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

Whatever it was that hit this world, it probably wasn’t a supervolcano because supervolcanoes don’t cause craters that big and keep burning. Probably a meteor strike, and the nuclear signature meant the meteor had most likely cracked the crust and mantle. Big Prizes, old Amos must’ve been thinking as he lost altitude and switched over to recording and scanning, flying the ship with one hand and trying to calibrate his mad hodgepodge of instruments with the other. Collecting data he’d use to verify the sale of the world’s rights and the price he would be entitled to. Again, he was dreaming of an industrial powerhouse like Hella as he threw out the aero brakes and tried to keep the ship stable for recording. With him owning vast shares in a corporation that would want a piece of this amazing world, he would have riches beyond imagining. That was the other option. You could take the Monarch payout and live easy. Or, you could sell to the corporations for stake and then live easy on the interest. Even maybe become a player. Who knew?

You were never gonna be a Monarch. That was for sure. No one is that dumb except maybe thirteen-year-old girls who think Prince Charming Monarch is going to come in and sweep them off their feet and make them one of humanity’s best. Just ’cause love.

Then he saw the Scar that had been carved out on the world below. That’s a feature off to the southeast of the Crash site. It’s the big one. There are others. Smaller ones. Cracks in the world that head off at odd angles. But the Scar was the first thing he spotted. It was huge. Immense. Conspiracy theorists have posited every explanation for it, right up to and including the claim that the alien ship fired some kind of beam weapon that was orders of magnitude more powerful than a D-beam strike, leaving the Scar as it went down. It’s twenty miles wide and a mile deep, the Scar. It runs for a thousand miles to the southeast. And it’s nothing but fused diamond.

Another theory is that when the ship came down in multiple pieces, the engines disconnected on reentry and exploded down the length of the Scar, creating an immense gash in the world. Still others say the ship must have come down in battle and the Scar is some impression left by a siege superweapon used to attack the ship once it was down planetside and trying to defend itself on the ground. The attackers couldn’t cross the surface and so they in effect used sappers to blast their way into the wreck in order to finally kill the crew.

That theory isn’t as wacky as it seems. Much of the weirdness, when you look at the Wastes, looks like the result of superweapons the Monarchs in their Dark Labs wish they could dream up.

And me looking at all this as the miles passed got me thinking, and so we began to talk.

The conversation between the Monarch and me began like this. We’d been driving in silence for two hours since we’d left the blackened remains of the outpost beyond the bridge over the Crack of Doom. We pulled over on the edge of a lake of boiling water that swirled hypnotic purple and spilled paint golds. The smell coming up off the lake and its many pools that stretched off into the distance was definitely sulfur. And something else. Something familiar, but something I couldn’t place at the time. I wondered, in fact, if I’d ever smelled it before, and why it seemed familiar. The murmur and pop of the bubbles was constant, and I was standing there near its vast edge spreading away into the chalky sunlight, staring down into the hypnotic swirls.

“There are lifeforms in there not catalogued on any known world,” said Hauser from behind me. Pig at the ready and scanning the horizon. Belted ammo draped around his thick neck. The damage to his features had revealed the gleaming combat chassis underneath. He looked like a grinning skeleton on one side of his face. Hauser on the other. I concentrated on the Hauser part. We’d seen a flight of Ultra drops off in the distance a few hours back while we were on the road, heading toward the southeast. So, while we didn’t think we’d run into any out here, we knew they were around. That Ultra Marines were operational even in this region.

I didn’t respond to Hauser’s undiscovered lifeforms observation. He did that a lot. Lots of worlds had those. New lifeforms. The galaxy was a pretty busy place. But Crash had been settled long ago. There really shouldn’t have been any surprises. Research and exploration were pretty thorough on most worlds this developed. But then I remembered the Wastes were considered a permanent no-go zone.

Why?

Like so many things in the galaxy, if the Monarchs said so, you got used to not asking questions. Way above my pay grade. Not my monkeys, not my circus. The reasons not to question were almost hardwired into our DNA. If the Monarchs said so… it just was. No questions asked. For example, this world, currently being ravaged by deadly Ultra Marines, had asked why not? In their own way. As in why not govern ourselves?

Monarch Answer: D-beam strike. Death camps. Slaughter. Deleted from the stellar charts.

Probably by the time we made it back to the Spider that would be the case. If we made it back to the Spider.

“My scanners indicate they are silica-based, Sergeant Orion. Which is very… unusual. They are cephalopods. Their eyes, and most of them have at least seven thousand six hundred and twenty-eight, are emitting radiation at very low levels.”

Okay, that’s freaky, I thought. Not just the thousands of eyes, but… the radiation bit. Hadn’t heard of a lifeform that did that. And silica-based. I knew everything in the universe was generally carbon-based. So yeah, that