.
Then he pulled the trigger on that bad boy.
And she smiled.
21
Team Ranger
Front Street
Captain de Macha pushed the massive Sentinel tank up over the defenses the Savages had constructed and smashed it right through the wall of an old building on the far side. It was an ancient structure from the New Vega frontier past that was being retrofitted, or gentrified, round about the time the Savages showed up.
Some kind of Savage engineer team—they were armed with what clearly looked like explosives—were setting up to bring the building down as the attackers pushed through.
De Macha’s loader popped out from his secondary hatch next to the commander’s, screamed the Espanian equivalent of “Surprise,” and lit the Savage engineer team up with a brutal burst from the coaxial heavy pulse rifle.
Colonel Marks’s infantry swarmed into the breach, covering behind the tank and the ruined walls, and shooting in every direction within the open floor plan of the old building. De Macha appeared in the track commander’s hatch and signaled that they were moving forward.
“Watch that demo gear,” ordered Sergeant Major Andres over the whine of the tank’s howling engines. Then, to the colonel over the command comm: “Best we get through this quick, sir.”
The tank pushed through the massive building’s main floor, encountered another wall, and punched through that one too, sending ancient mortar and brick flying in all directions, mindless that it might be a load-bearing wall and bring the entire structure down on them. The infantry followed close behind.
And that was when the Savages came at them from the flanks, swarming through access doors that led in from the outer lobbies of the building. A grenade rocked a forward assault squad covering behind de Macha’s flank. No one saw it, and when it went off, the entire squad was ripped to shreds by its needle-sharp fragments.
The soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth started firing as Savages came from gaps in the walls, or from two corridors that opened up onto the space they were fighting in. What made their attack disconcerting, realized the colonel as he directed fire, was that unlike most people, the Savages moved and fired at the same time. And their targeting wasn’t half bad despite their mobility.
“Let me through!” A medic sprinted up, wanting to get out to the team that had been rocked by the grenade.
The colonel held the kid back. “You wait until the assault teams put down the first wave!”
“We can’t set up a collection point here,” said Andres over the comm. “They’ll just demo the building with us inside, sir.”
“Affirmative on that,” said the colonel. “Leave the dead and carry the wounded. Follow the tank through to the other side.”
“Uh…” said Andres. “Sir, I don’t like—”
“No other choice, Sergeant Major. I get that we’re strung out. But this is the breakout in an enemy-held defensive line. It’s the only way we free up the main assault. Once the Savages know we’re in, they’ll react and try to seal it, cutting us off. We push now while we have the opportunity.”
De Macha’s Alpha One bulldozed through another wall in the gutted building and entered a grand opulent lobby. Tall leaded windows provided a view onto the street—and an entry point for the anti-armor round that smashed through the glass, glanced off the tank, and went fishtailing up into an ancient red crystal chandelier.
The ornate piece crashed to the floor and the giant leaded windows came apart as the Savages filled the space from every quarter with as many rounds as they could.
“Buttoning up!” shouted de Macha over the comm.
“Good idea,” replied the colonel. “What’s your thermal imaging look like?”
There was a humming lull in the comm while the real world turned into a cacophony of stray rounds, smashed glass, and distant gunfire.
“Nothing,” replied de Macha with frustration. “She’s smashed. We’re blind.”
The colonel turned to his two assault team leaders. “Both of you take a side exit and set up an ambush. Maydoon, you make sure it happens!”
The LT serving as his XO nodded and moved with a “Yes, sir!”
Marks pulled out his battle board and dialed into the ad hoc Coalition fire support request screen. Using a real-time map of the city provided by a Hawkeye drone, he centered on his coordinates, tapped out three target reference points, and asked for high-energy incendiary rounds to be used.
The response came on-screen.
Fire mission online.
The colonel waited.
Shot out, came the message.
A round whistled in from above and smashed into the street. The colonel chanced a peek from the room they were covering in and saw the flash of bright gunfire coming from the building across the way. At just that moment another smoking anti-armor round smashed into a silver marble support column and exploded.
The colonel adjusted the shot location on the battle board and waited.
Shot out.
Again another massive round whistled in from above. This one hit the building across the street. Smoke and debris erupted from its portico, but the building seemed relatively unharmed.
The colonel touched the “fire for effect” request button.
Affirmative, came the reply.
“Uh, sir…” whispered the sergeant major from along the wall. “Any chance a full barrage is going to set off the explosives that were supposed to bring this structure down?”
The colonel made a gesture with his head indicating he had no idea. And that they had no other option.
Five seconds later artillery rounds started falling all over the building on the far side of the street. For a full minute rounds slammed into everything. Glass fell from shattered windows. Drywall and plaster shook loose and came down in great sections. Some opulent staircase from New Vega’s frontier past groaned and collapsed in a dusty cascade.
Dead silence followed the thunder of the falling artillery barrage.
“Moving forward,” said Captain de Macha over the comm. Not wasting a moment. Taking advantage of the enemies’ disorientation.
Colonel Marks wasted no time either. He had few soldiers left; they needed to be swift and mobile. “Flanking teams hold. The rest follow the main element.”
The Sentinel crushed the massive bronze entry doors and bounded out onto the street. Its main gun, and the coax on remote, rotated on hydraulic whines, looking for targets.
The colonel’s ear picked up an ominously wrong clanking sound in one of its tracks. They’d pushed through, but the feeling that they could be overrun in an instant weighed on Marks.
There were no Savages on the street. The building across the street, along with several others nearby, had collapsed in a great pile of ruin. Dust still rose up into the sky.
Team Ranger took up defensive positions on the grand steps of the building they’d just exited, some covering behind ruined statues. The colonel again brought up the battle board and accessed drone recon, only to be greeted with a black screen.
It had been shot down.
Twenty minutes until replacement, said the flashing message on the board.
Inwardly the colonel sighed because he’d had this thought before, and it was a ridiculous thought to have now. Both because it was true, and because it was false… in a sense.
This was no way to fight a war.
But when had there ever been a way to fight a modern war? Everything always went wrong. The best plans fell apart within seconds. All that had ever served him was being able to adapt and react faster than the enemy. Because the situation changed moment by moment.
It always did.
T
hat had meant life or death on many occasions.
And… things were always different with the Savages.
In the distance, several blocks up to the east, he could hear the ongoing firefight from Ogilvie’s force. He checked on the casualty reporting.
That was down too.
DNS Attack in Progress flashed across the screen.
Well, thought the colonel grimly, that makes sense.
The Savages loved to play cyberwarfare games. So of course they’d fight hard in that battlespace too. Lie low like they didn’t want to participate in that space, assess, and then when things were nice and messy… unleash a DNS attack.
Effectively the Coalition was now blind.
Marks climbed up on de Macha’s tank as the captain opened it and struggled out into the daylight. His face was caked with soot and running with sweat.
“She’s hurt pretty badly, my friend,” he said. “But we still got Alpha Four and Five. They’re coming up now.”
“Roger that,” said the colonel. “We hold here for now. I’m taking half my men and I’m going to flank the Savage positions working that crossfire on the main body. Once I link up with the commander, we’ll move forward together and see if we can give the Savages something to think about besides Ogilvie’s force.”
“Got it,” said de Macha, who was already dragging out some kind of toolkit. “We’ll try to effect some repairs if the men you are leaving will cover us a little.”
He smiled guiltily like this request was imposing too much on the new colonel.
“They’ll cover you a lot, Captain,” replied Marks as he climbed back down. “You saved our bacon today. Thank you.”
“Well, you know how it is… brains in the head, as they say, save the blisters on the feet.”
And, thought the colonel, prevent body bags from being filled. Which is why you came along on this little adventure, isn’t it?
Marks pulled two squads, one heavy and one assault, to take with him against the Savage defenders obstructing Ogilvie.
A Savage artillery round randomly whistled in from overhead and landed a few buildings back. Its detonation echoed across the hauntingly empty streets of New Vega City as the colonel left Lieutenant Maydoon in charge of the team guarding the tanks.
“Cover him,” he said, indicating the armor captain.
“Affirmative, sir,” said the young lieutenant quietly. “His tank doesn’t sound too good. We’re going to collect the wounded and try to get a close-support evac off the top of the building. You good with that, sir?”
The colonel wasn’t.
And he knew that was a shortcoming of his. Mission was everything. And only he knew how bad this was shaping up to be. Wounded? They’d all be dead if things didn’t turn around fast.
He thought about the special package back in the crawler. He could order the crawler forward now. But the crew of the massive APC would basically be on their own; if they got jumped, his ace card was compromised. And the more this situation progressed, the more it looked like he was going to need to go to Plan B.
But he knew that soldiers had to take care of their wounded if they were expected to go on fighting. They had to have that assurance that someone was going to do the same when their time came. That their buddies would carry them off the field. They had to know that.
Otherwise they got hopeless and fatal. And that got dangerous for everyone.
“Make it happen,” he told the young lieutenant. “And make sure the dustoff birds have some interceptor cover when they come. We don’t know how much anti-air cap they’ve got around here.”
“Can do, sir. Setting up the LZ for dustoff now.”
And then the young officer was off and making things happen.
22
The Wild Man
Thirty-Second Floor, Cyrus Gardens Luxury Apartments
Hilltop District
The series of artillery strikes, as observed from high up in the building from which he saw the assault unfold, were incredible. He watched the ghostly trails of the rounds as they arced out across the sky, then fell into the war-torn streets like dying angels.
He imagined all the Savages that were destroyed under the collapsing buildings and exploding munitions from the barrage. He imagined this, and it was good to him.
A battle, when you were in it, was confusing. Everything was chaos. Nothing known could be counted on as true because so much of it depended on deception. And you had to center yourself and find out who was shooting at you, so you could shoot back at them. Shooting was always the first priority. Whether you got to shoot first or last. And if you were lucky and found someone to shoot who didn’t know you were about to shoot at them… well, that was all just bonus round. The best of all positions one could desire.
The sniper’s way of life. Which was death for those out there in the scope.
Bonus round.
Another one, babe.
Since Stendahl, his life had all been bonus round.
Think about that, he told himself as he watched the city.
There were only two battles in progress he could observe along the bottom of Hilltop. Full-scale, pell-mell, shooting-at-each-other-with-everything-you-could-get-your-hands-on battles until one side was good and beat down. He’d seen a few other smaller skirmishes go down—sudden violent encounters that didn’t last a minute before someone had been annihilated. Sometimes he’d even added a round or two, vaping a Savage’s headspace like some divine act of retribution.
Which wasn’t cheap for him. The rounds he carried were anything but.
It wasn’t like he was carrying a blaster that relied on rechargeable energy packs. He was using old-school chemical-based propulsion rounds. And he made his own. Back on the Sweetwater Express he’d had a whole loading shop set up to while away the hours and days in hyperspace. In the silences between worlds his life was perfecting the loads and working the rifle. The ancient rifle, a family heirloom that had journeyed out to the frontier with them. Long ago.
To Stendahl.
A place that once existed.
A place where the Wild Man didn’t.
People didn’t begin to call him the Wild Man until after Stendahl. Living on the fringes of one backwater world after the next. Out where the grav-rail lines ended. Beyond the last prefab shacks at the end of town. Doing odd jobs and the occasional varmint-cleansing for some rancher or grower. Waiting. Just waiting for the Savages to pop up somewhere. Just like all varmints.
Every so often he’d do a little bounty hunting. Most of them little more than local-government-sanctioned hits when some particular person offended the locals enough for them to put together a pot to get the offense handled.
But that, all of that, had just been work. Odd jobs. And he’d felt less and less of her in those times of waiting. Like she wasn’t even there in the abandoned shacks he’d made his own for a cold winter’s season. Like she was out wandering the forest paths in the night and asking him when he was going to…
You know…
Do another one, babe.
But he had to wait. He had to wait for the Savages to show up somewhere. Following the rumors and hope the Sweetwater Express would hold together for just one more run. Hauling him and the big rifle and all the ammo he’d loaded himself out there.
So he could hope.
And sometimes pray, though he stopped believing a long time ago.
He would sometimes find himself on a quiet, mostly dead world where the Savages had never been. Or where they had come and gone, and that was why the world was dead now.
They were locusts.
But this, here, watching the day turn toward the hot afternoon and seeing a quiet battle lull as both sides figured out their next move… hauling away the wounded, moving around for advantage… this felt different. Different from those other worlds. Those other
raids.
He ran his scope over the Savage colony ship out there in the distance. It was a thing so gargantuan and huge, so alien, that it might as well have been a painting, or some special effect in an entertainment about such things.
It didn’t look like it was getting ready to pick up and move anytime soon. It looked like the Savages were here to stay.
That’s what it looked like.
He looked down at the newly quiet streets, at the gaps in the wide-ranging battlefield. The right flank of the Coalition forces was breaking up. One force was moving off to the east to engage the Savages that had pinned down the main element.
He thought about that for a second.
Then he was up from his hide and grabbing his ruck and gear, all of it by some automatic programming from an unaccountable amount of one-shots and position shifts he’d been doing since Stendahl. That had always been his advantage over the technologically superior Savages threatening to wipe out humanity. Every time they showed up in some part of the expanding sphere of human presence within the galaxy, he’d gone there, hidden among them, and made one shot at a time. Shifted. And shot again.
Do another one, babe.
That’s how you kept on going. Sure, you could shoot down a few of them. But then they’d know where to find you. Shoot one and move. Words to live by. Words he had lived by.
But now he’d spotted another building. Forward. Across the no man’s land of ruin the Savages had created to keep the Coalition back. If he could get there, he could hit more Savages as this new element broke off to stab into the Savage side somewhere along the main battle down there in the streets.
He felt her smile as he heard his breathing. Hard and fast as he sprang into motion. He had to move fast, or he’d miss the show that was gonna happen over there beyond the ruin.
And that wasn’t an option.
23
Team Ranger
Movement to Contact, Savage Flank at Triangle Square
Moving quickly with as much infantry he could spare, the colonel ordered his team into a patrol column. The platoon sergeant had assured him that Specialist Lucas Martin was the best point man they had. Martin was thirty meters ahead and taking them along a remarkably wide and clean alley that ran along one of the main streets heading east toward Ogilvie’s main body.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 10
