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

Suppressive from the east. My guess is they’re sending in an assault team from the north.”

I’m low-crawling across the grit of the floor and getting cut to shreds by glass and debris. But at least I have my assault gloves on. I’m also spiking hard on adrenaline, so it doesn’t matter. I hope the Kid’s following because it would be a real waste for the First Sergeant and Biggs to have done all that work only to have the Kid get killed without contributing in the least.

“Orion to Chungo…” I wait for the comm AI to redirect to the indirect squad leader in Voodoo.

“Go for Chungo, Orion. Sounds like you’re in the stew.”

“Copy. Yeah we’re in it for sure. Need you to drop something across TPs one through six I marked out for you. Got anything that’ll do the job?”

Pause. Maybe he says something smart, I don’t know. I’m close to Hoser who’s managed to get a small space in the rubble of the bank with which to engage the snipers’ teams to the north. Hoser’s Pig makes a lot of noise and burns a lot of brass. But it does tend to keep heads down.

“Whatchu facin’, Orion? Say again… Whatchu—” It’s Chungo over the comm.

“We got assault teams coming out across the kill zone,” I reply. “Anything anti-personnel would be mucho appreciado at this time!”

I crawl up right behind Hoser and the assistant gunner, Hustle.

Hoser is laughing his butt off because he’s cutting Front Loyalist irregulars to shreds within his small window of traversing fire death. Problem is the rest of the squad is telling me the irregulars are all across the section and the Pig can’t hit ’em. Still, the heavy gunner is having the time of his life shooting whoever he can whenever he can. It’s almost obscene. But I’ve never been one to spite a man for his passions. No matter how simple they are. We all have ’em. I’m sure mine would be just as weird to them.

“Shot out,” mumbles Chungo over the comm.

The volume of incoming is so heavy there’s no way I’m chancing a look to see where anything lands. I’ve already got wounded. If what he has doesn’t work… we’re fixed for up-close and personal battle.

What happens next sounds like a thousand angels screaming from far away to suddenly close. And then there’s like two thousand thumps. Yeah, my ears aren’t that accurate, it was later when I got the ordnance specs that I can add the numbers to the account. But the thousand screaming angels are indirect fire from a one-shot anti-personnel system Chungo had been holding back for just such a special occasion. The one thousand thumps were the munitions splitting in half just before impact.

A second later the entire battlefield lit up like a camera flash. Comms went down and it was clear there’d been some sort of EMP disruption effect in the mix. If they were running night-fighting gear, they were now blind out there. But these were irregulars, and chances were they’d gotten their rifles, NVGs, and a bowl of rice before the attack. So they were really just armed civilians with lots of guns being funneled straight at us to try and do something about our refusal to die. They were still dangerous, I’m not saying that. The Front Loyalist pros were running sniper ops and watching from the heavies suppressing on our right flank, looking to exploit a breakthrough with probably more reserves. They were going to overrun our line inside the bank and break us up for a moment. Then they’d send in a freight train of irregular troops to exploit our momentary weakness.

We got lucky—the freight train arrived a little early while we could still kill it. The Voodoo indirect team came through for us.

But back to Chungo’s special.

The first segment of the air-deployed munition was similar to a flashbang grenade. Irregulars who’d probably been taught to crawl and rush in teams, rudimentary movement to contact, were suddenly deaf and blind out in the open and their ears were probably bleeding. They’d even be having trouble standing up. Even trained pros do the thing you shouldn’t do at this point if they’re suffering from these effects. Which is lie there and let your senses come back online. Some of them just start shooting wildly, probably hitting their own more than getting anywhere near us. Others stand up and scream something in the local dialect to the effect of, “I can’t see!” convinced they’ve been horribly wounded.

That’s when the second phase of munitions went off. A variation on the time-honored mine system as old as human history, the claymore. Except this phase is run by a one-shot AI that’s scanned the strike area, determined the targets, and commanded all the munitions be feather-dropped via small drone batteries before activating their smaller grav batteries to readjust their kill arcs for maximum efficiency across the front of our line.

The AI has about a minute and forty-five seconds of runtime. It’s more like an expendable AI battery charge.

Then, and this is where Chungo, whose fat and muscle contrive to make him look like a stubby large bull, figure that one out, laughed so hard I thought he was going to have an embolism when he told me later that about sixty-four thousand steel BBs exploded in perfect max kill arcs and destroyed the entire assault force in half a second. A sudden brutal overkill ripping through the night in front of the ruined bank.

He was right about that.

There wasn’t much left of anyone.

“Expeditionary Logistics developed that but had problems, so I got a few on sale when we hit that bazaar on Noaa,” laughed the immense Chungo. Strange’s indirect specialist. A maestro of death from above and the steel rain falling down on your enemies. “It’s really a beautiful system though,” he said softly after he stopped laughing. Almost reverently wiping a tear from his swollen red face. Almost a holy whisper at the end. “It’s only