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

Then a goat barked.

Then there was lead everywhere. A hurricane of lethal intentions.

It was an ambush and we got pinned fast.

A two-hour fight turned into a running gun battle through the village as we tried to make it back to the transports and work our way out of there under fire. Amarcus and Dog Platoon got hit almost at the same time over near the station that ran the whole place. The captain was running the QRF and they went in to relieve Dog who was getting hit real hard. Daisy-chained IEDs devastated one of the Dog squads. Killed everyone except the AG. We called him Two Fingers after that until he got killed a couple of months later.

Anyway, we were in it deep right about then. The whole village was completely radicalized. And of course, armed to the teeth. Our intel had been rotten. We were supposed to be looking for a small faction running guns out into the ice. Instead we walked into the equivalent of a whole tribe of berserkers. Those girls who I said would have sold their bodies for whatever we could offer out of our rucks, suddenly they’ve got AKs and they’re shooting with the local men from good cover. Someone opens up with a Stuka and kills two of mine. Punch led a team into a building and cleaned it following some immediate and extremely violent CQB. That saved our bacon.

But we were surrounded and it quickly looked like they were gonna burn us out if the quick reaction force didn’t get us out fast.

That’s when Stinkeye comes rolling in with the girl, and the thing that she does happens. The Wild Things spools up and wastes half the village in about two minutes. We didn’t lose anyone, but it was pretty horrible to watch. Even if the dead who’d been done badly like that had been trying to kill you the minute before the death whirlwind started. It was an awful thing to bear witness to.

Like I said, Nether, who is literally a floating specter wrapped inside a gray kaftan that looks more like grave rags, told me that night that he thought it, the Wild Thing, was most likely some kind of quantum entanglement effect that allows what she, the creepy Little Girl, can do, to actually happen in our current space-time. He thinks it was close to what was done to him back when he was human In the Monarchs Dark Labs.

“Not sure, Orion,” he says in his disembodied whisper to me as we watch the comm that’s doing nothing late at night and hope no one piles up a vehicle and kills some locals around the base. ’Cause then we gotta wake the Old Man and that’s never good. Plus, I’m not sure he actually sleeps. I think he just lies on his bunk and smokes, trying to figure out all the ways we’ll get killed and how to avoid that. That’s a commander for you. But Nether tells me that night, “I’m not totally sure if it’s Monarch super-science from the Labs, Orion…”

The Labs that don’t officially exist and are responsible for ninety percent of the freaks in Voodoo.

“… or if it’s some kind of… mutation… that she has. Courtesy of the galaxy. But I’m pretty sure all it really is, is she can open up a gate to somewhere not good. Where that gate goes, I don’t know. And I don’t wanna know, Orion. I suspect the future. And for some reason she’s able to pull one specific and very tormented individual through. And that’s what the Wild Thing is. An individual, a warrior obviously, from some future, or alien race, or the extreme past before humans ever left the home world. Whatever it is, it’s stuck. It’s tormented. And it’ll kill to protect her for as long as it can, and as fast as it can, because I’ve never seen it stick around for longer than two minutes. But that’s not what bothers me, Sergeant,” said Nether as we sat there in the soft darkness watching the comm.

I placed a lit cigarette on the table between us that night. His hand, a null space in the universe that looks exactly like a human hand, reached out to touch it. Picked it up and began to smoke it as the cigarette began to fade. I’d lit the cigarette. He usually only gets a couple of drags before it ceases to exist. Pro tip… don’t think too hard about it when you see it for the first time. Even the smoke ceases to exist.

Nether is also a product of those Labs that don’t officially exist. Just as they all are. Voodoo Platoon.

But that’s not what bothers me, Orion. That’s what he’d said before he got his three drags in and the cigarette ceased to ever exist. We’re quiet when he gets to smoke because that’s more important than what’s being said. The smoke is amazing. It turns blue like the gas nebulae of the Arms of Orion for which I sometimes wonder if I was named. And then it seems to reverse and become something that never was.

It’s beautiful to watch. Just as those light-years-long gas clouds are when you’re moving through them out beyond the Orion Khanate Worlds. It’s worth coming out of the coffins just to get a look at one of the Nineteen Wonders of the Universe. To spend three days or so alone in the Spider while everyone’s sleeping. Just watching the nebulae pass. Looking for ghosts. Beautiful ghosts. Glimpsing strange worlds no one will ever find because nebulae are too dangerous to navigate to be worth exploring.

But that’s not what bothers Nether. About her. About the Little Girl. Who bothers me.

“What bothers me, Orion…” He never calls me Sergeant and no one ever calls him Chief. “… is that for some reason she chose us. For some reason she chose Strange Company. I’ve asked her why. She doesn’t answer. Just says