Sudden storms of gunfire rang out at random intervals in the distance ahead. There may have been some return pulse rifle fire or the odd blaster. But it didn’t sound like the general’s thrust was all that motivated to break through.
“Probably probing, sir,” said Andres in these moments as the column held up in the shadow of some ruined building or covered behind a slope of loose scree that was once an office tower or apartment complex.
Martin held up his left fist and crouched behind a dust-covered service vehicle that had probably been left in the alley weeks ago. He pointed toward his eyes with two gloved fingers, then stuck his index finger up.
“Eyes on one,” whispered Andres over the comm.
Martin fed the image from his pulse rifle to the colonel’s battle board. With the entire column hugging the wall of an ancient brick-and-mortar building that hadn’t been swept away by New Vega’s recent wealth boom and gentrification push, Marks watched the image of the Savage marine.
He was obviously on guard duty. Whether it was watching the flank, or forward as some kind of observation listening post, wasn’t clear. The Savage was crouched in the basement stairwell of a building farther down the alley, well concealed. Martin could have easily walked right up on him and gotten the whole column killed. But the point man had lived up to his eagle-eyed rep and spotted the fantastically obscured Savage hiding just below street level.
Armor system just like they all wore. Faceless helmet. Some sort of cloak. Wicked matte-black assault rifle.
There really was no way to sneak up on the guy.
The colonel called the squad-designated marksman forward over the comm and showed him the image. The shooter, a small kid with nervous eyes, studied the Savage while slowly working over some gum in his mouth. Then he looked around and selected his spot.
With no fanfare he got down on his belly and began to inch out into the alley a little at a time. It wasn’t how the colonel would have handled the target. He would have gone forward. But he wasn’t a micromanager. If the kid was good, then he knew what worked best for him.
The marksman waved Martin back to the alley wall and away from the service vehicle. At that moment it became clear what the kid was going to do. He was going to shoot underneath the truck and take the sentry through that small window of space.
The colonel crouched along the wall. It was a difficult shot at best.
Marks took a moment to study the sniper’s weapon. It wasn’t the standard pulse rifle variant; it was a charged rail gun. The colonel had used those a long time ago and was always glad to see the back side of them. Great for direct-fire engagement and targeting; terrible in combat environs and susceptible to EMP-based warfare. There was a reason they’d called them Brittle Betties back in the day.
The kid fitted in an electrical charge pack. One shot per. Sighted, blew a bubble, and fired. The brief electrical discharge of the rail gun popped the bubble. But other than the muffled electrical snap of the weapon, there was no sound.
That was smart thinking by the kid, Marks told himself. Dial down the velocity to stay below the sound barrier. To stay quiet.
In the time it took the colonel’s eyes to refocus on the target, the Savage’s brains had painted the wall of the stairwell.
“Nice shooting, Private,” the platoon sergeant whispered before turning to Colonel Marks. “Good to go, sir.”
They were just a few streets away from the main axis of advance for General Ogilvie’s team. They sent Martin and three others into a building after hacking the electronic lock at street level; the security system was running off an independent power source not connected the city grid. Martin swept the building quickly, moving fast, and came back over the comm once it was clear.
“Top floor,” he whispered quietly. “We got a view of what’s going wrong, sir.”
“We’re coming in,” announced the colonel.
“Copy that.”
Two minutes later the platoon had eyes and muzzles watching every entrance to the building—some kind of plumbing supply warehouse. Marks and the point man made the roof, and a moment later the sergeant major joined them.
What they saw made plain why the main body was getting murdered every time they came up the street to attack the Savage forces holding there. It started with a wide, triangle-shaped intersection. The smashed and still burning ruins of APCs and a few tanks littered the intersection—as did the bodies of the infantrymen from the various worlds that formed the Coalition forces. On the Savage side, the south of the triangle, the Savages had been firing from sturdy-to-the-point-of-hardened buildings down into the open end of the triangle the Coalition forces were coming through. Furthermore, the buildings not occupied by the Savages had been demoed so that only skeletons remained, the floors and stairwells revealed. Any Coalition troops trying to get into an overwatch firing position would be sitting ducks for Savage counter-snipers.
The three of them—point man, colonel, and sergeant major—were seeing this whole scene at distance, from inside a stairwell that led up to the roof. Within the dark recess of the roof access, as the day began to fade into afternoon and a gray acrid misty smoke hung over the city, they could spot Savages in position, or moving around, waiting for the next assault from the Coalition.
After studying the situation, Marks led everyone back down into the dark of the uppermost floor. It was a musty-smelling business office.
“Get me Ogilvie,” Marks told his comm tech.
“Patching you in, sir.”
Marks waited until he heard a voice on the other side, one that didn’t belong to the Supreme Commander. “Who’s this? I need to talk to General Ogilvie.”
“General Ogilvie is unavailable. This is his adjutant. What do you need, Colonel Marks?”
“You tell the general that my boys and I have pushed past the Savage lines and have eyes on what’s chewing up his damned offensives!”
This seemed to stir the adjutant. “Stand by for the Supreme Commander.”
The colonel ducked from the sound of a boom—close enough to make him react, but too far away to represent any immediate danger.
“What’s this about, Marks?”
It was Ogilvie.
Colonel Marks quickly ran through the situation and highlighted the forces facing Ogilvie.
“I’m well aware of why we’re being slaughtered, Colonel,” said the clearly irritated Supreme Commander of the Coalition. “It’s impossible to break their anchor at the south end of Triangle Square, as the locals call it. Ridiculous name, isn’t it? This is New Vega’s high-end premium shopping district, and that building the Savages are using for an anchor is the old bank. Built like a fortress, strong enough to resist pirate raids, and armor and artillery aren’t doing much. But…” added the colonel, as though he were personally trudging up some impossible mountain to lead a surprise counterattack, “I have scout teams probing the back side of Hilltop, and we may well yet find another street to go up in a few hours’ time. We’ve pinned them here; they won’t be expecting us there when we decide to move.”
If, thought the colonel, a there exists.
And knowing the Savages as well as anyone could know something that had shed its humanity, Colonel Marks didn’t think they were going to miss a trick and leave some undefended route into their rear. It would either be trapped or full of surprises. Like being targeted and ranged for some artillery they had yet to reveal. That was their way. More soldiers would get killed learning something the hard way that the colonel could have told them in the first place.
But it was clear that Ogilvie and his lot weren’t listeners.
The truth was, Marks ruminated silently to himself for not the first time within the last twelve hours, they should’ve turned this place into a glass parking lot the second the Savages showed up.
Couldn’t reason with them.
You just had
to destroy them. And to the colonel, that meant also destroying planet they’d infected.
Because with something like the Savages, something post-human and cunning and living in the dark, how else could you be sure you really got them all?
It was the only way.
The only way to be sure.
“Yes, sir,” the colonel finally replied over comm—after first muting it long enough to take a deep breath.
This was not his normal mode of getting things done. But it was the only way to get things done right now. Now that they’d collectively tied their fates together in this—what was really looking like an insanely bad idea—coalition of the willing, as the politicians back home had all been saying in the weeks leading up to this.
The goal of the whole operation had been to save the valuable world of New Vega. No matter how many lives it cost. The ones making the decisions weren’t the ones paying. The feast was ordered. The slaughter was now served.
“But, sir,” continued the colonel, “as you’ve noted, that could take hours. And having moved as far in as my men have, I’m not confident there actually is another way into the Hilltop District. Taking out the forces at the Triangle is our best shot at getting to the… Nest. I have a plan, if you’re willing to hear it out, sir.”
24
The colonel laid out his plan, and to his credit, the supreme Coalition commander agreed with it.
Eventually.
Initially, the general’s “strong and measured inclination,” as he put it, was to wait and see if his scouts could find another way into the district. It seemed to Marks that the main allure of the “wait and see” plan seemed to be the possibility of General Ogilvie coming off as a tactical genius if the scouts got lucky and actually managed to find a route up into Hilltop.
Assuming everyone didn’t get slaughtered trying to take that route.
But if it paid off, that’s how legendary status was achieved. And of course this would become a political campaign talking point going forward. Win-win for everyone.
Except the dead.
“And besides, Colonel,” said the general with alacrity and general optimistic goodwill from his position located much to the rear of the forward line, “we may catch a break and they could engines up and shove off altogether. That’ll look like a vic for us at this point.”
A vic, thought the colonel.
Victory. As if there ever was such a thing when two sides started shooting at each other. The victory would be for those who didn’t have to die today. Who merely had to live with the horror of what they had witnessed for the rest of their lives.
That was the real victory.
“I hope so, sir,” said the colonel, knowing no such outcome was even remotely possible. None of the Savage forces he’d observed, and that were still under observation from his team located right inside the enemy line, looked to be falling back to their ancient colony ship for emergency departure.
No. The Savages were not leaving. Not now, not any time soon. Which bothered the colonel on a level he didn’t have the time to consider.
Yeah. Trigger-nuke dialed into max yield would’ve done the trick in a heartbeat. Still might.
“There is a question that bothers me, sir,” continued the colonel. “If the Savages do pick up and go, they will most likely be departing with a significant portion of the population. We’re seeing no civilians this side of the line. No bodies. No mass graves. No survivors. My guess is they’ve been taken into the… uh, Nest. Sir. If they go, if we are able to declare… a… victory…”
He couldn’t bring himself to say vic. He was too fine a man for that.
The term was phony, like it was some benchmark on an officer evaluation report officers were forever writing about one another.
“Then we’re going to face some hard questions about why we didn’t do everything we could to rescue the civilian population when that was our primary mission here. Sir.”
Your primary mission, General was the unspoken card the colonel had played like an old hand. Because it was all manipulation to the colonel. Playing the pieces, moving them around. Getting things done as he saw best.
There was a long pause on General Ogilvie’s end.
The sense of dithering that came over the comm from the general, at the extreme rear watching the battle with as much data as could be safely gathered, to the colonel, forward in the thick of the fight, was palpable.
“I believe you are right, Colonel,” began Ogilvie slowly. As though thinking his way through this new conundrum. “I’ll order a fresh next attack in fifteen. You’ll be in position by then?”
“We will, sir.”
“Well then,” said the general as though only now realizing that the man he was talking to was the one who was going to be doing the actual killing. The one at the tip of the spear. The one putting his life on the line. Which, when you really thought about it, as the general was doing in that moment of clarity, was the biggest gamble of all. The gamble to sign on the dotted line, raise your right hand, and bet your own life.
“Good luck, Colonel,” said a somber Ogilvie. “To you… and your men.”
25
Following Martin, the assault team once more formed up in a wide-intervaled column and made its way up through back streets alongside the posh shopping district the galaxy had called Triangle Square. It was still called that on the battle boards and TacAn maps. Except now it was a battlefield.
A few more Savage sentries had been silently disposed of, and within minutes the team was watching from inside the dark shadows of a high-end restaurant that had been dark since that day six weeks ago when the Savage ship first came out of the skies above the gleaming gem of a city.
Across the street stood the ancient First Bank of New Vega—a literal fortress. Or literally the remnant of one. Back before New Vega City was even a city, the early colonists had guarded their fragile wealth from the pirate cartels here, in this central fortification. In this blocky, triangular, twenty-story high building.
There were no windows below the fifth floor, and a well-defended entrance provided the only way in. One heavy machine-gun team was bunkered in front of the entrance at ground level, and two more had taken reinforced positions on the second floor in stone architectural balconies that, ornamental or not, seemed hardened to withstand attack.
All Savage forces were clearly oriented to engage anything the Coalition threw at them down the main street—Grand Avenue.
In five minutes, Ogilvie would order his armor and remaining infantry forward at slow speed, using maximum cover. From the west, Captain de Macha and his three tanks, with a platoon of infantry under the command of Lieutenant Maydoon, would attack into the Triangle and absorb the attention of the leading Savage elements located along the eastern side, bunkered in glitzy stores and fashionable high-rises that formed multi-tiered garden grottos. With the eastern side of the Savage defenses engaged and the southern end of the triangle attacking the Coalition forces coming from the north along Grand, the colonel’s team would then assault the main entrance of the bank from an angle that was roughly behind the heavy machine-gun team stationed at the entrance. After breaching the door, they’d engage and clear the Savage defenses located within.
It was hoped that the Savages would react defensively once the bank, the anchor of their defenses, came under assault. If they were forced to refocus on the threat from within, or even tried to retake the building from without, the Savage units would stop engaging Ogilvie’s troops, allowing them to take Triangle Square.
Or at least that was the plan.
Sergeant Major Andres was sweating when he checked his watch. It was hot. Outside, the last of the day’s zenith of heat was fading, but not so within the quiet dark of the abandoned restaurant.
He checked his watch.
Two minutes.
“Everybody up,” Andres
said. He may have been scared to death, but there wasn’t an ounce of fear in his voice.
“C’mon, pretty boys. Nap time is over. Time to earn your pay and kill some Savvies. After this, fortune and glory. And maybe your mommas can buy a new forge printer with the life insurance they’re gonna get if you don’t come home.”
No one laughed. They’d seen enough of their comrades die to feel like their luck was out. That to keep fighting was to tempt fate just one time too many. The reality of their pending deaths weighed in such a way that no amount of levity could lift it at that moment.
Weapons had been checked and loaded. Triggers were live. Gear was shucked or tightened. But there was no laughter. The work was quiet and businesslike.
At one minute everyone was staged in two-man teams to exit the building. They’d move forward covering angles and engaging.
Objective one was to neutralize the ground-floor machine-gun nest at the entrance to the building.
In the distance, Coalition armor, probably Sentinels or Wolverines, opened up at range. The powerful booms of their guns could be heard echoing throughout the canyons of the city, shattering windows, shaking tables and forgotten dinnerware.
A few shots smacked into the bank several stories up and did little more than send forth sprays of concrete.
The Savages’ heavy machine-gun teams immediately answered from across the square. They were sending armor-piercing rounds at the tanks, APCs, and the infantry on foot.
“At least that got their attention, sir,” whispered the sergeant major over comm at thirty seconds to “Go.”
The colonel nodded once but said nothing.
His gaze was out the door and on the machine-gun nest down the street. It was barking on continuous automatic fire, and even from here, forty meters across and down the street, bright brass flew out and away from over the sandbags. The Savages’ guns were gas-fed twin-barreled murder machines. To get caught in their deadly cone was to die badly in several places all at once.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 11
