The team fell to silence as the words, and their meaning, sank in for the team.
“You knew about this?” asked Rechs.
“I did,” she said.
50
According to Captain Davis, the biggest survival bunkers were in the lower decks of the sealed colony ship. That’s what her handlers had told her before sending her team on this mission. An entire small city might be down there, just waiting for the end of the world to hurry up and get on with it. The New Vega government had been ready for anything. Apex predators. Pirates. All the other calamities that could befall an isolated colony.
But not Savages. No one was ever ready for them. Or at least that had been Rechs’s experience. And the experience of a few dozen dead worlds.
“How do we get down to the ship?” Rechs asked.
Davis pointed to the far end of the expansive and empty floor, suggesting they go around the great open space that showed the Savages’ work beneath them. “There’s another elevator this way. It’ll take us down to where they were drilling. I never went that far myself, though one of my team did. It was dangerous to get down there so close to where they were working.”
They proceeded directly to the elevator, a much larger freight lift. It crawled downward slowly, sliding through some deep dark well.
“Expect anything,” Davis said. “They may still be drilling. Guarding, patrolling—”
“Waiting to ambush us,” offered Andres.
“Just be ready,” said Rechs, checking over his weapon as they descended.
But when the lift stopped, it opened on silent, lifeless, utter darkness.
Proceeding cautiously, covering the exits and angles, they moved forward toward the great drilling operation. The Savages were no longer there.
They’d managed to blast their way into the ancient buried colony ship.
It had been called the Stardust Zephyr when it hauled itself away from Earth’s cluttered orbit, bound for promises a scout sold high on. Leaping bravely into the shadowy frontiers of hyperspace. In those days, a ship had been just as likely to not come out of hyper at all as it was to finish its jump.
Eight hundred had been the original colony number. Give or take. Some would be born and some would die just in those first few months. Eight hundred colonists had flung themselves at this distant world in hopes of a better life than the one Earth offered.
War.
Poverty.
Disease.
On New Vega they exchanged the challenges of the old world for those of the new.
Storms.
A powerful apex predator.
And disease. Lots of those on new worlds. Med suites hadn’t been invented yet to clear out all the nasty stuff strange new worlds offered.
But it was a chance to do something. Room to move around and discover. A place to have something of your own.
And now, they were a top-of-the-line civilization competing with the best of the post–Great Leap star nations that had started out from Earth long ago. A place that seemed on the verge of being able to turn up its nose at the stodgy worlds in the galactic core.
Stardust Zephyr, built to last the rigors of deep space, protected them during those early years. It became the castle they fought from, sallied forth from, and hid in. And thanks to its protection, as the years of the predators, and then the pirates, came and went, the colonists survived. And, finally, hard generations later, flourished. As their city literally grew up around the sides of the great starship, a new mountain formed in the landscape. Hilltop. And what was once all of the colony became merely… Old Colony.
But the Stardust Zephyr was always and ever at its heart.
A starship that had carried every conceivable thing the colonists could ever need, because it was a one-way trip. No return ticket.
Hyperdrive worked both ways back then, same as it did now. A ship could jump back to Earth again.
But there were no repulsors. Not for something that large.
So a planet landing… that was a one-time deal.
Now the team was moving forward over discarded drilling equipment and boxes packing Savage technological pieces that defied easy explanation to the mind of a modern-age human.
“They spent a lot of resources to get in,” whispered Sergeant Major Andres over comm as they proceeded through the mess.
There were no dead bodies. Savage or human.
They reached a great round well right in the middle of the level’s floor. It was easily thirty meters in diameter, and seemed to have been blasted and bored straight through. Impossibly thick layers of reinforced concrete and mammoth metal plates so thick that you’d think it was the colony ship’s outer hull itself—had you not been able to see the ancient ship down below.
“Down the ramp,” Rechs said, cutting through the awe that seemed to have settled on all the others.
They clambered down a spiraling ramp, large enough for their APC to have driven down in tight, winding loops, until they reached a sort of great bridge of concrete that spanned above the hull of the ancient ship. The Savage light fixtures had been left on, illuminating the ship as if it were a work of ancient art on display in a museum. The light kits resembled the skeletons of long-dead robots, their lamps giant sightless eyes casting adoration at the beached whale of interstellar travel.
“Proceed across the bridge,” called out Rechs over the comm.
“Roger, Colonel. On your six,” answered the sergeant major.
For every one of them it had seemed that most of their time in the tunnels below New Vega had been spent hoping not to run into more hunters—Makaffie’s morlocks—or other Savage patrols. But now, crossing in front of the monolithic starship buried beneath the city, they were exposed. Very exposed. It felt as though if there were ever to be a Savage ambush, it would be now.
Yet all remained quiet. Desolate.
“Where’d everyone go?” asked Makaffie, who was in the rear. Next to the Wild Man.
“Maybe they got in, got what they came for, and left,” suggested Martin.
And then no one said anything until Rechs threaded the inward blossoms of the breach into the ancient outer hull of the buried ship. The metal had been torn and blackened. “They got in, all right.”
They passed through the thick outer hull to the inner hull, climbing down a simple scaffolding system the Savages had no doubt constructed to move in en masse. Systems between those two shells had long ago been removed, probably used for purposes of survival in the early days of the colony. Precious salvage during the lean years. Some kind of construction foam-crete had filled in the gaps and been capped off with ceramic mold. Some of the stuff was now broken loose on the deck, but most of it was blackened and blasted.
Once through, the team found itself in what looked like a high-end corporate lobby. In frosted glass were displayed the flags and symbols of office for the government of New Vega. Or at least, in the bits of frosted glass that hadn’t shattered.
“Weird,” said Makaffie.
“How’s that?” asked Greenhill.
“I dunno, man. I just figured—mentally, y’know—that once we got inside, it would be like the outside. A time capsule. The same as it was when it landed. This is a trip.”
“No,” interjected Davis. “Everything inside the ship has been updated and retrofitted for years by the government. You’d have to visit a museum to see what this looked like on the inside when it first landed.”
“I’ll add that to my list of things to do on New Vega,” quipped Martin.
“Keep moving,” growled Rechs.
There was dried blood here, but no bodies. And the dried blood had pooled before turning to drag marks. Whoever had been wounded here, or killed, had been dragged away.
“Calories,” de Macha whispered over the comm.
This was confirmed as they p
roceeded forward. The rust-colored drag streaks led to bubbles waiting along the walls.
Like a kind of pantry.
The ship’s internal areas, once packed tightly with as much equipment as could be stuffed into the premium space of a starship, had long ago been cleared out, forming wide-open office vistas of white ceramic, stainless steel, and frosted glass. But all of it was now ruined by the pockmarks of bullet fire and trails of Savage destruction.
“Firefight here,” noted Martin.
“Doesn’t look like much of one,” said Greenhill. “New Vegans switched over to blasters years ago, just like everybody else. Don’t see no return fire, or blaster damage for that matter. So… ain’t much of a fight. More like a turkey shoot from the look of it.”
All was silent as they proceeded toward a central well that had once been the power core. The old power plants on ships of that generation always required the most space. It had since been turned into a central lift and atrium at the heart of the government-in-hiding.
Rechs checked the time. Five hours until dawn. Then a day. Sundown and it was over.
Not much time left to get everything done. And his men had been up and fighting for much of the last twenty-four hours. The longer things dragged out, the tireder they would be.
A sound echoed up from far below.
“We ain’t alone in here,” said Makaffie.
“That’s for sharp as sure,” muttered Andres.
Rechs peered down into the shadowy darkness. The space carved out for the old power core likely ran all the way from the very top to the very bottom of the old ship, with intermittent deck access throughout. “What level are the labs?”
“Almost all the way down as best we could gather,” said Davis. “We knew the deepest levels were where the most secretive and important work was done.”
Rechs shook his head. “It’ll take too long for us all to get down there and get back up. I can go quicker alone if I use the armor’s jump jets.”
“You got rocket boosters on that thing?” Makaffie asked. “Man… I always wanted to fly, you know?”
Rechs ignored the artillery man. “How do I find the device?”
Davis bit her lip, something Rechs had never seen her do. He could see she was wondering if she could trust him. And if she should.
“Our intel said it was in a secure lab called Gray Watch. Second-to-last level. The project name is Telos.”
Rechs nodded and moved to the railing that lined the vast space. “Hold here until I get back.”
“Rechs,” she said, holding out a hand as if to stay his jump into the darkness. “We were told there was some pretty heavy-duty security stuff down there. Something called a ‘Troll System.’”
“What’s it do?”
“I don’t know. We only ever had the name of the system. But given what we know they have invented, it’s safe to say it’ll be formidable.”
Rechs studied her for a second.
“All right then.”
And then he was gone, over the railing and falling. Bringing in the armor’s booster jets as he descended into the darkness of the ancient ship.
51
Rechs had to flare the armor’s jump jets then bump them hard to vault onto the circular walkway that girded the central well along the level next to the bottom. He scanned the darkness using the armor’s radar-assisted imaging system, currently interfacing with low-light vision to produce a grainy blue-and-white image inside his helmet’s HUD.
Here and there lay the remains of supplies. Food wrappers. Medical supplies. Discarded survival packs. And spent ammunition casings.
The Savages had been here, looking to harvest the defenders, the survivors. Those men and women who had held out here for weeks, hoping to last until the other worlds could get their act together and rescue them.
Obviously they had not held long enough.
The Savages had broken in to continue their work of… calories. Which was what they’d been doing all across the planet. Shopping. Putting away food for their journey to the next planet.
But this deck still looked to be a mess. As though the Savages hadn’t had the time yet to clean it up like they had at the breach site. That made Rechs feel like this deck was the last stand. The place the government survivors defended at all costs.
He ventured through a heavy blast door that had been blown inward. A crude map on the wall gave directions to the section he’d come seeking.
Gray Watch.
Security Access Omega Black Required, noted a warning in broad lettering.
Rechs moved on without hesitation. The Savages didn’t have security access, so he’d either find the defenses defeated, or he’d find scores of dead Savages. Either way, he had to move forward.
But when he arrived at the entrance to Gray Watch, no security access was needed. The ceramic-forged vault door with a seam down the middle slid open automatically as he approached, its security panel torn off the wall and obviously hacked. Some device hung limply from a series of spliced cables and wires that had been hard-connected to the panel.
Rechs looked inside the room and froze, pulse rifle ready. Not because the door had opened so easily. But because of what lay beyond it.
Not just tens of Savages, but hundreds.
And all of them dead.
These Savages were the faceless cannibal marines he’d fought on the surface. Their machine bodies tangled and torn, riddled by hundreds of rounds per. Their brains—the only thing left of their biological roots—exposed in sliced-open helmets or sprayed in chunks on other dead marines and along the walls.
A horror show.
Rechs stepped gingerly through the field of ruined corpse machines, head on a swivel looking for signs of what had managed this slaughter. Inside his HUD, the targeting laser at the tip of pulse rifle danced out and ahead, covering the dark spaces and caressing the corners as he advanced into the New Vega technology sanctum sanctorum.
There were fewer dead bodies farther in, as though the main fight had gone down hardcore and in earnest back by the door. Those who had made it this far had died alone, or sometimes in small groups, but just as badly.
Rechs suspected that the unknown Troll System was responsible. The question was… was it still active?
The space opened up to a massive lab complex and office space subdivided by high-impact safety plastic. Dozens of small labs, operating rooms, and clean rooms. And all were riddled with the spiderwebs of impact and weapon strikes that had left snowflake-reminiscent impacts in the heavy-duty partitions.
It grew darker the farther into the lab Rechs moved, so much so that even with his helmet he was having a hard time seeing. Now he was down to radar, which had switched him over to digitally graphed green lines of everything. Not the best imaging software to engage targets with, but better than firing blind.
Keeping his weapon steady, he popped a dark flare that would emit electronic light, scratched the activation lid against the wall, and tossed it forward. The imaging software in his HUD re-calibrated with the added low-spectrum light source and switched over to better imaging. Still not the best. But good enough to hunt by.
Far away, in the distance behind him, he heard the distant crackle of pulse fire.
The Savages were engaging his team high up in the ship’s central well.
But there was something else within the soundscape that the armor’s listening devices were picking up. A secondary audio signature, down here and close to his position. He could see its audio line at the top of his HUD.
A mechanical hum. Activating suddenly—then stopping. Then a different one altogether. Something… almost robotic.
The sound of a drum whirring to life.
It sounded exactly like a ship-based point defense cannon.
Rechs threw himself to the ground as hundreds of electrical snaps went off a
lmost all at once. Invisible bees smashed into the ruined safety partitions, spider-webbing them even further. At points breaking through and creating crystalline geysers erupting on the horizontal plane.
Maybe a thousand rounds in eight seconds.
Then nothing. Weapons fire ceasing as instantly as it had begun.
The sound of a drum whirring to life was exactly what any mounted anti-armor gun firing ball ammunition sounded like. Except there should have been the singular telltale BRRRRAAAAAAAAAP of those infamous and ancient weapons that still found their places in the militaries of today. If only because they were so good at what they did despite the production costs.
Instead of that groaning brraaaap there had been only that low symphony of electrical snaps.
There were few things that actually interested Rechs. Few things he took the time to know and understand, to study in depth and at length. And he’d lived a long time; much of what he knew faded over the years. Or became obsolete. He’d seen that happen many times over.
But weapons, and weapons systems, he always kept up on those. Because he’d faced them in the past, he would face them in the future, and he had to survive them if he was going to do what he’d set himself to do a long time ago.
Which was another story for another time.
Facedown in the piles of machine corpses along this lane of the smashed lab, surrounded by pieces of technology that looked eerily like bodies and body parts leaking mechanical fluids in slow drips, the remains of brains putrefying in and among them, Rechs searched his mind to identify the weapon system that had just snapped out a thousand shots at him in the blink of an eye. Only the armor’s advanced audio detection system and his own memory of ancient weapons systems had saved him at the last second.
And now something was moving through the lab. Coming toward him.
Coming for him.
On tracks. Like a small tank.
He scanned memories of a thousand different weapons systems on a hundred different worlds.
Could it be…
… a Gauss gun? An electrical rail gun system that fired cyclically.
Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Page 25
