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

man out of him. Captain says we’re moving forward now. Punch us a hole, Sergeant Orion.”

I switched over for Chief Cook and had him bring the crawler in, warning him we were taking fire from the terminal.

“Hammer down, Orion!” shouted Chief Cook with a giddy war whoop that seemed out of place. Above the gunfire and flames, I could hear the chemical transport’s big engines spool up and begin to howl through the drifting smoke that surrounded the besieged starport out there like some wounded beast.

I wondered what would happen if the thin-skinned crawler did actually take a round in its supply tanks as it came in. Leaking deadly hallucinogenic gas would be a problem for those of us on the ground outside the terminal but not so much for those inside, entrenched, and defending. Against us.

“Fourth and First, covering fire on the terminal!” I shouted to be heard. “Engage any targets and give the crawler time to get close to the ship!”

Now I needed to identify an AC conduit that led into the terminal. Chief Cook had given me three locations to spot, and I toggled the combat lens with my watch controls to assess and scan. I found the closest one that wasn’t too far away from the back of the starship and ran for it, hearing rounds chasing me across the burning cement.

“Punch, you’re in charge until I get back!”

I ran for the massive AC condenser and inductor stack and made it fifteen seconds later. I pulled open the service admin panel and checked that the unit was operational. It wasn’t. I went through the root commands and switched it over to manual flow. There was no port connector for the crawler’s hose feeds, just ground air getting sucked into the terminal. There was no way to just rig the intake.

And then I remembered this was Chief Cook’s operation and he’d have to take responsibility for that. Responsibility for hallucinating my men to death inside a firefight. I wasn’t comforted by the lack of accountability and personal responsibility, but I understood that there was math in a battle. Math I wasn’t always good with. Math that made me uneasy. A battle is five percent planning, ninety percent skill, and five percent weird and undefinable magic. There’re some other subcategories in there but that’s what it felt like right now. Don’t canonize that. It’s not Orion’s Law. I have other laws I want to be remembered by for posterity. This one’s not ready for prime time yet. It still needs to be refined.

But right now, it would do.

Seconds later the wide, flat, and gigantic crawler rumbled through the black smoke and thundered straight toward the back of the wrecked starship at top speed. I popped purple smoke and waved it at Chief Cook behind the wheel. He mashed the accelerator and I chanced a look at the AC inductors. They were sucking the signal smoke in greedily.

So that was… mostly good.

For a second it seemed Chief Cook was just going to run me over. At the last moment, he yanked the gargantuan wheel and the crawler came alongside the AC inductor stack, braking hard. He hopped out, mindless of the fire we were taking, and went to work getting the main hose detached from the crawler in a very businesslike fashion. As though he’d only recently studied and memorized the primary maintenance orders so he could perform this operation. Saying things like “I think this is how it goes” and “Well this is all wrong” and finally, “Let’s give a whirl and see if we can win us a purty girl, Orion.”

Again, he was heedless of the shooters in the terminal that were actually trying to kill us. But to his credit he was wiry and agile, and he moved like a spider monkey on pure Quick. I assisted his passive defense by trying to spot the shooters and return fire, if just to keep their heads down. Wisely, I did this from the cover and concealment of the tall AC stack.

One round smashed into the hauler near my defensive position and instantly a jet of necrotic bluish gas began to hiss forth from the crawler’s large tanks and dissipate into the air I was breathing. I had the feeling that it hadn’t actually dissipated. That it had just micro-atomized and was even now overwhelming my sanity via my nose, eyes, and mouth. Still, I shot back at the enemy.

Keep the main thing the main thing. And killing the enemy is always the main thing in these kinda situations, as the First Sergeant likes to say.

Chief Cook saw the sudden puncture and ran for it, his run almost comic and over-exaggerated as he pumped his arms and fists. He had a roll of high-speed tape out of his starched fatigues cargo pocket, ripped a strip, tore it with his gappy teeth, and smothered the bullet hole in the tank.

Then he looked at me.

“Might wanna dose up now, Orion.”

Ulp, I thought to myself and placed a tab on my tongue. I’d issued one to everyone and a few extra to Choker.

Cook looked at me and smiled psychotically.

“Aren’t you gonna take one?” I asked Strange Company’s psychological warfare specialist.

He laughed maniacally.

“One? Already took three, Orion. Get it on, Sar’nt. Get. It. On. Man.”

Chapter Nine

We left the chemical hauler full of psychotropic toxins pumping its poison into the green ring’s main terminal AC system and made for the back of the ruined starship that had been making the run between the home world and Crash, or Astralon, before it got permanently ruined by friendly artillery. The enigmatic Chief Cook, our attack’s Voodoo asset, seemingly oblivious to, and unhittable by, incoming enemy fire from the terminal, went back once we were halfway across the burning tarmac and heading for the cover of the aft bulk of the grounded starship. He called out over his shoulder as he comically ran, “Forgot something!”

If he wanted to get killed by tempting exposure to incoming lead