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

brothers to one another, strangers to the universe, were depending on us. We’d need every rifle we could carry to get the company off-world.

“Better than these?” Jacks held up four bricks of Thermodyna in response to the Monarch’s suggestion that she had something better. Thermodyna was our preferred high-ex for disabling structures and breaching doomsday bunkers. Stable, extremely kinetic, you could trigger it with everything from traditional detonators to a targeting laser.

The Monarch pulled one of her fancy grenades off her chest rig. It was cylindrical and stippled with a rubberized grip that encompassed its surface. No spool. Just a weird dull gray knob on top. Definitely military-grade. She gave the knob a twist and it began to throb and pulse in a soft neo red.

“This is molecular thermite. Blast radius two thousand meters. It’ll flash-fry everything in less than ten seconds as the molecules ignite and cause chain reactions turning connecting molecule strings into firebombs. Think of it as self-replicating napalm. Moves like a wave outward from the center. We use it to clean sensitive sites. And to avoid capture. My problem here was delivery. You…”

She stared at Choker and his staple gun, Hauser deep inside the guts of the engine to reach the Mule’s control systems, and the rest of us ponying up all our explosives. To be honest, we have a lot. Most of us carry extra. Just in case. And of course… dead Boom Boom smiling behind his shades, tied to the wheel and the seat with paracord.

“… you seem to have solved the… delivery problem,” she said dryly. “This will do. Just get it close and it’ll cook them inside their armor. Unless they’ve got a quantum defensive pocket… they’re dead.”

Now, watching the last hundred meters of Boom Boom’s corpse’s existence, the sniper still had not fired.

“They’re going for it…” squealed Punch with delight. The only thing he loved more than punching people in the face was blowing them up.

“How many in an execution team?” asked Choker, attempting to act nonchalant. If you didn’t know him it might have worked. If you did it gave you the chills. Asking like he had some running count of everyone whose demise he’d ever had a hand in bringing about. The executioner team was definitely making his list.

I try not to judge. But sometimes…

“Six,” stated Hauser emotionlessly.

The Monarch confirmed this number with a nod as I cast a quick look at her.

Twenty meters to go and Stinkeye wandered up to our observation position. We’d left him in the other Mule where we’d piled all our remaining gear. It was going to be tight from here on out as we all crammed in to make the rally.

“Whatchu lizards up ta now?” he croaked like a hungover starport gutter drunk. “Anyone wanna play—”

A flash close to something nuclear lit up the entire sky. It was shocking and made you exhale all your breath and know you just did something very wrong. An offense against all that was natural. Five seconds later a hot tornado of heat and searing light washed over us and knocked our Voodoo chief onto his butt. Clouds raced away high above and suddenly the day was about twenty degrees hotter than before even over here almost four thousand meters away from the center of the detonation.

I shielded my eyes and stared into the bright furnace where the settlement at the far end of the span had been. When I could see again, a black-smoke mushroom cloud suddenly turned into a slow-moving twister, flinging black, burning debris and smoking gray ash away in every direction.

Reaper began to cheer.

Thirty minutes later we drove across the bridge as fast as we dared. Racing through the blackened remains of ground zero. The Monarch had assured us the device was non-nuclear and there would be no fallout.

The sands on the other side of the span had turned into weirdly beautiful glass sculptures. Some meaningless. Some looking like a race of alien titans, half squid, half cloud giant, that might have ruled the galaxy before humanity ever uttered the words “lift off.”

As for the settlement…

It was as though nothing had ever been there. It was like driving across the surface of a dead and airless moon that had been charbroiled. And then, two thousand meters later there was just flaming desert weed and prickleflower for us to disappear into.

The Seeker pointed us toward the track that led off the Eighty-Eight and down into the bowl of the eastern Wastes’ lowest points. The terrain down there was lost in a chalky heat haze that shimmered and sparkled due to the vast mineral deposits and strange features that were characteristic of the post-Crash desert.

The Kid was at the wheel. I studied what we were getting ourselves into, wondering how many I’d get killed down in there where an alien starship had once fractured the crust of this world. Maybe even myself. Maybe I’d even get me killed. And then I gave the Kid the signal to go into it. To take us to whatever we’d been headed toward all along. Whether we liked it or not.

We were on our way, and I was hoping for good things, but expecting worse. Which is the lot of NCOs.

Same as it ever was.

So it will ever be until the heat death of the universe.

Chapter Thirty-Six

I’ve been to a lot of worlds. Driven across vast stretches of endless weirdness that bore little resemblance to the place I first started out on. Or even any of the worlds I might have called familiar. Being a mercenary boils down to this… go to strange and interesting worlds, sometimes stations or starships, and kill people. So let’s just say I have a broad depth of experience in places where people pay to have you conduct warfare on their behalf. Having said that, the Crash Wastes had some of the weirdest terrain features I’d ever seen in my too short, yet felt very long, life. Over thirty-six hours into this op and