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

this is where she’ll be safe until something happens. The captain knows something about all this, but of course he doesn’t say.”

Why of course? Nether knows something about the captain’s past. But he won’t say what. Says he can’t.

I remember we didn’t say much after that. We just ran out the hours of the night watch until it was dawn and Nether faded. He becomes completely invisible in daylight. He’ll go to his room before the sun rises and spend the day there. That’s best for company sanity. Everyone knows he does that, so they don’t think he’s just hanging around being invisible. It was late when we’d talked about the Little Girl and what she can do. About the Wild Thing who might be a tormented individual trapped and brought here because of some weirdness about quantum entanglement which was supposedly the theory behind the fold engines of the Monarch Battle Spires. The implications of the Wild Thing were too creepy not to contemplate. And too crazy to wonder about aloud. I ate pancakes, scrambled eggs, and drank milk in the chow hall that next morning as the day started and I would head off to rack out. Thinking about what Nether, a transhuman being who had been made into what he was in the labs that didn’t officially exist, had said.

“What bothers me, Orion, is why she chose us.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

We spotted the incoming drops and began to move for the roof of the terminal, falling back by fire teams and spending all the brass we could afford in short, violent bursts so each team had enough covering fire to move to the next cover.

Three Valkyries, two configured for troop transport and one in the hunter-killer dropship mode, bristling with defense guns and anti-armor missiles, appeared through the drifting black smoke and yellow haze of the battle out there beyond the shattered windows of the disintegrating terminal. The hot afternoon air smelled sharp and acrid. A mix of burning fuel, roasting flesh, burnt cordite, and CS gas.

“Captain says mark the LZ in two,” shouted the First Sergeant over the comm. I could hear the chatter of fifty-cal nearby in the feed. Probably the Mule’s gunner.

I got Reaper up and moving and jerked the Little Girl along with me as we fell back even though she gave me the creeps. She was still a child.

“He’s coming now…” she yelled up at me over the voluminous gunfire within the cavernous and shattered space of the once ornate terminal-cathedral as she allowed herself to be carried along in my wake. Oversized coat flying, big boots clopping against the marble and crunching shattered glass. I dragged her as fast as I could, carrying my rifle and ammo ruck, dodging fire. We passed Hauser, who was holding the rearmost position in our last line of defense and ducked behind a terminal sculpture that had once held pride of place in this section of the building. Meaning something to someone a long time ago. Some dead someone no doubt.

No one had problems leaving Hauser on our six. Covering our retreat, calling it a retrograde if you were an officer. But I did. I still thought of him as a human even if he was a real live killing machine. I had big problems leaving him behind.

Hauser ducked. I could tell he’d been hit several times. His synthetic flesh was torn to shreds in several places, exposing raw machinery and a gleaming combat skeleton beneath. Much of it was covered in the synthetic red syrupy coolant his system ran.

“Hauser,” I chanced over the blare of incoming and outgoing fire.

He turned mechanically and gave me a thumbs-up as he loaded in his last belt. Telling me he was still good to go. Still combat effective. Still alive. He didn’t need an AG to carry resupply for him. He knelt, his massive frame hunkered over the dry water installation he was covering behind, slipped a gleaming belt of linked brass off his shoulders, and got it fed into his weapon. Quick and efficient in a slow, almost smooth way, his methodical economy of movement a kind of tireless relentlessness that shrieked competent lethality even as everything came apart under intense fire all around us.

He didn’t say anything. Just gave me a look that said everything was still under control. And that reminded me of all the conversations we’d had on the subject of him. Half the company treated him as just another weapons system. The rest knew him as a friend, or at least a sentient being when they needed something.

I saw him as a person, regardless.

I didn’t like that even those who saw him as sentient defaulted to the “just a weapon system” position when it came time to do really dangerous stuff. Like hold the last position in a retreat under fire. “Let Hauser do it” was a constant solution to difficult problems with low survivability rates. Often right in front of his face.

This situation we found ourselves in at that moment, retreating under heavy fire from multiple assault teams, was exactly that scenario.

“I understand,” Hauser had always told me when we talked about how he got treated. “Their thinking is correct, Sergeant Orion. This type of combat operation is exactly what I was conceived, designed, and optimized for. To minimize human loss and maximize extreme unit violence. I don’t have a problem with the calculations your kind arrive at when determining who needs to do the most difficult task to achieve mission success and ensure minimum unit casualties. I understand their thinking. It’s self-serving. But it’s why your kind believes they survive.”

I always told him it still didn’t make it right.

He would look at me for a long moment, studying me like he was either calculating bullet trajectories and critical kill solutions for maximum lethality across my frame, or observing some scientific broken psychological phenomenon to identify, catalog, and upload back at base. To tell the other automated killers when they all agreed it was