Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Part I: GODS

  Gods: Chapter One

  Gods: Chapter Two

  Gods: Chapter Three

  Gods: Chapter Four

  Gods: Chapter Five

  Gods: Chapter Six

  Gods: Chapter Seven

  Gods: Chapter Eight

  Gods: Chapter Nine

  Gods: Chapter Ten

  Gods: Chapter Eleven

  Gods: Chapter Twelve

  Gods: Chapter Thirteen

  Gods: Chapter Fourteen

  Gods: Chapter Fifteen

  Gods: Chapter Sixteen

  Gods: Chapter Seventeen

  Gods: Chapter Eighteen

  Gods: Chapter Nineteen

  Gods: Chapter Twenty

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-One

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-Two

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-Three

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-Four

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-Five

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-Six

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Gods: Chapter Thirty

  Gods: Chapter Thirty-One

  Gods: Chapter Thirty-Two

  Gods: Chapter Thirty-Three

  Gods: Chapter Thirty-Four

  Part II: LEGIONNAIRES

  Legionnaires: Chapter One

  Legionnaires: Chapter Two

  Legionnaires: Chapter Three

  Legionnaires: Chapter Four

  Legionnaires: Chapter Five

  Legionnaires: Chapter Six

  Legionnaires: Chapter Seven

  Legionnaires: Chapter Eight

  Legionnaires: Chapter Nine

  Legionnaires: Chapter Ten

  Legionnaires: Chapter Eleven

  Legionnaires: Chapter Twelve

  Legionnaires: Chapter Thirteen

  Legionnaires: Chapter Fourteen

  Legionnaires: Chapter Fifteen

  Legionnaires: Chapter Sixteen

  Legionnaires: Chapter Seventeen

  Legionnaires: Chapter Eighteen

  Legionnaires: Chapter Nineteen

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  GODS & LEGIONNAIRES

  THE SAVAGE WARS BOOK TWO

  BY JASON ANSPACH

  & NICK COLE

  Copyright © 2020

  Galaxy’s Edge, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  All rights reserved. Version 1.0

  Edited by David Gatewood

  Published by Galaxy’s Edge Press

  Cover Art: Tommaso Renieri

  Cover Design: Beaulistic Book Services

  Formatting: Kevin G. Summers

  Website: InTheLegion.com

  Facebook: facebook.com/atgalaxysedge

  Newsletter (get a free short story): InTheLegion.com

  Part I:

  GODS

  “That’s what makes the Savages dangerous. Nothing… nothing ever makes sense with them. Because it’s all madness. It’s all lies.”

  —Tyrus Rechs

  Gods: Chapter One

  Game Over. Game Over. Game Over.

  The message kept flashing in his brain. And inside his shattered heads-up display. The HUD was telling him he was dead, and that the game was over. Except he wasn’t in-game anymore, and every bone in his body was broken. Crushed beneath the weight of a collapsing building as massive starships engaged each other at close-range above the ruins of New Vega in the aftermath of the Coalition forces’ final retreat. “Broadsides,” it had once been called in the age of sail. An age long before the present games that some still called war. An age lost long ago on the forgotten ruin of a mythical Earth.

  Uplifted medics from the Pantheon were pulling him out of the rubble of the building he’d been inside when it collapsed. Running diagnostic lasers across his combat frame. A Coalition corvette piloted by Admiral Casper himself and bearing the infamous Tyrus Rechs’s tiny strike force pulled away from the planet. The Uplifted medics were diagnosing whether he should be allowed to continue to live, or whether he should be left to die.

  Restart, or be reclaimed.

  His life hung in the balance.

  My body, the broken and crushed Uplifted Marine thought, and felt around for another token in his pocket. Or a quarter. It’s time to leave the arcade soon, his pain-fractured mind whispered as the medics brushed away the cracked glass of his helmet’s HUD and wiped the dust across the sections that remained.

  He was out of tokens. The Battle for New Vega had sucked up all his coins. Left him a tokenless, quarterless pauper in the arcade of the galaxy. Game over.

  “Salvageable,” croaked one medic in their electronic hyper-digital chatter. Both had lighter versions of his armor. Their helmets and sensors made them look insectile, but their human-framed body armor system was composed of the same basic material as the blurry mirrored faceless helmet he wore. After all, they were Uplifted. All of them. Uplifted of the Pantheon. The inheritors of the galaxy the Coalition Animals had called “Savages.” And yet just one element of the combined Grand Uplifted Alliance fleet had taken New Vega, the first of the hyperspace-connected worlds, and made it their own.

  The Animals called them the “Savages.”

  The Animals were their inbred, inferior, ancestors whom they’d left back on dying Earth.

  The Uplifted of the Pantheon were the possessors of the Path.

  The Pantheon were but one species of the many Savage tribes that formed the Grand Alliance that would rid the new worlds of the disease that was their ancestors. In fact they were but one tribe of those that called themselves “the Pantheon.” Some of these other Pantheons even followed the belief system of the Path. But not all. There were many roads that led to the godhood all Uplifted sought on some level. It was godhood… or destruction. There was no middle ground. Unless you counted the quantum uncertainty of disappearance. Getting lost out there in the stellar dark between the worlds. That had been the fate of many. Ships like the Obsidia—they, too, were Pantheon, followers of the Path—had disappeared forever somewhere unknown. But the Uplifted of the Pantheon—of the lighthugger named Pantheon… the Uplifted who’d stormed and taken New Vega for their own… these were the true believers. The keepers of the faith. They had survived the darkness between the stars.

  One of the Uplifted medics took out his can opener.

  “Can opener” is not authorized slang for Combat Protection Mainframe Armor Access Device, reminded Maestro via message over the shattered HUD. The ghostly letters drooled and blinked, hovering above the ruin that surrounded his body. Some of the characters winked in and out of existence. Eventually the whole message just failed and he was left with Maestro’s whisper in his brain. Telling him the right way to think in order to follow the Path. Where the next step could be found. How one might achieve the ultimate level
of existence. Godhood. By meeting the correct standards of the collective whole.

  But we call it a can opener, thought the dying Uplifted marine lying in the rubble of the building that had collapsed as the Coalition corvette pulled away from the rooftop. He watched the medics work to extract and salvage him. A massive section of the building he’d been fighting in, and on, and finally fallen with as it collapsed, pinning and crushing him beneath a mountain of familiar rubble, needed to be removed from his lower half if the combat frame was to be salvaged.

  All such piles bear likenesses, he thought as he gazed at the mound of destruction that had once been a high building. The mound of destruction he was trapped in. An old memory came to mind, brought all the way from Earth out here to the stars and the worlds that they, the Uplifted, had conquered. A memory from some long-ago date. He’d pushed it aside to make room for the Path and the future. But he remembered it now, that other pile of rubble rising out of the dust of some doomsday attack. It had been a Tuesday morning like any other, or so they’d been told, and they’d promised in return to never forget.

  And they never had.

  But they had edited. Which was the power, the right even, of the Uplifted.

  Now, as he lay pinned and crushed within his combat housing, the Path and the future were one and the same. And so were all the smoking ruins that went hand in hand with victory.

  Same as it ever was.

  They’d driven the last Animal ship, the Chang, off into the skies of New Vega. But then they—the Uplifted marine detachment that had been assigned to hunt the survivors down—had been caught in the crossfire atop a collapsing building in those final star-scream moments as inbound Uplifted ship-to-ship missiles and pulse turrets raked not only Tyrus Rechs’s escaping corvette but also the very building it had been attempting to pull the Animal survivors off of.

  My body, he thought. My body is too crushed beneath this fallen shard of building to be salvaged. That was obvious even to him. Probably eight thousand pounds by the old measurements.

  “Can opener” is not to be used as a term for Combat Protection Mainframe Armor Access Device, repeated Maestro, just a whisper in his brain now that the HUD had failed.

  Yes, Maestro, he replied in thought only. Because Maestro was always there for him. And Maestro was always right.

  Maestro always told him, them, the marines, who served for the glory of the Pantheon, what was the proper way to think in order to achieve maximal personal growth along the Path. First, Maestro prompted. Then he gradually escalated through increasingly imperative, and eventually punitive, means to ensure that the lesson could be learned and applied.

  “Can opener” is not to be used. Correct.

  And yet, the Uplifted marines did use that and many other forbidden words when engaged in-game. In combat. When return fire was coming down on them and they were told to move forward and cleanse a certain planet of Animal infection for the glory of the Pantheon and themselves, they used all the slang if only just to communicate what needed to be done as everything went catastrophe in a clamshell. Hell in a handbasket. End of the world. Again.

  End of runtime.

  The two medics standing over his crushed body signaled to another salvage crew working nearby to bring in the jaws.

  They’re bringing the jaws. Good. Those words were still good. Central Committee hadn’t banned them yet. The jaws. They were still good words. And how good they were, because they would free his combat frame and make it new. And then…

  Extra lives.

  More tokens.

  More games in the arcade. More glory. More honor. Another step, one more, further along the Path.

  And then, for just a moment, he was back in the arcade. Standing in front of the Battle for New Vega upright he’d been playing for hours. He looked around. All the other kids had gone home. All of them except Jim Stepp. Jim, never James. Never ever. Not even the teachers called him James. As though they were as afraid of him as the general populace of the school was in awe of him. The legendary Jim Stepp. The older boy he’d once been was now over in the darkest corner of the arcade, playing his favorite game. Devil’s Hollow.

  That had always been Jim’s game.

  That detail had manifested itself in his private reality. His private simulation of his own long-ago past. Just as it always had. Through each shedding. Through each becoming along the path.

  Devil’s Hollow had remained Jim Stepp’s game.

  You played that game at your own risk, his mind muttered like some kid trying not to attract the unwanted attention of the school demon.

  Between the two of them lay Galaga, Battlezone, Tutankham, Dig Dug, Scramble, Asteroids Deluxe, Feeding Frenzy, Tapper, Total Annihilation, Smash TV, Concentration Camp, Ye Are Kung Fu, and I Am God.

  He checked his pockets… he had no tokens. No quarters. He wasn’t a crushed space marine here in the arcade. Just a kid. It was time to go home now. Except his legs wouldn’t move and so he just stood there and watched Jim Stepp, the toughest kid in school, staring into the machine he was working. Staring into a game called Devil’s Hollow. Like he was in a trance.

  “Salvage likelihood at sixty-five point two percent,” indicated one Uplifted medic to the other. The one holding the can opener. Both of them chittering back and forth in digital electronica.

  “Can opener” is an unauthorized word. Bad word. Bad word. Bad word.

  Again, gentle promptings from Maestro.

  Use “Combat Protection Mainframe Armor Access Device.” Good words.

  Then he was back on the battlefield of the planet the Animals had called… New Vega. Gone from the secret arcade of his youth. Lying amid the aftermath of the battle that had almost ruined all the Uplifted marines from the lighthugger Pantheon. The sky was dark from the smoke of still-raging fires across the battle-torn city. It didn’t matter—those were the buildings of the Animals, their houses, their towers, their culture on this world burning like so much trash. Like the garbage it was.

  Beyond the gray-and-black smoke, the blue of early night was shining through. The crushed Uplifted marine scanned the stars to see where his prey had gone, but that corvette had departed hours ago. He had navigation and targeting data on the other hulks in low orbit. That telemetry was at least showing within his cracked and ruined HUD. All the ghostly digital renderings of the positions of the Grand Uplifted Alliance vessels come to take New Vega for the Pantheon. The data fritzed in and out of existence and occasionally scrambled into meaninglessness, but it was reassuring nonetheless. They had succeeded.

  The massive hulk known as Palace of All Knowledge was due to pass overhead in thirty-six minutes and forty-two seconds. It would drop more advanced reclamation units onto the ruins of New Vega so that the work of creating the Pantheon’s terrestrial paradise could begin immediately. Finally. After all those years of stellar wanderings in the dark, the work of making the planet into the Pantheon’s new home could begin.

  It would be a Home for the Gods.

  If you were some very unlucky human survivor, what the Uplifted called Animals, watching all of this from some hidey-hole in the rubble, dirty, wounded, out of charge packs and knowing that the last of the Coalition had just pulled out with its tail between its legs, knowing that you were most likely doomed and stuck well behind enemy lines, you would see the Savage medics, armored and faceless, working with green diagnostic lasers over the collected wounded to assess who was going to be salvaged, and who was going to be… reclaimed… for the greater good.

  The medics were using the Combat Protection Mainframe Armor Access Device now, and the Uplifted marine’s resulting disconnection from the system and Maestro gave him a sudden other perspective of what it might actually be like to be an Animal stuck behind enemy lines. A desperately frightened monkey ancestor compared to the pinnacle of post-human evolution that had conquered you. The Uplifted.

>   The contrast was shocking in its clarity, despite the narcotic-laced drip the medics had introduced to assist in the salvage operation.

  To your Animal monkey ears and monkey mind, the Uplifted’s speech would sound like the high-pitched chitter of electronic insects sped up on H8-balls during a weekend-long binge in Sin City. It would sound hyper-fast, neurotic, tense. And even if you, timid frightened creature out of the primordial past that you are, could slow down the words that they, the Uplifted, were exchanging, one between the other, it would sound to you like a mash of languages, random numbers, and even a few symbols spoken by a madman obsessing. None of it would make any sense to you. The meanings would be indecipherable. They, the Uplifted, played with words so constantly that their meanings had become unmoored from their origins.

  The truth was made and remade again and again to suit the constantly shifting needs of the Pantheon. They did not cling to stories or facts because of fusty old things like tradition and meaning. They optimized reality as readily as they optimized every facet of themselves. Every facet. Constantly. And so today’s Truth and Safety Council became the Inner Committee in the blink of a thought and tomorrow might be something just as innocently named and yet a little more powerful in its new form.

  This was shedding. This was the way forward for post-humanity becoming something more.

  Sometimes changes were made due to the fluxing codes by which one had to live and be judged by in order to remain part of the Pantheon. Part of the collective whole of the Uplifted. As in “can opener” being a bad word. Today out of favor. Maybe tomorrow would be different. But until then, it always has been this way… until something needed to be optimized… and then it will have always been that new way too and never the other.

  And to the wounded Uplifted marine lying there, hovering between runtime and—

  No. No. No. Runtime is a bad word.

  Hovering between life and reclamation. Don’t use “runtime.”

  Maestro’s spirit remained even if the disconnect had been accomplished.