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

for the mission, looking like the galaxy’s mangiest warrant officer who’d never make private in any real army, hobbled off down into the crowd-swollen mall. His bandy-legged stride wobbling his squat frame back and forth as he waded into the press of the young bright-eyed warriors who would return this world to the Monarchs. Hell, in their minds they already had.

They had no idea.

Chiefs Stinkeye and Cook utterly hate each other. That’s pretty much the only thing generally known about the inner workings of Voodoo Platoon. Those two would do each other in if they weren’t so damn afraid of the captain.

We call Stinkeye Chief. But we’d never call him sir.

“What if we hit you while you’re down there?” asks Sergeant Slick, Ghost’s platoon leader, as our chief warrant officer leaves us to go make his particular brand of mayhem among the locals down there playing soldier. Making it on our behalf down along the mall as the operation begins.

“You won’t even see me,” croaks Stinkeye over his shoulder, and as we watch him walk down the trash-littered dusty street on that hot summer morning as a war kicks off its opening day on this dying world even though it doesn’t know it’s dying yet, he begins to waver and fade from our view right before our eyes. Like some heat mirage that was never really there all along.

The warrants in Voodoo are pure freaks.

One has to wonder what the big super brains of the Monarchs did to him in those Dark Labs. What a super-genius-level AI can think up. And what was the price of the “gift” they gave Stinkeye. His ability to do Psyonix.

And what would it be like if there really were no regrets.

We mount up and move to our first shooting positions once we part ways with Stinkeye.

It’s an hour later and all four technicals are blocks away from each other when we get his signal to engage targets. It’s hot and the sun is directly overhead. We pull back the dusty old tarps for the snipers so they can shoot, and they start firing according to Stinkeye’s instructions. All the technicals are divided into two groups. West Group and East Group. All of us are on the extreme edges of the massed “army” we’re looking down on. Hiding in the streets above the mall. Watching the Loyalist kids frolic as they play conquering hero on this eternal morning. Snapping pictures with their devices as they pose in front of the guns and reflection pool past generations long gone and much forgotten put up to be remembered by. Silly history… don’t you know you’re just a plaything for would-be tyrants? Smoking joints and cavorting around growing drum circles as slogans they think they’ve actually come up with on their own are chanted and reverberate. The Loyalists have won the war before it even ever got started. Huzzah!

That’s how easy it is.

It really does feel like a festival as our snipers begin to shoot them.

Ten rounds and we shift to a new shooting position.

The silencers are huge and the noise suppression is luxurious. The shots really sound like mere mouse farts. Whispers of ghost breaths. And of course, the snipers are covered by the tarp except for their rifles. Just a couple of workers standing around a truck is all anyone sees. The expended brass is just staying in the bed of the truck as it drizzles away from the ejector ports of the big rifles in steady-slow streams. I run three-sixty for my technical and listen to the shots puff and hiss as the big fat silencers deal with the noise suppression. No one is interested in us up here. But our rifles are out and we will engage.

Down below no one is screaming. Not yet.

At least not for the first five shots. It’s on shot six I hear some girl down there start to scream bloody murder as her friend’s head just magically comes apart in front of her. I don’t even see this, but I hear Soups, the spotter for Wulf, say just that.

“Got ’em in the head, Wulfy. Nice shot.”

I chance a glance down to the mall and iris in with my combat lens dialed in for daytime combat. I scan and spot. Edges of the crowd on our side. Out near the boundaries of the greensward that is the mall. I count three corpses down in the grass and I see the screaming girl, some chubby chick, university age with red-dyed “super hair” as they like to call it, on her knees and crawling away from the guy she was just standing next to. She probably dyed the hair red with an expensive nano-wash to support the movement that morning or at some other recent time. The guy Wulf just blew the head off of doesn’t care anymore about supporting hair.

Four more shots and we shift position. The other technicals are beginning to engage as we move to our next loc.

Down below, the protestor-resistor-looter-justice army doesn’t quite get what’s going on now. Collectively. Why? Because they’ve been trained to only operate collectively. To take their orders and participate in groups when they attack others, destroy property, and generally make a nuisance of themselves without any kind of actual resistance. They’re like jackals. Suddenly forming a mob and going after the law-abiding to demand more change. But things are different today. Right now, they have no clue they’re today’s victims. Prey. Hunted. Collectively. Individually they just know some of their own have suddenly been shot dead. And in the few cases of exceptionally good shooting, watched heads turned to bone spray and red mist on the hot summer air.

There are gut shots because of course.

Clearly this was not what was planned for Conquering Hero Victory Day. Months of the easy victories of smashing glass and fighting the powers that be with endless slogans, chants, and marches in the streets, and full media support, are collapsing as the realization settles in that war is