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

birds the Monarchs were now flying all over our battlefield. Correction—it was their battlefield now. Keep up on current events, Orion. Y’all just got your teeth kicked in.

The dropship’s engines howled urgently. I knew what this was all about. Even though I’d never seen a Monarch Battle Spire in all its terrible glory, few living had, I knew what was going down all around us. They called it “First Pass.” The Ultras were asserting dominance of the field. Every combat unit, friendly or foe, was considered an enemy target during what the Ultra Marines called First Pass. Their chance to kill everything before the demanded surrender.

In other words, for the next few hours, or days, or however long the Ultras felt they needed, surrender wasn’t an official option. Though I had heard rumors that sometimes loopholes existed. I’d also heard there was a planet made of solid gold out beyond the Mutar Nebula.

One sweep over the battlefield to destroy everything. Ultra tradition demanded this be known as the Field of Death and that nothing grow or be built or thrive there for one hundred years to acknowledge the supremacy and totality of their martial force.

It must be fun to always be the winners.

“Maybe we’ll get a chance to tangle, Sarge,” said Puncher, running a systems check on his weapon and not minding that the pilot was flying so fast, and so low, and so recklessly that we were probably going to smash into something in what remained of the last thirty seconds of this flight.

Everything screamed that things were about to end incredibly badly. I could feel it. And I’d felt it before. But this time I was probably right.

I couldn’t take my eyes off what I was seeing below and out the door of the cargo deck, sometimes sideways even. Entire tank and mech platoons suddenly got ignited by fuel-air bomb strikes, cooking the crews inside and turning the landscape into nothing but scorch and char. C-beam strikes came down from the heavens and ripped the terrain up where there had been advancing lines of Loyalist infantry mixed in and fighting with our side. The shock of bright high-energy multi-gigawatt fury scarred the retinas as you looked away from the sudden destruction. Entire divisions had just been melted, the realization scarring the mind worse than the retinas. In their opening moves the Ultras did unimaginable loss of life. If just to get your attention that local fun and games were over. The mind didn’t want to…

And this was just their opening move.

Interceptors streaked down even as the Battle Spire was still finishing execution of her mysterious jump between the stellar gulfs of the universe. The space-fold. Rumors abounded that the Spire was the only ship with fold-capable technology. Were they launching their strikes from that amazing behemoth? Or were there assault carriers rigged for stealth and dumping troops and ships to support the entry?

It was like watching the most fantastic military operation ever witnessed until you realized with horror that you were about to be on the receiving end of all that violence. In the movies, the Ultra Marines were always the heroes saving civilization from the hordes of darkness and the greedheads who wanted to own their own destinies and enslave the colonies rather than submitting to the glory of the Monarchs. In the movies, massive music scores always accompanied this triumphal moment when the Battle Spire entered the scene in a desperate bid against seemingly unstoppable galactic evil. As the hero Ultras raced to the jump decks and flung themselves toward the world below.

In the movies they are always the heroes.

The hour is always desperate.

And the bad guys always die.

It sucked to be the bad guys. Apparently we’d be playing the part of the bad guys today. So it sucks to be us for what’s left of us.

Across what I could see of the line of combat, ours and theirs, both sides were still trying to kill each other regardless. Maybe the Loyalists thought the Ultras were here to support their victory. Maybe the Resistance didn’t see any other move than to just keep on fighting. So they just kept on fighting. Maybe not for any kind of tactical advantage, probably just to get away from the arrival of the Monarchs’ premier fighting force. The Ultras. I watched a running battle between a tank battalion, one of ours, and an anti-vehicle mech’s high-pulse lasers, closing and burning armor-piercing incendiary heavy rounds just to get clear of the engagement zone and the First Pass.

The battles down there were schizophrenic.

No one knew how big the declared First Pass Zone, an official thing, would be at this moment. It was the whim of the Imperator overseeing the Ultra Marines. In a few hours, as the generals from both sides managed to establish diplomatic relations and sue the Ultras for peace, the details would become clear. But right now, in the first moments of total chaos as all cowered and shivered beneath the arrival of the monolithic Battle Spire, sure their end was at hand, the finer points of one’s survival weren’t clear.

Ultras and Monarchs are way above my pay grade. But I knew what every merc on the battlefield was thinking at that exact moment. Show’s over, folks. Time to get your pay, if you can, and get off-world. Real quick. Re-education and time on the cyber-rack’s a real bummer. Ask anyone who can’t remember their real name and how they ended up on some world they had no history on working for the mem factories as little more than a paid slave.

This was why the drop we were in was streaking for a nearby LZ as fast as its engines could scream. Any craft in the air over the battlefield was considered a huge priority target for Monarch air-attack assets. The drop all around us rumbled and shuddered as the reversers kicked in to full and the hover engines throbbed, landing gears deploying, medics trying to hold on to