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

But then he would just say, “Only you have a problem with it. And that is why we are friends, Sergeant Orion.”

Just Orion, I told him.

“Negative, Sergeant. Military protocols require the use of proper rank to ensure unit cohesion and maximize unit performance.”

He was giving me that look now, under fire from every direction, glass and concrete exploding as I held on tight to the Little Girl’s tiny hand and waited for some covering fire to make a move. As the last of Reaper made it up to the observation lounge and was taking the roof where the drops, circling the terminal and taking ground fire, were waiting for our marking flares. Engines howling, door gunners laying hate on every enemy unit swarming the terminal like homicidal ants.

Hauser the combat cyborg was giving me that “go now” look. Telling me he understood. Telling me to leave him behind. Telling me to let him work now.

Enemy troopers were taking the main terminal hall now. Scouts and skirmishers arrived fast, moving like hunting predators trying to pin us down so the heavier assault pincers could come in and do the nasty work of doing us.

I scanned the situation while trying not to get my head blown clean off. To move we’d need covering fire. Plain and simple. Hauser could cover us with a full belt, but then he’d have to pull back up the final escalator with nothing to cover himself with. He could run, but he’d take incoming. One shot to a critical system and he could go down. And we were pulling out. Not even the captain would hold a drop on a hot LZ to retrieve a downed combat cyborg. As has been said, that’s what they were made for.

But he was Strange Company. To him. And to me. Even if the rest of us were a little unclear on that subject. He was doing his best to prove it.

“Buy time and do dangerous things to protect life. That’s what them murda ’chines do, Little King,” I could almost hear Stinkeye saying.

I shook my head. We’d send the girl and cover each other on our way out. I was still carrying a sling bag of six-point-five mags. I had enough to be trouble for anyone stupid enough, or brave enough, to rush us in the next minute.

“Get ready to move,” I hissed at her. And that was when I smelled fall. The season. Smoke and dry heat coming on the drafts of bullet trajectories. Autumn leaves crunching in the stillness in between. Most worlds have a kind of fall. Some are classically beautiful. Others bizarrely intoxicating.

Fall’s that way.

I swore right in front of her. A kid, I had to remind myself without much conviction.

She gave me a look that was unusual even for her. In many ways she was more emotionless than a combat cyborg. She never smiled. Never cried. Not once since she’d attached herself to us like some child’s ghost that didn’t know it was dead. A poltergeist for the already dead. She did nothing kid-like. Not ever. No dolls. No paper dresses. No games of skip and count. She was just a mini adult combat cyborg. Always studying. Always watching us. Collecting. Evaluating. Finding us guilty. Or maybe that’s just me. Chief Cutter assured me she was biologically human. We’d been so concerned by her behavior we’d actually wanted to know one time.

But the look she gave me when I smelled fall, the season, coming at us like a hot draft across the shattered glass and flying grit of the bullet hurricane developing all around our moving last defensive line as we ceded the terminal… the look she gave was unlike anything I’d ever seen on that pretty little darkly melancholy face.

It was almost as if she was sorry about something. Some mistake she’d made. Some tragedy she’d seen. Some pity she was too kind to mention.

“He’s coming now…” she said as the wind began to moan and howl all around us. Shadowy autumn leaves that were never there streaked past my vision like the phantoms they were. Phasing into this reality.

Phenomena that always accompanied the coming of the monster she called the Wild Thing.

“Go. Go now!” I hissed at her and shoved her as I stood and went to full rock-and-roll with the Bastard, laying down a full magazine of outgoing hate to get her covered as she moved for safety up-terminal. Hauser picked up my lead and stood to present a massive target as he let go with methodical bursts on our shadowy enemies down-terminal.

That was when the sudden sirocco of hot air, smelling of brimstone and gunfire, burnt cordite and burning jet fuel, washed across the battlespace. As some other reality not of this known universe opened up and a force came through to our side. To other-whens “connecting”…

It was a dangerous force. Very dangerous. Uncontrollable and wild. And utterly lethal.

But if she was in danger, it’d start killing everything it could identify as being a threat to her specifically. A target. An enemy. Sometimes, on occasion, it had killed our own. Strange Company. Very rarely. So maybe it read intentions that weren’t on the surface. Who knew? And sometimes the violence it executed was so massive, we just lost our own due to “friendly fire” or just plain old catastrophic destruction. What did the tac planners call it? Collateral damage.

By the time it made contact with our reality, seeming to come through some massive hellfire-lit fissure in the universe that just opened up out of nothing, the windstorm of hot dry air smelling of fall and burning autumn leaves had turned into a minor hurricane all around us.

I burned a mag and called out a change.

“Falling back!” I shouted over the storm.

Hauser covered and we began to fall back together. I chanced a glance backward and saw the Little Girl fleeing up the immobile stairs for the rest of the platoon making for the