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

darkness down here, it landed on that one’s upper torso. I squeezed, knowing as I let it go that I’d gone high. But sometimes high was good.

Not safe.

But good.

Brain matter and blood painted the pristine white wall in the darkness behind that one and I didn’t need any fancy tech to tell me he was done for good.

Hauser was working over the main element off to our right. That’s how we wanted it played. We wanted them to think most of us were concentrated down at the far end of the main baggage claim where their entrance doglegged into the main hall. If they were smart, that reaction force would come in and sweep right into my flank as they tried to set up for an assault to the left. I crawled along the floor behind the baggage fountains as I sensed where they’d set up their line, leaving Punch to anchor the counterassault. I was hoping to shoot them in the back.

I passed the Kid, hunkering behind another conveyor feed that accessed the main carousel. Ricochet and direct fire was everywhere. But I’d been here before and I could feel the way the firefight was going.

I tapped him and told him to follow. It was time to get him in on the action.

We slithered a good thirty meters across the polished floor, down in the darkness, hearing rounds caress machinery and sing off into other directions. I turned, pointed two fingers at my eyes, and knife-handed the direction I wanted him set up in. Then I slithered another ten meters and slid into a nice fighting position to shoot from. We were the far end of the line of our defenses down here in the claim area, and what the enemy didn’t know is there was a gap, a sizeable one at that, between my line and the Kid and me. They could exploit that, but they wouldn’t. They’d go after Hauser relentlessly unloading the Pig on them.

Two enemy squads came in and staged. I could hear the chatter of their comm, but it was too low for me to overhear anything distinct. And I couldn’t pop up to scan and see who was carrying the flamethrower rig.

Not until the last second.

The ripe smell of pungent gas, old and dirty, washed over me. Hauser’s machine gun rang out. His onboard radar had their location’s tag, so he knew where they were, but that didn’t mean he could hit them. There was some heavy-duty cover courtesy of the conveyers in the way relative to his position. So he had good cover.

I looked at the Kid. His eyes were wide, but he was in the game. I watched as he flipped the selector switch on his Bastard from safe to semi.

I held up two index fingers to indicate the number eleven. Every space marine knew what it meant and that was company SOP on hand signals. Eleven. As in turn it up to.

Full auto, rock and roll.

This was one of the few times when we went there. We wanted to put up a sudden wall of fire, throwing as much lead at the enemy as we could in as short amount of time as possible.

I unhooked a frag grenade, one of the ones I’d marked in permanent marker with Have a Nice Day. That wasn’t company SOP. But we did it all the same. The messages ran the gamut from Get It On to the ever-dark Hug Me.

I motioned I’d toss.

We’d wait for the detonation.

And then pray and spray and hope we ruined their line.

I clacked the bio-keyed spoon and watched the five countdown rings at the top of the explosive start to subtract. I let it go at three and covered, basically just skyhooking the thing over a few carousels and right into their midst.

The explosion was dull and underwhelming. The guy carrying the flamethrower rig, which started to jet gas-slash-fire, and whose body had just been torn to shreds by needle-sharp fragments, stumbled around and then exploded in every direction as his fuel tank suddenly detonated.

We popped up and mag-dumped on the survivors. Especially the ones covered in burning fuel.

The remaining group, protected from the explosive by some of the luggage fountains and still ready to stage their attack, were now caught in a crossfire between Hauser’s Pig and the Kid and me.

The guy carrying a flamethrower rig in that element was smart. First thing he did was throw up a huge wall of fire between his team and Hauser’s relentless Pig, then traverse the massive baggage claim area, dividing it in half. Burning liquid fuel was everywhere and it was easy to see that things were now out of hand for everyone.

I pulled the Kid back from our fighting position just to get away from the greedy flames that were everywhere. We duck-walked, and I dumped fire in short bursts with one hand as I tried to raise Hauser on the comm. But someone on their side must have tossed some kind of comm-chaff type grenade. Our whole system was rebooting in my combat lens.

Ten seconds later we were cut off by flames, but I had re-established something of a connection to Hauser.

“Pull back to the left and escalators. Set high-ex and det immediately. We’ll find another way up.” The battle here was lost as the flames went out of control. We’d be burned alive down here. It was time to retreat back into the main terminal.

I could almost hear the First Sergeant screaming at me, “We don’t retreat, Sergeant Orion. We advance to the rear.”

The channel was still scrambling and trying to reacquire through encryption, but I got a terse “acknowledged” from the cyborg, and the Kid and I entered a new area of the terminal, chased by gunfire.

It was some kind of employee maintenance hall. Unglamourous and gray utilitarian, hazard yellow lights streaming and smoke seeping in.

Suddenly I had comm from the First Sergeant.

“… say again. This is Doghouse for Old Man,” said the old NCO,