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

The walker moved again, and the ground strike shook the area all around. I glanced up when the downed sub-orbital, burning internally, groaned and collapsed along one side of its wide bat-wing. There were dead bodies thrown out all over the pavement around us from the crash. I hadn’t noticed them on the way in. That was the funny thing about being a soldier. A mercenary. Sometimes you just didn’t see the dead anymore. They weren’t targets now. They were just done. And in the world of predators everything is just targets, and the dead who don’t bother anyone much anymore.

But then sometimes… all you see are the dead. All the dead you ever knew. All the dead you ever made. And occasionally the one you didn’t. But with them it’s just something about that one you find that sticks with you through the rest of a long day’s march and into the late watches of the night. Asking yourself who they were, that one you found hunched over and dead, lying off in the brush where they died. Where the stray or intended bullet found them. Or sprawled in the tall grass and staring dead-eyed up at the sky and swiftly moving clouds on a late winter’s day on a cold world as you swept your sectors, looking for his friends. Asking yourself what was the difference between them and you, and how you could avoid such fates.

Or whether you even could.

As if….

Knowing anyway that someday some other joe was gonna find you just like you’d found that one. And then they would be the ones wondering who you once were on the long march across this galaxy. Who was waiting for you on some other world not this one? But that was no longer your burden. You were done now.

And maybe there’s some cold comfort in that. Like a thin blanket you’ll just have to make do with on a long wait until morning when you can move around again and get warm by the simple act of merely being alive.

The launcher was an AAV-4. Anti-Vehicle Four. Affectionally known in the business as a Hammer. More incoming fire whistled past us from off to our left. The enemy ground units, staging to support the Savage, were pushing on us once again. Supporting fire from our line opened up and ruined a squad that got caught out in the open. Sucks to be them. The dead twisted as they fell, Hauser’s mint-green tracers showing the squads exactly where he wanted more fire to make sure they were ruined and wouldn’t be bothering us. The Pig had done most of the work to stall the assault on our flank, but there were still squad DMs trying to take shots at us.

Designated marksmen are always a hassle.

“Keep their marks down!” I shouted at the Kid as I deployed the launcher. It had four tubes, hence the designation. There were single-shot Hammers and an AAV-6 model I’d fired once. There was even a rumored S model, but I had no idea what that one did.

Each Hammer round was recoilless and fired independently. The company had paid good money we didn’t have in order to get this system to Reaper at just the last second. Whatever I’d been feeling in the moments before about being abandoned by the Old Man disappeared. He’d authorized company credit with the arms dealers in orbit to get us a weapon system that might change current events. And keep some of us alive for just a little bit longer.

I shouldered the weapon, kneeling once again and remarking at how damn heavy the thing was. But the rounds inside were loaded with high order gelatinous dynamic pentaerythritol tetranitrate.

Super dynamite, as it’s sometimes known.

The last half of the round is a solid core steel-tungsten rod riding on a gauss rail that fires the round into the explosive for maximum kinetic damage to the target. The rod also has polarized charged magnets that cause it to rotate end over end for maximum damage, and fun.

The weapon interfaced with my combat lens and asked to assume a targeting overlay.

I blinked and accepted, muttering, “C’mon, c’mon…” as the Kid engaged a shooter who simply would not die despite an entire mag dump. I heard a round whistle past my bucket and knew the enemy shooter had skills.

“Kill him,” I muttered through gritted teeth. “Before he kills us both!”

The walker loomed suddenly to targeting life inside my augmented vision. My vision irised in on the killer war machine’s insectile head, where the pilot could barely be seen behind the forward weapons operator inside the armored canopy.

The first firing solutions developed, moving from spiraling telemetric circles into urgent target reticules, switching from red to yellow as the data acquired the likely kill shots. Then blinking into critical red indicating I was good to fire.

“Target acquired!” I shouted as I’d been trained. “Back blast area clear!”

Old habits die hard. Good training never does.

I dumped all four rounds as fast as I could push the launch trigger just below my shoulder.

The air around us suddenly lost all its pressure. Then a second later had twice to three times the pressure. My vision blurred but the shots were away as the concussive effects of the launcher’s recoilless system scrambled our already fried brains. Two point five seconds later all four rounds tore through the three-story terminator.

The first round streaked into the Savage’s guts where most likely the munitions for the GAU-88s were kept. The tungsten rod ignited and blew munitions and mechanical systems all over the back of the runway behind the immense walker.

The second round ripped off a GAU-laden arm, destroying the massive eight-cylinder rotating barrel and turning it into hot melting fragments flying away in every direction. The third round did the same to the other arm. And the fourth round seemed excessive at that point as it turned the main control canopy into a volcano of molten