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

And still I could not take my eyes off the amazing Battle Spire above us.

It was the largest thing I’d ever seen in my too-short life.

I’ll describe it for the record. If the record survives. Because right at that moment, I wasn’t sure if Strange Company would. No one survives First Pass. No one survives the Ultras. We were dead and the worst part was most of Strange Company knew it. But what else were we gonna do but keep trying to survive for as long as we could?

The central hull of the immense Battle Spire is long. Very long. There is no ship humanity has ever constructed that even approaches its size. At least the size of New Manhattan City on Sakur. But, for the record since that is what this is, I’ve heard there are larger Battle Spires. The Red Dragon is supposedly the biggest. At that moment, watching the monster heave into local airspace, dropping several armies and combat teams all at once, I had no idea what this one was called.

The aft section of the Battle Spire is wide, where the engines should be but aren’t. The local-space maneuver engines are all along the hull. Its main engine for motive transport throughout the universe, the fold engine, is supposedly deep within the ship, but no one knows for sure because no one’s allowed to get close to a Battle Spire. Automatic death sentence. But whatever and wherever it is, there’s nothing conventional about that engine. It’s one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Monarchy.

The aft section, rather than housing the main engine, presuming it doesn’t, is for the immense hover and a-grav converters that allow the Battle Spire to set down tail first and establish an overlord tower from which to continue the destruction of a world. It’s like a wedding cake top to bottom but moving horizontally in this configuration at ten thousand feet as it executes the space-fold and enters the time stream in the skies above our heads to begin the invasion. The hull races forward up there, tapering at the extreme end, the bow, into a series of command blisters that form the bridge and finally the navigation needle which conspiracy theorists say is critical to the space-fold engine located deep within the immense ship.

As I understand it, the central hull is all Monarch blue. The main hull is brilliant white and dotted with glittering lights that come from the inside and seem to be small cities crawling along its tapering cylinder. All of it run, crewed, and lived in by the ship’s complement of beam gunners, transport officers, supply chiefs, and air attack squadron pilots both sub and orbital. I have no credibility in guessing the size of the crew complement, but if I had to, I’d put it at upwards of ten thousand. But I could be off by a hundred thousand. The mind fractures looking at the immense size of the ship that has come to kill us all drifting into the skies above our war like some casual end of the world come to make good on its promise.

That’s not totally correct. The ship will kill some of us. The Ultras will kill the rest. That’s how it’ll go from here on out for what remains of this world’s last gasp of self-rule.

If the magnificence of the incredibly long central hull wasn’t just a universal wonder in and of itself… I mean seriously, how do they build these things? Mega-corporations can build city-sized orbital refineries or bulk cargo haulers, and of course small destroyers, cutters, liners, and the scouts and free traders. But nothing even approaches the incredible size of a Battle Spire.

If anything, its very existence makes the argument that the Monarchs are better than the rest of us. To build a ship of that size defies every known science. And yet… there it is. Moments from raining down a thousand different forms of death on our heads.

One of our wounded just died on the deck of the Drop Zero Six. Maybe two minutes from getting triaged by Chief Cutter’s medics. Now he’ll go to Preacher. I watch as Choker shuts the eyes of the dead man.

As I was saying, if the central hull wasn’t enough to make you remind yourself to close your jaw and stop gaping like some slack-jawed local yokel, then it’s the Ultra Battle Rings rotating independently about the hull that make you dizzy with fatal wonder.

I don’t want to look at the dead man on the deck or remember his name. Or ask myself if I got his story down in the logs. It’s all too much right now. So I look at the fantastic death machine I’m being given the rare privilege of actually seeing during an invasion. As I’ve said, this is a sight reserved mostly for the deceased of other forgotten battles.

Death and wonder don’t mix.

On this Spire there are five. Five battle rings. Again, I’ve heard other Spires have more. But five is more than enough to assure us of our imminent destruction. The rings are not attached in any way to the main hull. And yet they encompass its diameter, rotating languidly like some magnetic levitation art installation inside a mem zillionaire’s private tower on one of the Bright Worlds.

These rings are where the Ultras are.

Even now as I watch, mechs, walkers, and actual airborne are being dropped all across the battlefield. Combat teams, strike divisions, enforcers, inquisition squads, death squads, special forces, armor, artillery, and drop commandos. Departing from the drop, jump, and combat cargo decks.

It’s raining death out there.

It’s beautiful to behold if you’re given to grim fascination and your mind just keeps whispering in the background, low enough so you can ignore it completely, that you’re all about to die. Then, yes, it really is fascinating to behold.

They come down like falling stars, the big mechs that will soon form the main assets of their attack and