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

Maybe he was the lucky one that day. He got out early before the Seeker had a chance to make her madness. Before she tried to make us into something we weren’t and were never supposed to be.

Before she tried to make me believe.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Drop Zero Six Valkyrie was just climbing off the roof of the shot-to-hell terminal when the first fast movers streaked across the battlefield and smoked a bunch of air assets including the Valkyrie One Eight—the HK model on overwatch. A rain squall came out of nowhere as the clouds above flashed lightning, changing eerie colors for an instant. Rain crashed through the open cargo door, dousing us with hot droplets. It felt dirty and oily. Burning like the acid rain on some worlds.

I heard the star scream of the Monarch interceptors as they came in fast. At the same moment I heard the massive thunder break in the skies, snapping and crackling all around us. All ambient noise got suddenly weirdly quiet an instant later. The only sounds that stood out, at least to me on the deck of the drop, was the sound of the comm chatter between the pilots and Resistance combat air control, which was still operational despite the total rout going down along our line. I could hear that and the chatter of the door gunner, a bitter chick with a mean mouth dragging a cigar as she worked the swing-mounted minigun. Swearing violently, she mowed down the first of the Loyalist troopers to hit the roof and try to take us out as the rattling dropship went to engines full and heaved off the LZ, blowing purple smoke and drooling brass from her door guns. I watched the minigun erupt, sending supersonic ball ammo in high doses straight through the roof and the first enemy combatants to make the LZ. Raising their combat rifles to try to get lucky on a drop’s inductor fan as they got smashed by supersonic fire. The minigun ruined them all and then we were suddenly up and over the battlefield watching all kinds of enemy units race forward to exploit the breach in our line. From here the situation looked much worse than I was already worried it was.

So, we had that going for us.

That was when the first of three Monarch fighters streaked over the battlespace and dusted about thirty air and ground assets in a sudden streak of random explosions. Monarch fighters are the best and latest in military hardware. They move like graceful angels of death doling out destruction without discrimination or effort. Both sides got hit. Both sides died near instantly, bewildered that victory, or defeat, had just instantly turned into something far worse.

I didn’t see Valkyrie One Eight get hit. The HK drop riding shotgun on our dustoff. Just saw the flare of the explosion and the sudden orange iridescent hell glow wash over the wounded and dirty of my platoon clinging to the deck of Valkyrie Zero Six.

“Dayum!” swore Punch as the aircrew tried to check for survivors in the burning wreckage of the sister ship now smashing into the field west of the terminal. The co-pilot was already sitrepping an alert and calling for air rescue. Bad day getting worse.

Yeah. Like air rescue was gonna happen today. Today had just officially become cover-your-butts day.

By the time I cranked my head around and saw the burning wreckage of One Eight pile into the tall dead grass, tumbling end over end as it disintegrated all at once, throwing burning fuel and parts, and body parts, in every direction, it was clear no one had survived that sudden crash.

The Vals, as they were known, Silver Valkyries officially, a close air support mercenary dropship company with no small amount of guts, had just lost two crew members in the downed HK drop.

The chick flying our drop, the stunning beauty with the otherworldly eyes I’d seen on the LZ, was over the drop’s comm and telling her flight to stay on task.

“Vals, watch your sectors and get me a loc on those fast movers. They’ll be back in less than two minutes. We’ve gotta make the emergency LZ in less than that!”

Then she said a thing that stunned me, stunned everyone, and made all the weird anomalies in sound and air all around us make sudden sense.

“Monarch Battle Spire entering our airspace now.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Those are Avengers!” shouted Punch as another flight of three Monarch state-of-the-art interceptors streaked across the battlefield once more. Explosions developed along the enemy front like sudden cherry blossoms in some kind of new apocalypse bloom. My mind wanted to believe somehow the game had changed for us. That defeat which should have been victory was now somehow victory again.

But the massive leviathan now entering the battlespace over our heads at somewhere around ten thousand feet made notions of victory pipe dreams. This was bad. Real bad in fact. And impossibly, getting worse by the second.

The war on this world was officially over even if no one had said it. And for that matter, the odds indicated Strange Company was done with its time on the galactic lens.

“Thirty seconds to LZ!” shouted the crew chief over the drop’s comm. “Comin’ in hot, ladies!”

She meant us. Strange Company. The actual body stackers. But we were hitching and so of course we’d endure abuse. One of mine did spit some dip on her boots though.

I was proud of that guy.

Meanwhile it was chaos inside the Valkyrie drop, despite the small victories of spitting dip on someone’s shiny combat boots. Stuffed with Reaper wounded and Dog security, those of us who were mobile were hanging on to the cargo straps and trying not to fall over and out as the ship took evasive maneuvers just over the battlefield. Alarms shrieked from the flight deck and I had a real bad feeling one of them indicated missile lock from those sweet-looking death