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

Payments to our lawyers on Bright had stopped six weeks ago. Our current account rep, Astacia Esquival, had advised the captain to conduct no further operations until some of our back pay was settled up. She’d even advised him to withdraw us off-world for our next contract and let the lawyers figure the aftermath of the struggle with whoever ended up in control of the planetary assets.

Oftentimes the Monarchs’ reps would do just that.

There were two problems to this though. The Spider could no longer make planetary landings, besides being no longer jump-capable. We needed a starport with extra-orbital transport to effect the eighteen-hour flight for link-up with our ship and to get off-world to our next contract. And with no mem on hand we couldn’t hire orbital transport. That was problem one, and it was a big one.

The Resistance was paying all the merc dropships in mem by the bucketloads for excessive contracts. The only transport we had was wheeled. And no matter how much of Stinkeye’s hooch you ran it on, no high-speed battle goat was going to ever achieve escape velocity beyond a few meters of height on the bad roads between everywhere we needed to go.

Problem two was there were only three starports on Crash. One was currently a giant smoking crater, the result of a tac-nuke early on down in the southern hemisphere. That was a denial-of-service attack being that the port was away from the main action and therefore capable of operating as a major supply hub for our enemies. The Resistance generals hit it just to make their case for the main port of entry being critical. That main port was the one we were trying to take this unseasonably hot morning. And the third starport was five hundred miles out in the desert wastes and dead seas west of our position. The Crash Wastes, as it’s officially known. Near the famous landmark that gave this world its name. The Crash. That starport was nothing more than a dry lakebed and a lonely old terminal with a small settlement built up around it. But, big valuable but, it ran its own tracking beacons and could be used to make system entry and planetary landing. That made it extremely valuable once the main starport went down.

The only caveat was that any ship setting down there had better be able to get itself off the planet otherwise it was stuck forever. No services out there.

It was a smuggler’s port. Every world had them. And it was amazing how they defied destruction even in the worst of conflicts. Probably because the leaders of both sides were using them to line their coffers with smuggled contraband in the event of either a win or a loss.

It pays to play it both ways sometimes.

All that was the big-picture strategic view of what we were trying to do, and what needed to be done, as we got the order to move on the starport along with almost every other ground unit the Resistance had in our sector to throw at the Loyalists.

First the Wraiths came in before dark. Stealth bombers shaped like flying crescents that hummed on evil notes in the predawn overcast skies that were already hot and expectant with the day’s heat and battle. They were like the black blades of Death’s scythe flying through the darkness to hit their targets. These were actual Astralonian air power assets. Astralon had once had a carrier group but the Monarchs sent it in with the first wave at Mistral Bay and of course we all know what happened there.

That was a bad day for everyone. Including the Monarchs.

Since then the Astralonians had developed a great planetary air force but had shied away from carrier production, preferring to transport their aircraft off-world via bulk carrier and deploy them planetside on whatever world they’d been ordered to fight on for the Monarchs.

So the Wraiths, jet-black and moaning like drowning ghosts in the night skies, swept in and hit a lot of targets to the southwest of our staging positions. Deep in the rear of the front lines of the Loyalist units. Probably nailing supply columns and staged units that would react to our impending assault. Now they were blown to bits, covered in burning fuel, and trying to scramble out of meters-deep craters along the main MSR at two hours before morning light.

Hot chow was most likely canceled.

Dawn came up hot and steamy within the misty gloom. The day felt tense and sweaty just as the long night had. Reaper had spent the darkness in a culvert located along the main aqueduct that supplied this district. A large and impressive engineering feat worthy of any of the Bright Worlds. Water was a big thing on Astralon. In some places it was everywhere. In others it was nowhere to be found. Sometimes the dividing line was so clear it was unnatural. It made you uneasy to see a desert scar and a tropical forest divided by a rushing boulder-strewn river that seemed like a tear in the world. Many people chalked this up to the actual crash site itself. Saying that somehow the crust of the planet had been fractured long ago and therefore the water tables, moisture, and weather patterns of this world were all ruined from that long-ago impact with something the expansion of humanity couldn’t yet wrap its mind around.

But the planet had reached a strange kind of equilibrium with the early colonists building these huge continent-spanning aqueducts that would have needed to be hit by at least hundred-megaton warheads to destroy. And even then, the water would have just found its way past the irradiated lake that had formed in the hundred-megaton crater.

The giant structure of the aqueduct feed we slept in that night, or didn’t sleep in in the case of some of us, made you feel insignificant. I spent a lot of time outside the feed to the culvert where everyone rolled out,