Strange Company by Nick Cole (best ebook reader for ubuntu txt) 📕

“I don’t have one, Sar’nt,” he lied. Like they all do. Even if they don’t know it yet.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Three hours later we were looking down from a ridgeline of broken red rock as the bright sun of this world beat down on us. The morning cold had faded to intense heat as our journey took us lower and lower into the hell-bowl of the eastern Wastes.

We had a problem in our way, and we needed to solve for escape.

From here atop the ridge, you could still look back and see the dim image of the massive Battle Spire hovering over the remains of the capital. Beneath it, storm fronts of black smoke drifted over the capital city and out to sea, mixing with high white boiling cumulus clouds and a golden miasma of sunlight, plus the vent-boil off many of the starships now streaking in to begin to plunder this world on behalf of the Monarchs.

“The bank ship will be coming in soon. After that, if the locals put up any more resistance, they’ll go to endgame.” The tall and beautiful Monarch sat next to me while Punch went upslope to the top of the ridge to scout a chokepoint we needed to get through. Her prediction sent a cold chill down my spine. Endgame meant a lifeless rotting shell of a fractured world with the remaining survivors desperately fighting for the little that was left. It meant melted cities and vast stretches of burning desert where there had once been fields and rivers. It meant being marked as a no-go hazard on the stellar charts. It meant strangulation and slow endless death until there was nothing but the bones of everything that no one ever knew.

The rogue Monarch and the rest of us waited down by the Mules. Some eating. Some smoking. Stinkeye moaning and hunched over, drinking from his hip flask more than usual. He was suffering for sure. That trick he’d pulled back at three-roads junction had done a number on him like I’d never seen before.

To hear him tell it, he was dying.

I’d asked him if there was anything I could do for him, but he just waved me away like he was going to be violently sick, muttering curses as promises against those present, and against some I’d never heard of, but who he wanted dead even more.

But that was Stinkeye. He always did that. Someone was always gonna pay for the wrongs and injustices done to him since time immemorial. He assured retributive death on others like some people eat popcorn. By the handful.

So it was honestly hard to tell if he was really sick and dying, or just drunk and Stinkeye.

“Endgame?” I asked her as we both stood there watching the enormous ship. From here it was beautiful, but it left a cold in your bones you knew even a hot bath couldn’t ever shake. I hadn’t had one of those in nine months. A hot bath. If we got back to the Spider, I’d hit the saunas in the gym on the upper crew decks and stay there for a week just to get the blood and dust of this world, and burnt cordite, out of my skin. And the cold out of my bones from having ever come so close to the Ultras.

Remember, surviving the experience was a privilege held by few in the galaxy. And it was not an experience I’d ever want to repeat. We’d passed their handiwork a few times while threading Highway Eighty-Eight, the main artery out into the desert cities. Convoys of refugees taken out by Monarch airstrikes or Ultra close-air teams out in hunting packs. Flames still guttering in burned-out and blackened vehicles ravaged by Monarch door gunners, the charred bodies within forever screaming silently in the clear desert morning.

At one point, off the main road, we found where an Ultra executioner team, their version of special operators, had taken out a Resistance armored cav unit attempting to get out into the desert and away from formal combat operations. We drove through burned out a-grav fast tracks and the remains of cycle scouts. There’d been a big ambush and a firefight. Lots of small arms and explosives in every direction. The wounded survivors had been double-tap-stabbed all along the carnage we had to weave through just to follow the chalky desert trail littered and splattered with dried blood.

“Estimating all this took place less than eight hours ago,” said Hauser stoically. “We should be careful.”

“Really, Captain Obvious,” snorted Choker. “I was pretty sure we’d hit easy street and these psychopaths had somehow tired of killing everyone and were just gonna let us go now.”

Silence and the sound of the Mules’ engines for a moment.

Hauser the combat cyborg. “Then that would be unwise of you to arrive at such a conclusion, Sergeant Choker. We are still—”

“I know. I was being sarcastic, Hauser. We’re probably gonna die. I get it. Tell the orphanage I went out like a man.”

When Punch suggested we try to scavenge for more ammo, something we weren’t great on, or even extra fuel cells since the lead Mule was bleeding energy by the hour, Hauser stopped us.

“Not advisable at this time. Standard executioner protocols indicate ambushes are to be booby-trapped with high explosives and plasma mines during the after-action phase of neutralization of all enemy combat units. They excel at these types of operations. They’re moving fast to find more units to terminate now. This tactic creates a second ambush as probability indicates other units will search a terminated unit.”

I waved us on, and we weaved through the twisted wreckage sculptures in charred black. I was glad to be off the road and back out in the desert deeps after that. That cav unit had been too close to the Eighty-Eight, and that’s how they’d gotten themselves tracked and ambushed. Yeah, I told myself. They’d brought that on themselves. Now I could hyperventilate easier.

Two hours