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

The bar was dark. Tables with universe blue, like midnight on a full moon, tablecloths waited in the mirror dim dark behind the bartender and where I was seated at the bar in full battle rattle, my slung Bastard hanging like it didn’t care that it was a thing that shouldn’t be there. Small little red hurricane lamps glowed like dying suns in the darkness all around the empty place. Like each table was endgame solar system gone red dwarf. A small model of what it would look like when the heat death of the universe finally came for us. Soon to collapse into nothing but a blank. Fun, huh? But then there were the black holes where matter gets crushed down so tight and thin, some speculate that the incredible suck there leads to other places not known. Or dreamed of.

But feared might be a better term. Who knew?

Interesting to find out if one could survive such a trip. But that’s sci-fi as old as the Trek. And look how much they got wrong there. So, like I said, who knows.

“Scotch. Rocks.”

The bartender turns to his work once I’ve declared my weapon of choice.

“What is this place?” I ask as the not-smiling businesslike man works pleasantly. Filling a glass with one large and perfectly manicured cube just slightly smaller than the cut crystal bucket. Then the scotch a’splashing.

Some brand I’d never had the money for. Ho ho… good times ahoy. Death ain’t so bad, I tell myself.

The amber splashes over the giant frosty cube and I’m thirsty just looking at it all. I smell the hint of peat and smoke and for some reason I look around once more, for her. Whoever she was that I once knew and couldn’t remember now. And have tried to forget in all the wars since.

She was the blank space in my universe where once there was something meaningful. But that’s probably standard issue for every private contractor. Every soldier. Every man.

I remember though, that her kisses tasted like scotch.

I remember it took a long time to forget that detail. And drinking scotch since hadn’t helped.

People join the Strange Company for all kinds of reasons. Even me. Yes. I have mine. And they’re not exceptional. If you think this is some account where the narrator is going to present himself as brave, yet fated, or heroic and bold with an answer, tool, weapon, or quip for every occasion, I’ve got news that won’t move or shake you. That ain’t me, bub. Maybe the quip part though.

I’ve always found it helpful to have a sense of humor about whatever suck you find yourself in. It makes things pass a little easier. So when you find yourself in some crossfire hurricane and you’re afraid your number’s up this time, just tell the guy next to you as you both fumble for magazines and try to keep putting as many bullets between you and those trying to kill you, just tell him, “I guess they’re not fans.”

I always laugh. And it puts things in perspective even if the other guy doesn’t get it and thinks you’re just weird.

The top-shelf scotch on the rocks, just one, is placed in front of me. I watch it because it is beautiful and perhaps death wasn’t what I’d been expecting it to be all along. Somewhere in the bar I hear an old-school jukebox click and hum as it warms up to play. I look over and see it in the corner. Purple lava light whorls and twists along its antique face. Just like the one in that bar from a long time ago when I was no one else.

I pick up the scotch and hold it in front of me. And for just a moment I see the logo and name of this bar, expecting it to be the same one from that long-ago bar, because this is just a hallucination, a drug trip, right? Isn’t it? I’m just having some kind of weird flashback about a critical event in my past while most likely half my own drug-addicted platoon gets killed because of a severe lack of leadership. For which I am responsible. I’m tired, honestly, of being… responsible. Of leading. Badly.

I sigh.

Yeah, I’m pretty tired of it all.

I’ve been tired for a real long time. It’s best to be honest.

How long, I ask myself as I stare at the name of the bar on the napkin beneath the cut crystal glass of scotch I’m contemplating.

I hear a female voice. Not the one from long ago. The one whose kisses once tasted of ice and scotch. Do they still? Good scotch because her family had the kind of money that could afford good scotch. In good times, and better. Ice because it was always hot where we were then. Always around her. But maybe that was just me.

They never had bad times like the rest of us. Where she came from. Whose she was.

But the voice of the Falmorian party girl is the one I hear as I stare at my beautiful drink. Her electric purr with the husky French accent.

I remember you, estrangier.

Yeah.

I sip the good scotch.

It’s good. Real good, in fact.

Yeah, I tell myself. I’ve been tired since then. And running on fumes for a long time before Crash, or Astralon, or whatever you want to call this mess. This tragedy… If I’m honest with myself.

I sip again.

So, this is just hallucination. And I’m probably hit and dying badly in a firefight going to hell by the second. Hopefully Choker is working on me. Checking my condition. Tourniquet to stop the bleed. Pack the wound with quick clot. Pressure dressing. Call for dustoff.

Eight minutes to a rear main casualty care unit.

This is just shock I tell myself and finish the scotch.

The bartender is right there with the bottle. Hovering as though his very existence depends on it. Yeah, of course. It’s the good stuff. The