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

But that wasn’t Gains’s PT. Gains loved exercise, and he studied it relentlessly. Wherever we were at he was turning whatever he had at hand into a gym. He was rippin’ yuuuge even for a gunner. But he was also an encourager. He didn’t shame you if exercise hadn’t been your thing and you wanted to learn. He just got you going and encouraged you to do more. He called those improvements your gains. Hence the tag. He’d work with anyone on anything they needed to improve. He had a small cult of gettin’ swole going on across the entire company. Once you were in the cult you found positivity, friends, and you got jacked. One of them had needed to explain to me the usage of jacked versus swole one time. You got swole. You were jacked. I never joined but I admired from afar.

“Yeah,” I said in the dark of the maintenance hangar as we waited for more war to come and find us. I adjusted my sling and tried not to think about the future of the company without Gains anymore. Who would encourage us now to be better than the drunken, tired, and wrecked soldiers we were? Who would see that something better inside us even if that better was just larger muscles?

That was him. That was Gains.

And now he was gone.

Chapter Eighteen

Gains had told me his story back on a world called Blue where the company had picked up some rough work. He told me after what the company records refer to as “The Long Patrol from Hell.” That’s what I put in there, my words, my title, but I didn’t come up with the name. The whole company collectively called it that. Still does late at night when we swap cards, drink a little, and remember all the ways we almost got smoked on “that one.” There are dozens of “that ones” among the current company roster. Even the Old Man calls it that. One night he came by a sector Reaper was watching in this war, early on, doing a guard check. It was late. We stood for a while smoking a cigarette, talking about the situation in our zone and how’d we’d react if anything lit up. It was starting to barely rain and the Old Man finishes his butt and mutters as he stares at the vast black wall of night, “Well… at least it ain’t the Patrol from Hell this time, Sergeant.”

So even he calls that mess exactly what it was. The whole company almost bought it there big time on that patrol.

Long story short, it was a three-day foot pacification patrol into the deep, up into jungle highlands on that world. We were there to root out the supply trains making their way down through the jungle and into the swamplands where much of the main fighting was going down. Blockade runner starships from the corps were bringing in containerloads of weapons and explosives because the other side, the one we were fighting for, had air cap over most of the continent but couldn’t penetrate the missile defenses surrounding the mountaintop starport atop Blue’s one and only super-peak. Up there at an altitude of twenty thousand feet high, the blockade runners were protected by advanced aegis ring missile defenses that could knock out any strike fighters sent in to do the cargo ships trying to make the dangerous approach to the mountaintop supply base.

Once the cargo came in and set down on the massive landing pads, immense thrusters flaring and a-grav engines shuddering hard to stick the landing, it was sherpa’d down onto the lower high jungle peaks where the snow line ended. Then it disappeared into the hot, sweaty, and dangerous maze of fetid jungle up there above the main basin.

The foot patrol was because none of our vehicles could make it up and in there. The jungle was steep and dense, and it grew vast due to the snowmelt high above. A cut trail would be reclaimed by the jungle within hours. Easy to lose your way in there. So it was nothing but a brutal climb with all the gear and weapons we could do. The air felt heavy for no reason I could ever figure out even as it got thinner, and when the jungle should have disappeared the higher we went up, it didn’t. It just got denser, thicker, and even angrier for some reason.

There was, on that hell of a world, a particular small flying snake, the size of an insect like a fly, that could swarm in sudden bunches. Get enough bites and you started to get real sick and see visions. Hallucinations. Maybe that’s where Chief Cook got his psychotropic gas attack idea. He’d just been lying in wait like the predator he was for the perfect op to bust it out on someone. Anyway, twenty was the supposed number of bites before the mild toxin amassed enough in your system on a daily basis to send you over the other side. Water, rest, and food flushed it. But water was critical. Rations did horrible things to the flushing effect, and we were so exhausted, rest seemed more like death. Amass enough toxin in your system and you were done. Medics checked you, confirmed you were going, and we just roped you with 550 cord and you got drag-lined along with your element, drooling and raving while the rest of the squad distributed and carried your gear.

At one point it was so bad for most of the squads, just Hauser and Gains were dragging the rest of Third Squad along with them, carrying everyone’s weapons and dripping with sweat. We climbed higher and higher, hoping we’d reach some altitude level where the small flying raptor snakes didn’t go.

Spoiler… we never did. But that’s not important to the story.

And yet Gains, no matter how beat we were each day in the jungle and on the Patrol from