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

But why me?

He’s coming now, Orion. The Wild Thing. He’s coming… now.

The captain and the Monarch nodded to each other, topped off on mags, and moved inside the ship to clear it. Seconds later there was the thunder of gunfire in the tight spaces forward.

“Time to go,” said Hauser flatly. “Dog Platoon is pinned down. They need our assistance immediately, Sergeant Orion.”

I looked at Choker for an update on Jacks, who didn’t look so hot.

“Good to go, Sergeant,” said our medic, putting all his weight on a pressure bandage. “He’s gonna make it.”

Jacks was gray.

I nodded at Hauser and we made the ramp. I commed with the Kid as we hustle-crouched along the dropship’s flat and wide hill going forward to intercept the men coming from the wounded crawler.

“It’s all on you and Punch, Kid,” I said. “You gotta hold that ramp or there’s nothing for anyone to come back to.”

“We got this, Sergeant,” interrupted Punch. “Did I mention I was comfortable with extreme amounts of violence?”

The Kid just gave me two clicks on his comm as he engaged more targets pushing the hijacked drop. We were getting hit now from three directions back there.

He was Strange Company now.

We depended on him.

And he knew that.

Chapter Fifty

The wind was beginning to howl, and the leaves of autumn were sweeping across the desert starport airfield like dancing whirling dervishes on sudden end-of-summer sciroccos. Moving from ship to ship, under fire, we linked up with the first elements of Dog in retreat. In the distance, we could see the hit crawler. Smoke was billowing out of the side in great big black oily huffs and bursts. What remained of Dog Platoon was fighting a fixed defense from every side they could hold out there.

Monarch Ultra Marine infantry were moving in swiftly from our southwest as a blank space in the universe began to open up. Music like sizzling acid you could never remember playing on the keys of the brain as you watched the horror that came next become real. There were other Ultra death squads coming in. Coming at us. From all points of the compass. But these were the reinforcements that were here to stop us. That was clear. Like they’d known we would always try to exit here at the starport by hijack, and now they were going to put a stop to that.

I heard that unholy music begin to thunder from that other place in the universe that I didn’t ever want to know. It was happening now. He was coming. The Wild Thing. I could smell fall. Autumn. And it smelled of the end of all things good and the coming of the winter of the universe. Maybe that was where he came from. The Wild Thing. Like the ship we’d crossed through deep down in that dark crevice made thousands of years ago. The ship from tomorrow and yesterday. Things way above my pay grade. Maybe the Wild Thing was a doomsday weapon from the future. Made as humanity’s last stand against an unquenchable force that had finally come to take our place on the galactic scene. The Simia. I had no idea. But after everything the Monarch had told me, maybe that was the explanation for the unexplainable.

If there can be one.

And the Little Girl? War’s orphan. Maybe she was just some gift from the universe that took pity on humanity and knew that we’d need some help. Placing its use in the most vulnerable of hands.

Like there was some new order coming to the universe and we would be governed in a new way. A way foreign to us. A way of mercy.

The Wild Thing came on, running at them, our enemies, as he began to fire. That fantastic weapon of his opening up and creating a cone of shadowy death that was like a hail of speeding bullet ravens ruining everything in their outbound path. A human carrying a GAU weapon. Which was impossible now. But who knew when and where this Wild Thing came from. What was possible in the future, or the other. Or what could be imagined when death came knocking at humanity’s collective door. I bet we got real creative ten thousand years, or whenever, from now. When it’s desperate you can get up to all kinds of tricks. As anyone in Strange Company knows.

In seconds out there as I watched in fascination and horror, that enemy assault team was ruined and the Wild Thing was already engaging another Ultra death squad. They reacted faster, sending man-portable rockets at him. He weaved, ducked, seemed to accelerate into their midst, and began firing. Smoking missile trails threaded past him as he shot them down. Grenades detonated and he moved closer, drawn to the slaughter like a moth to a flame.

Someone detonated an explosive, and the Wild Thing was rocked by the shock wave. He’d bought us time by destabilizing their attack. We could get ours pulled back now that they were reacting to our unknown superweapon loose and in their midst. Killing spree in effect.

I scanned the crawler.

There were dead. Theirs and ours there.

“The magazines have been hit. Fire suppression systems are struggling to contain the damage,” reported Hauser, who was assessing with his combat scanners and matching data with comm chatter and various telemetry feeds he could pick up off Strange Company members’ equipment.

Overhead, Chief Cook, Hustle, and Hoser in the Ultra dropship lumbered across the battlefield murdering Ultras trying to push from the city onto the airfield. Heavy fifty-cal fire, incendiary mixed with tracers, ruined an assault team who’d just breached the high concrete wall ringing the starport. I saw Hustle shouting inside the drop, telling the chief to shift position so he could engage new targets.

We were covering behind the bulk of an inter-system ore hauler that had been parted out and hadn’t seen a run upwell in twenty years. The patchwork ship was a ghost of itself, but it was cover in the middle of a