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

sweep during the First Pass. Walkers with GAU guns and missile packs. Big walkers with 140mm main guns and anti-personnel chain guns. Heavies with Maas Gausers and A-beams to sear right through structures and boil any defenders inside.

Small dots like swarms of dark birds race through the drop formations.

“Drones!” yells Punch over the howling engines as the drop slams in hard to our new LZ.

“Down! Down! Down!” screams the drop’s beefy crew chief. “Don’t forget yer bags, ladies, that’s the last flight of Air Val. Every man and woman for themselves.”

We’ve come down inside a supply yard near the main city that was supposed to be our follow-up target of exploitation if the attack on the airfield went well.

Which it didn’t. Obviously.

I slide off the cargo deck, dragging my rifle and ruck, and the beefy Val crew chief is next to me. Her voice low and husky. A woman’s voice.

“We’ll help with your dead, Sergeant,” she says. The opposite of how she’d been on the ride over when I’d begun to hate her for calling us ladies.

But she’s a woman. And women never stop caring, nurturing. It’s hardwired into them. Even if they are warriors. They always care for the wounded bird.

I must be that bird, I think, as we begin to remove our dead from the floor of the bloody cargo deck.

The Battle Spire moans on some ominous hum high above us and sunlight breaks through the storm front and another squall of hot acid rain sweeps across our tragedy. Side effects of the space fold phenomenon, I am told.

“Incoming!” someone shouts uselessly. The air feels hot and electric and it’s clear the Battle Spire is about to fire one of her big six-gig D-beams. If it’s going to fire anywhere even near us, we’re dead. No “suck dirt” and cover is going to stop that thing. It’s like getting hit with a nuclear blast ray. And honestly, no such thing exists for the rest of us. If you’re going to go nuclear, it’s a bomb just like it’s always been since the beginning of time. But somehow, the Monarchs developed that technology into a death ray they can just turn on and off. The D-beam. As bad as it gets.

The ship above our heads, surrounded by swarms of dropping war machines and comet-streak infantry smoking in hot to make the LZ their Pathfinders have set up, fires at some distant target. Probably the naval carrier group off the coast because the D-beam strike doesn’t hit the city we’ve come down in the outskirts of.

Otherwise we’d all be dead, and all our problems would be solved.

“They do that, Little King, to let ya know who da bosses are,” says Stinkeye, who’s come to help as we get ourselves off the decks of the dropship. He’s come up with Preacher, the Strange Company chaplain, to retrieve the dead.

The First Sergeant is telling everyone there’s command brief and change of mission in ten, near the First Sergeant’s Mule.

I watch death fall from above as a thousand wonderful and terrible Ultra death machines and uber warriors awaken to their purpose. The hour of the First Pass is at hand. I hear Stinkeye whispering, his voice breathy and gasping as he and Preacher get So-So’s body off the deck of the drop.

“Now you know,” he says. “They boss. No room for doubt, Little King. They boss. We just the dead now.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Change of mission,” begins the captain ten minutes later. He’s burning a cigarette and pointing at a tactical flexy he’s got set up on the First Sergeant’s Mule to show us our route out of this dog of a contract. The platoon sergeants and squad leaders are surrounding the Old Man as the briefing goes down, never mind the war breaking out all around us.

Ultra artillery is already shelling the mem fortress some local traders financing this conflict had set up inside the capital. Far away heavy machine-gun fire thuds across the landscape. Small explosions. Grenades. And then the fusillade of assaulter gunfire, frenetic and high cycle, as the Ultras begin neutralizing their first targets.

Whoever’s fighting back is dumb.

But that’s their story and not mine.

The Old Man is calm. But he looks tired. Then again, who ain’t. It’ll be dark soon and it’s starting to rain. Showers and electrical storms courtesy of the mysterious space-fold engine.

We’re at a supply depot that had been set up inside the city for our eventual conquest. The captain and the Old Man had decided to hop, skip, and jump behind enemy lines and hit the depot instead of running for the hills like the rest of our Resistance employers and allies.

“Contract’s over, Strange Company,” continues the captain as we all listen in silence over the screech of beam strike and thunder of outgoing artillery trying to hit and slow down those running from the justice of the Ultras. “Company is facing two problems at this moment. The first is our employers have decided not to pay us out and are declaring the contract unfulfilled. Our lawyers will have to argue that out with them for the next ten to twenty years. As all of you know, we needed that mem to get over to Blackrock sub-light and get the Spider’s hyperdrive repaired. So, we are currently broke. Not the worst problem. But not good because funds might not be available at Blackrock for the repairs. Which was the purpose of this whole contract.”

The captain gave it to us straight and looked us right in the eyes while we took it. It’s best to be honest about these things. If anyone wanted to complain or walk away, now was the time. Wasn’t much of a choice because right now the Ultras were going to annihilate every combatant they could get their hands on for probably the next three days. And if they even suspected you’d been in combat they were going to bring in the Inquisitors and you were gonna face the cyber-rack for a good three