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

company. Men keep conversations with him short. And it always seems, when I observe these interchanges from a distance, that he’s sad to see these one-sided knowing conversations end. He likes to talk politics and he’d love to go on. But he lets you go and watches you for a long time after you’ve left. Studying you. Like he’s completing some note in a mental file he keeps on everyone. I’ve seen this. I’ve watched him do this. Studying them as they go. And he’s seen me seeing him. Then he smiles at me, waves, and moves off like he’s had someplace to be all along.

I chalk all this up to being a specialist in psyops. They’re masters of the human psyche. They know what makes people tick. And more importantly they know how to freak you out and get you to do the thing their commander wants you to do, tactically, so you can get killed by his men.

Think about that. I tell myself that every time I deal with Chief Cook. Whom I actually like. Our politics aren’t dissimilar. In fact, he thinks, or has convinced me to think, that we both share the same nihilistic view of galactic culture. And that we both know how it will really end. Which is very badly. For everyone.

That’s not even politics. That’s just watching the news and reading between the lines.

It’s just reading the road map and seeing what lies ahead whether anyone likes it or not.

Most Strange Company don’t get that deep on subjects of the way things are going. It’s too sober.

But Chief Cook usually just says to me, “You know, Orion.” Gives me a wink and keeps on moving. I’ve taken to pretending I do know. But who knows? Sometimes it pays to play both sides. Know what I mean?

As far as we can tell, Chief Cook is uncannily good at what he does. Which is mess with people’s, the enemy especially but sometimes randos and even us, he messes with their heads on a grand scale. As has been noted, he hates Stinkeye. Utterly. And the hate is reciprocated in full, if not more so. If the company is ever overrun and given the order to die in place, once all the brass is expended and we’re pulling into our last positions calling out “last mag” to meet our bad end, I fully expect to see those two going at it with knives. Two lunatics who thought the enemy was really just practice for the real villain they saw in each other.

Getting down to the business of settling scores with what little time remains.

But then I remember Sergeant Amarcus and I don’t think too badly of them. Everyone’s got a villain. Or, in someone else’s story… you are someone’s villain. You’re the bad guy.

I try to keep everything in perspective. It makes the mental sight picture work much better. And, as an old sergeant once told me, “Front sight forward isn’t a bad way to live when you think about it, Orion.”

I test it out all the time to see if it’s still true. So far it has been.

“No worries,” Chief Cook’s telling me and the rest of Reaper as we watch the cargo terminal off to our left begin to gush clouds of black smoke, each of us praying we’re not suddenly going to get graphite rained-on in the next few minutes. The black billowing smoke looks like a demon’s chest heaving and getting larger by the second as the fires over there consume and combust more material. “They were storing some illegal munitions that came in last week on the Archon of Delago,” mutters the warrant officer behind us. Chief Cook. He’s a big mutterer. A low talker. Sometimes you can’t even tell what he’s saying and you miss half of it at that. “Big freighter. Torpedoed by our bombers as she tried to make the jump. So…”

Chief Cook paused and exhaled, whistling through his wide-spaced teeth as he did so. Studying the local apocalypse we were all watching, and wondering if we had to go fight in shortly. Honestly, it looked to be devoid of enemy even now. Who could’ve survived? But uncontained radiation does have a tendency to freak one out. Especially if you have to go mucking about in it, looking for a fight.

“So… what you’re looking at there…” lectured Chief Cook like he was some instructor back at EOD school, “is about five tons of high-ex munitions that got hit somewhere in south shipping will-call, as far as I can tell. We knew it was there. Inside man tipped us off. Well, he’s probably dead too now. We were gonna take it. Guess not. That’s the way things break, kids.”

I can’t tell if Reaper actually believes our psyops spook, but they sit back down in the culvert and return to getting their gear ready for the attack. Deciding what’s too heavy to carry for the rest of the day across all the kilometers we’re going to need to fight our way through to reach the main terminal in green ring. And deciding what’s necessary to do that fighting.

The worst thing is to be in a firefight and need what you don’t have. Then you have to get real creative, or real violent.

I stood there scanning the morning’s destruction. It was zero-seven-forty local. The day was promising to be a big mess. I could feel that. I knew from the op order that we wouldn’t be going into that mess to clear. That was Dog’s job. But we were supposed to transit to keep our profile low on the approach to the main objective. Now I was getting an updated feed on our order. Our job now, as of the update in my combat lens, was to move through the tall dead grass surrounding the port and reach the first landing apron’s edge in the thin morning shadow of the main terminal for green ring. I was worried about that. The