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

hyperdrive, dumbthrust included, but not fold as used by the Battle Spires, is what I think the universe is made up of. Physics and the rules thereof. There’s some quantum that can bend or break the rules. But of course, there are always exceptions to the rules and if you really think about it then that’s just part of the rules too.

I measure my life in expended brass. The most truthful moments in my life. It stands in, not just brass shell casings but sometimes the linkage of a belt-fed machine gun, for battle. For ruin and destruction. For what we all really are. What we discover when a bullet finds and explores a body, devastating ideas and preconceptions in the cold moment of its sudden intersection with all your plans. That’s the way I measure the universe and test what’s real. The Dao of Lead. This is how I measure twice and cut once. How I move through it all and navigate life’s tough questions. Fire, or return fire.

The best defense is always more offense.

And believe me, I’m not especially violent. I’m not Hoser, Hoss, Punch, or half the guys in Dog. And no one’s close to that dark psychopath that is Sergeant Amarcus Hannibal. Enemy mine.

But I’ve learned it’s best to shoot first. And shoot a lot if you can.

You can’t even trust mem. Even though it’s the greatest currency in the human expansion since the Sindo, you cannot trust it. A devastating war we didn’t ask for, and a war we barely finished with our collective human lives, the Sindo taught us currency is fiction.

The illusion that money can spend you through a tough time or bring back sixty million dead. Lies. The illusion of currency died a hard death during the Sindo. Then came mem. But mem is just currency too. Even though you can use it. Spend it. Save it. Run your ships and weapons with it.

The only thing that ever made sense to me when someone tried to describe what currency, any currency really was, was this. It’s just distilled life, Orion. Estrangier. That’s all it is.

I’ve found that to be true even though I’ve done everything to disprove it.

Currency is just distilled life.

But that, the Sindo, was a long time ago and I didn’t see much of it. Just grew up during its darkest parts. As in real dark. But like I said, I’m a pretty meat-and-potatoes guy when it comes to reality. Yeah, I’ve heard there are cracks and places where it gets thin. And weird. Especially if you happen to be around an operational Monarch Battle Spire folding space. But as far as I knew, when the sign in the bar flickered on, signaling Cocktails in flowing red script, right there in the middle of the firefight inside the main terminal for green ring, I was sure reality had just suspended itself for a few seconds.

Drugs or no drugs, I was about to experience an intermission.

I got up, knowing there was a battle going on, or at least thinking it was a battle and not the slaughter of my men, led by the cyborg Hauser and the wild-eyed Chief Cook, who were currently conducting, routing the enemy and rooting them out. Shooting them down as they tried to figure out why reality didn’t make sense anymore. I looked back at the Little Girl hugging her knees and wearing the giant gas mask that made her look like a bug-eyed alien. And then once more I looked at the seam that had opened up in the universe. Inside that bar with the neon red Cocktails sign. Blinking on. Blinking off.

And I must’ve muttered something dumb. Like Cool. Or Far out. Or even the popular-decades-back Swimmin’.

Junkie benedictions.

A swanky little jazz bar that reminded me of one I had known long ago was in there past the seam. But that wasn’t right. It shouldn’t be here. But it was… and maybe…

I felt myself getting up from the carpeted floor of the terminal. Spent brass rolling around down there. My body was tired and swimming through syrup straight from a hypnotic goo-sugar tree in the jungles of Hitaarr. Every muscle felt rusted shut. I was still holding my Bastard and I wasn’t sure what the status of the current mag was. Loaded, empty. Half full. Wasn’t important bathed in the red neon light of the bar sign.

That expended brass should have been a clue. But I cleverly ignored it and just went with the automatic reactions of a soldier who’d soldiered long enough to make the lethal merely mundane.

The illusion was real. And reality was just an illusion. Right there in the middle of a desperate firefight was a bar I could just walk into. One I’d known, and one that was unlike anything I’d ever know. I was hallucinating, I knew that. But it was as real as it gets.

I felt my assault-gloved hands doing the reloading trick. Eject. Pull. Slap the new mag in. As if my brain, currently on vacation and considering making it permanent, didn’t mind if they, my hands, just went ahead and swapped for a new mag. Better safe than sorry is the tattoo every soldier who lives long enough has somewhere on their brain. And often you have to ignore that tattoo and do something really stupid because no one who’s trying to kill you is expecting just that. I crossed the thin terminal carpet, feeling the hollow thump of the floor beneath my dirty combat boots. Like some fairy tale giant walking the outer worlds. I felt slow and ponderous.

The sign outside the seam in reality lit up and stayed lit up. Not blinking like it might in some noir slasher flick now. Cocktails, it had flashed.

“… and jazz…” I mumbled to myself. There was someone who used to be important to me in there, I told myself because I remembered the bar from another life long ago and not this one anymore. Some reason I’d left