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

Rain doesn’t bother me. I was zoned for the mission. A gun sensei I once trained with told me a little meditation before a shootout didn’t hurt no one. Especially… if you knew the fight was coming.

That’s always the hard part, ain’t it. Knowing when the fight is gonna happen. So I guess you just sit around on the edge of a fight, just left of bang, and wait for it to go down.

Then you get it on and hope you get to see the other side of it. Which can last anywhere from seven seconds to four days according to my general experience.

Like I said. No arty prep from High Command. No precision D-beam strike to boil the defenders inside the block structure from orbit before the building exploded and left a thirty-meter-deep scar in the world’s surface. A brief sudden violent blue death beam of superheated plasma straight down out of the heavens like something from an age of fantasy and myth. Cutting a wide scar into the dark mud and literally slicing the massive structure in half as it ruined the defenses and cooked those within a three-kilometer radius alive. Problem was, the rebels lost the ship that could do that, the Beowulf, to sub-orbital fighter raids a week after the strike, during the truce talks that fell apart as soon as the Beowulf took multiple internals and lost her main drive and had to limp away off to the system’s edge. Or face a core melt, so the official story goes.

So, now we’re just going in to take them out. Those guys defending the last structure in No One’s Land. Grau Skull. Guys who could have just as easily been us if the contracts had fallen differently when this all kicked off and the suits were signing deals before lunch with some beauty in a bright chrome-and-glass palace of dining gentility. We’d fought alongside Grau Skull back on Blue out in the jungle highlands campaign five years ago. Pacification. Hearts and minds against the Gobies. A mega-corp wanted the mining rights inside what someone said the Gobies considered “most very sacred mountains.”

Now, here on Crash, High Command needs that structure intact for the big show in a week or two at the starport. No doubt another circus will be redirected for the generals while we go in and spill each other’s blood all over the tarmac around the green terminal ring at the stellar port of entry.

On the ground and working dark, Ghost Platoon, Strange’s scouts, make their way toward the objective and we listen to the zero chatter they generate over the net as they take out a Grau Skull LP/OP a hundred meters out. Ghost is pro. Slick trains them relentlessly even though there’s a lot of freedom within the understrength recon platoon to do what needs to get done. Everybody runs the weapon systems and gear they know best in the recon platoon. In Ghost you do your job and the rest is just noise, as they like to say. Don’t do your job and you’re up for grabs… that is if anyone else wants you. But why would they? You’re just broke, and why would any of the other platoon sergeants in Strange Company want you at all if you couldn’t cut it in Ghost?

That’s how people end up back in Reaper again. Because if no one wants you, I get you.

With the LP/OP eliminated, the Ghost platoon sergeant is thinking we have about fifteen minutes before Grau Skull figures out we just did their guys and moves to a guns-up posture, knowing things are about to get real imminent and intimate in the next few.

Surprise blown.

Ghost does their job again as one of the snipers whacks a spotter on the roof of the blocky structure we’re about to assault from our angle of attack. Like I said, Ghost is pro. Suppressed shot at medium range in the rain and dark isn’t easy even if you are running a Kang-Mueller acquisition and targeting scope on a Volk Predator sniper rifle firing dependable 7.62.

I know the sniper and I know his old rifle. Sleeper is in the house. I also know the job was important enough that Sergeant Slick would rely on just that guy to get the job done for us.

But anyone in Ghost could have made that shot. Everyone in Ghost is high-speed-laid-back all the way. They’re so pro it seems like they don’t care much. In other words, they don’t get bothered when things get focused.

Seems is the important word in that sentence.

Being a PMC is ninety-percent actor. I’m not saying you’re not pro at private mercenary work. That’s gratis if you’re going to stick around. But so much about what we do is attitude. Outnumbered, unwanted, and desperately needed, your acting skills go a long way in convincing allies, enemies, and predators regarding your intentions.

It also helps when you’re low on ammo and running out of options.

Or at least that’s how I view it. Your parsecs may vary.

So, if you don’t cut it there, in Ghosts, then you’ll end up in the Reapers getting all the whack jobs no else wants to die getting done. Stuff that needs to get done never mind the odds. When new guys come into Reaper they think it’s super-cool because we’ve got a nice patch with, of course, the iconic Grim Reaper Astronaut straight out of all the ancient myths of star travel and legends like NASA, Mars Command, and SPEC. A symbol as old as time itself. Something that’s stood for death in vacuum, plague, and general stellar exploration danger zones to be very careful of time immemorial. A warning turned into a tattoo worn proudly. Either chalked on a bulkhead inside a busted hull, or flashing on some still-active terminal deep inside a rock where someone found something they shouldn’t have. You get into Reaper