There was nothing from the colonel in the seconds before they moved. No words. No assurances. No hope. Everyone knew their job. To look at him was to know that he was going to do his job. And yours too if you died trying.
No one failed to notice the contrast of the quiet inside the darkened dining establishment, as measured against the maelstrom of death unfolding in industrial-sized doses out there on the street. These things were present in the minds of men about to run from one to the other.
Except maybe the colonel. He seemed not to care about the weight of the moment. His eyes were cold and murderous.
Go!” shouted the sergeant major, and then they were breaking out from the restaurant. Running and not shooting. Not until the last possible second.
To their right, from some distant building, a lone Savage sentry got on the ball quick and opened with a sudden staccato full burst, spraying the line of men running to engage the pit.
Three went down in the street, including the medic.
The rest kept running, moving as fast as they could to get across open ground.
The colonel was fastest. Flat-out sprinting, his rifle bouncing in his hands with each stride—anything but at the ready. He was determined only to close the distance as quickly as possible. Other teams moved more slowly, following sights in, ready to engage targets. Still others were hustling to set up fire on possible enemy response avenues.
Someone decided it would be good to fire at the sentry before he could shoot more men down in the street. That one hollow bark of the pulse rifle, ethereal and sudden—an alien sound amid the din of heavy machine-gun fire—alerted one of the ammo loaders in the Savage machine-gun pit they were about to storm. One of the faceless Savages, features covered by the dull gray surface of his helmet, pulled an old-school sidearm—a big old massive hand cannon—and fired at the colonel. The rushed shot went wide and smacked into another soldier.
The colonel was already firing as his rifle came up. It was wild until he walked it to its mark and knocked down the Savage with the pistol. Without slowing he slammed his shoulder into the sandbag barrier that formed the sides of the pit. He could hear the team of Savages inside reacting. It was alien almost, high-speed electronic chatter that sounded vaguely familiar.
“Frag ready!” he shouted at a trooper who’d come in behind him. Then he stood suddenly and sprayed pulse rifle fire over the barrier on full automatic. Not even looking. Just holding the weapon over his head and pointing it down on the other side.
He ducked back down and screamed “Now!” at the man next to him. The soldier had already cooked the frag like a pro. He popped up, dropped it onto the other side of the barrier, and dove onto his stomach. A moment later the explosive rocked the pit, killing the Savages on the other side.
“Move! Move! Move!” shouted the sergeant major to the rest of the troops.
Time for objective two: breach the old bank.
A soldier who hopped the barrier slipped in Savage brains that had been blown across the pit. The twin-barreled heavy machine-gun was a smoking ruin. And above, on the two armored and reinforced balconies, the other Savage machine-gun teams were still engaging Coalition forces down the street. Apparently unaware of the breach taking place closer at hand at that very moment.
The colonel was distantly happy that they had a little surprise still going for them. However the Savages communicated, they hadn’t realized the anchor point of their defenses was under direct assault.
It was time to exploit that to the fullest.
Infantry stacked on either side of the ancient security door. The thing was a massive chunk of reinforced steel that had once guarded the fortress from pirates with blowtorches, explosives, and firearms.
“Do it now, sir!” shouted the sergeant major once everyone was staged to follow on.
One of the infantrymen rushed forward with a large two-handed canister. He studied the massive lock for only a brief hesitant second before rearing back with the single-usage lock-breaker canister and swinging it with all his might, activating the rail-driven depleted-uranium ball within. The massive slug shot forward at incredible speed and destroyed the locking mechanism—and much of the door—using relativistic force.
The infantryman dropped back away from the door, tossed the spent canister, and pulled his primary while one of his fellow soldiers shouted, “Doorkicker for the win!”
Someone tossed in flashbangs. Then grenades. And then they went in shooting at everything that moved.
What they found on the other side shocked them.
A Savage reaction force of about twenty in dire black armor had been tasked with holding the security lobby. The flashbangs had disoriented them; they stumbled about placing big armored gauntlets on walls or surfaces to stabilize themselves.
But the frags had done… almost nothing.
Explosives that turned men to red goop and missing body parts. That generated the mechanically equivalent outcome when it came to light-skinned machines, mechs sometimes, and even the heavy troops of some worlds that skinned in similar armor to the Savages. That had killed all of the Savages in the machine-gun nest.
But those same explosives had done far less damage to these Savages. A few had smoking limbs that had once finished in a hand, or rather a gauntlet. These waved their stumps about. Another Savage had been cut completely in half, no doubt due to an unfortunate proximity to one explosion. And a big one, an elite as they’d been tagged by CIC battlefield intel, wobbled around with both massive gauntlets gripping its helmet. The rest of them bore only smoking fragments in their armor as they tried to regain their feet.
Then again, none of them looked immediately capable of firing back. A few struggled for their weapons, but with little success.
The Spilursan infantry, and even the colonel who’d followed the first of them in, after swapping out a new charge pack for his rifle, fired almost point blank into the frozen and surprised Savage quick reaction force. And every one of those soldiers noticed something as they burned through full charge packs, slaughtering their stunned enemies.
There was no blood in the massacre beyond the ends of their stuttering barrels.
Within seconds the Savages were dead. Or rather, lying motionless in their armor. No longer struggling to reach their weapons. The biggest, the elite, was the last to go down. It had gone to its knees—after taking several hits—yet stayed upright, almost defiantly, its massive giant gauntlets still clutching at its fractured and smoking helmet where the flashbangs had injured it. Him. Or whatever it had once been.
Sergeant Major Andres, breathing heavily, sweat streaming down his chocolate skin, stepped over, pulled his sidearm and put two pulse shots into the big giant’s head. It crashed to the floor of the old bank’s security review entrance.
Silence took over for a moment, though there was a full-scale battle going on just down the street.
Smoke and burnt ozone lingered in the air.
“Go three,” Andres said, croaking out the words.
The infantrymen moved on to objective three with businesslike professionalism. Now it was time to wipe everyone out inside the building in teams. Get the Savages to react to the threat close at hand—and fast, so that Ogilvie’s forces could finally take the square.
Colonel Marks could hear Captain de Macha’s Sentinels rumbling into the battle. According to the plan, the massive tanks were coming down Third Street and firing high-powered anti-personnel rounds at close range into the Savage defense on the eastern side of the square.
The teams moved quietly on toward their assigned floors. If Savage comm was down—that was the only explanation Colonel Marks had for how little resistance they had faced in taking the building—then a little more surprise might help. Not only with the mission, but with surviving long enough to link up with de Macha’s tanks.
The colonel and Martin moved to take the roof and
try to put down the indirect fire coming from there. Andres stayed to hold the entrance with a small team in case the Savages tried to retake the building from the ground floor.
“You get overrun, Sergeant Major,” said Marks as he stepped into the stairwell, “let us know.”
Meaning if you’re about to die, tell us.
“Ain’t gonna happen, sir. Always wanted to own a bank. Now I do. Ain’t gonna let it go just like that. My momma woulda thought she raised a fool or somethin’.”
The colonel smiled at this. Which wasn’t a thing he was given to.
“Hey, Colonel,” said Specialist Martin, standing above the body of the big elite that had been the last to go down. “Come back and look at this before we move, sir.”
The colonel stepped over. The giant had been hit by at least thirty pulses. The beautiful black armor, which up close seemed to have textures like circuitry whorls and even braille-like dots along its surface that hadn’t been observable from a distance, was ruined in several places. As with the other defenders, there was no blood running out onto the ancient golden tile of the bank. There was no burnt flesh or shattered bone. No intestines running out onto the ground like the colonel had seen in every other conflict with the Savages so far.
No gore.
Nothing of the awful horror that bodies look like when they’ve been ruined by weapons. Fascinating and terrible in the same moment. When you’re struggling to reconcile that the macabre corpse before you is a life. A life with experiences similar to those of the one who took it.
There was none of that.
Except inside the helmet of the dead Savage giant. Within its fractured fastness were the remains of a human brain.
The colonel stared at it, and for a moment it seemed to waver before his eyes. But that was in his mind. His eyes saw nothing more than the gray goo and spatter.
But the waver…
The waver had been his perception and reality meeting. His own mind not wanting to agree with the data it encountered.
The Savages were post-human. There was never any doubt about that.
But once, long ago…
They’d been just like him.
With a brain just like his. Just like all of theirs.
Surrounded by a body and humanity in all its messiness and beauty.
The difference was, these Savages had kept the brain and lost the body in their long night march toward perfection.
The brain was the only thing left of what they once were.
26
A wild firefight inside the bank lasted for the better part of the next hour. At first the Savages weren’t dialed in to the fact that their line was under attack from so close. The heavy anti-armor fire coming from the bank-slash-fortress was still focused on the surging main body of the Coalition coming up Grand Avenue into Triangle Square.
Captain de Macha lost one tank in the charge down Third Street, but he kept most of the infantry safe. Firing from across Triangle Square into the Savage-defended high-rises produced devastating effects on the structures the enemy was fighting from. But the Savages never let up, even with rubble exploding all around them. They refused to be dislodged by effective crossfire. Ogilvie’s main force of mixed mechanized infantry and armor support, struggling up into the square, could not link up with de Macha’s. No matter what they did, there was no pressing across the main square without taking heavy casualties. Triangle Square was a light show of tracer rounds, pulse fire, and the occasional sidewinding blur and following smoke trail of an anti-armor rocket.
The assault bogged down as Ogilvie held up for five minutes and called for additional tac air support before attempting the next push. During this pause he departed the TOC in the rear and moved forward in an APC—armored personnel command car—to better direct the battle from closer to the units supporting the heavy fighting.
The colonel was listening to all of this over the comm with only half an ear. Following Martin, his team was moving up the stairwell toward the roof. But by now the Savages were aware of their incursion.
“Better hurry up, Colonel!” Sergeant Major Andres shouted into the comm, the concussive sound of pulse rifles filling the background. “Savages are massing across the street to retake the bank from the ground entrance.”
“Roger.”
At every landing of the stairwell, the colonel could see for himself the Savage response.
A wide central well bored upward through the first eight floors of the bank, ringed by broad hallways with beautifully tiled floors and sculpted brass railings. Those opulent corridors were now lines of attack for Savage teams advancing to stop the assault on the stairwell at one corner of the well.
The resistance was fiercest on level four. The entire team was stopped cold, engaged in a vicious firefight against a host of Savages. Not unwinnable, but certainly not something Marks and his men could speed through.
“Sir!” a sergeant shouted to Marks. “You and Martin should move up—get to the roof. My team can hold the counterattack!”
Marks nodded after assessing the situation for himself one last time. Pulse rifle charge packs were quickly littering the impromptu fighting position. Short controlled bursts dropped Savage marines or sent them covering in office sprawls. Firing, targeting, and firing again seemed to be the only way to get a knockdown on the heavily armored Savages.
The Spilursan infantry were adapting to the situation.
“All right, let’s go,” Marks said to his point man.
Martin led the way up into the next floors, following the barrel of his brutal assault pulse rifle into the shadowy dark above. Two more flights up, a lone Savage marine came charging down toward them. Martin fired on full auto, drawing a line of pulse impacts across the wall, and then the Savage shapeshifted from a man into that cartwheeling human-like spider and was suddenly flying toward Martin’s head.
Marks joined in the firing.
The Savage went limp, dead in midair, trailing ruined ceramic plate armor and bleeding hydraulic fluid trails. It smashed into the wall and fell to the landing with a thump.
The colonel wasn’t taking chances. He stepped forward and put two pulses in its ruined helmet for good measure. The blue flash of the weapon turned his face suddenly stark as Martin watched and waited to make sure they were ready to go on.
Like the colonel, Martin wasn’t a talker. The merest of glances from either seemed to serve as an agreement, a plan, or a direction. They were a fighting team now. Rank faded away.
The sprint up the stairs lasted all of two levels before the Savages decided to blow the stairwell from above. The unexpected blast was like the loudest dry stick that ever snapped, rising above the cacophonic chatter of assault and pulse rifle fire, reverberating through the gloomy shaft of this ancient fortress of a building. The war outside in the square to the north was completely drowned out.
Marks felt the stairwell beginning to buckle beneath his feet. He grabbed Martin by the LCE and dragged him out onto the level’s balconied hallway bordering the main well. A moment later the entire stair collapsed onto the lower levels, a landslide that sent dust and debris flooding out in a cloud—likely right on top of the boys they’d left behind on the fourth floor, unless they’d been able to push their way past the Savage defenders.
Just down the balconied corridor the colonel had escaped to, a Savage machine-gun team, firing from a leaded cathedral window that was now filled with smashed shards, looked over in surprise at the two invaders who’d appeared on their flank.
Marks was already rolling over onto his belly. He dumped a full charge pack into the Savage loader, who was in the midst of feeding a belt of massive rounds into the wicked-looking light machine gun. Brass links lay scattered across the floor.
The first burst caught the Savage full-on dead center.
The thing merely sat down hard on its butt, a dozen smokin
g holes in its chest plate. Undaunted, it pulled its sidearm and began to fire back.
The colonel had fired his pulse rifle dry.
But Martin hadn’t fired at all.
He didn’t kill the Savage, but his spray of pulse rifle fire did manage to blow off the arm attached to the hand holding the thing’s weapon. The sidearm went skittering off along the floor as arm and body parted ways.
As if in slow motion, the Savage merely looked at the missing limb and moved to pick up the weapon with the other hand.
The Savage gunner was dragging the powerful automatic weapon, likely loaded with armor-piercing rounds, from off the ledge of the massive window that looked down into the war-torn square. He hefted it around to unload on the two infantrymen.
The colonel was slapping in a new charge pack when the interceptor Ogilvie had called in for an airstrike overshot the laser-designated target in the square below and unloaded a massive volume of pulse fire on the upper floors of the bank.
Both Martin and the colonel watched in amazement and relief as the two Savages were suddenly torn to shreds by the air-to-ground fire that swarmed in through the smashed window at the end of the corridor. It was lucky, but both men were happy to take it.
“C’mon,” muttered the colonel in the yawning silence that followed. “There’s another set of stairs on the other side of this floor. Hopefully Savages didn’t blow them, too.”
Then they were up and moving, racing across the slaughtered remains of the two Savages, the ruined heavy gun, and the piles of skittering empty brass casings as the fire from the strafing run licked up in small pockets of flame, burning out on the floor.
27
“Savages! Incoming!”
There were maybe fifteen Savages marines, moving fast and covered by light machine-gun fire from the buildings along the eastern edge of the square. The first force seeking to retake the bank. It was clear they intended to rush the entrance.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 12
