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

bit. He seemed born for this post-apocalyptic unquestionable warlord total power grab. It was natural him. And that’s what scared me to death about Amarcus Hannibal. That’s what made me keep the karambit ready at all times for the one chance I’d have to use it on him. We’d tangled a few times. I knew the next would be for keeps.

It felt like a promise.

Sheer chaos the closer you got to the refueling point. Shootings and worse. Scattered goods and even burning vehicles. I could only imagine the dawning horror most of these people were now experiencing. If they were here in the main capital, they were Loyalist-friendly, or at least Loyalist-adjacent. They’d been fed a steady diet of propaganda about how they were going to win and then the “healing and reconciliation” with both sides would begin once the Astralonian Resistance had been put down from wanting their selfish self-rule and celebrating nebulous terms like Freedom and Liberty.

Now they were getting a dose of what they’d intended to do to those on the other side. Because of course all the “healing and reconciliation” would go just the one way. It always does. It’s just a nice way of letting one side know they have no other choice but to accept the terms of surrender. The losing side bending the knee and exposing the neck while the winners rake the prizes and goods with that smug sense of self-satisfaction as they rule from the near-top of the heap. The Monarchs were the undisputed top of the pile of course. But near the top was just good enough for every non-Monarch citizen of the universe.

Near the top was a dream of many.

This was standard propaganda straight from the Monarchs. Once you were on the winning side it was Easy Street. Believe me, there was an upside to planetary revolt. Once the Monarchs settled things, those who’d figured the right side were gonna be in for some serious prizes. Big Prizes, as they say.

Propaganda worked because it told you what you wanted to believe. That was the secret.

Like the spectacuthrillers that showed evil, our employers on this one, being defeated. With extreme prejudice of course. Constant news-entertainment feeds filled minds and hearts with outright lies about the state of the war. They were always winning, even when they lost. Always smarter, even when they got caught flat-footed in stupid corruption. Always honest, even when some report indicated they weren’t.

There was no evil that couldn’t be walked back, massaged, and even justified to those who wanted to believe it bad enough to stop thinking for themselves. The ends do justify the means. Especially if there’s no one left to complain.

“If ya step back and look at all the individual pieces, Orion,” crowed Chief Cook as he swaggered around teaching some imaginary psyops lecture to everyone, “you’ll see it in all its grand mind-control glory. You see exactly where they’re going with it. But they know that. On some level they know they’re being controlled. So what do we do? Well, here’s what we used to do, is keep ’em destabilized by giving ’em new sensational stories every four days. Moving them this way and that but always in a certain direction we want them to go. A conclusion we want them to reach. A fever we want them to arrive at and be suffering from. For instance, take the plague on Demmeron Six. Great. Blame it on the opposition. Ratchet up the fear with hazmat postures. Make the little kiddies wear masks, hell, nothin’ sadder than seein’ some little tyke playing with a mask on. Really gets you in the feelz and makes you wanna punch someone in the face. Then, oh my what’s this, we blame the whole thing on the guy who’s actually trying to point out that the Monarchs’ bioweapons teams released a virus to hit the elderly and wipe out as many of them as they can. The guy who’s trying to help. He’s the one that caused it all by his lack of skill in handling the crisis we created. Why do this? Twofold. One, you get rid of the dole-drain to Life Assurance direct from the Monarch coffers, and two, you wipe out the wisdom database most of those oldsters have in which they could advise the young’uns about what they’re doing to fight for freedom. Those oldsters have life skills, plus twenty-five percent of them are combat vets from the Sindo. So win-win is how they always see it. And you get to blame the opposite side by never taking responsibility for anything and keeping everyone in a state of constant crisis. Let the world go into resentment and dissension and then do a little proxy war. Next thing you know, you got Ultras takin’ names and kickin’ people in the teeth. Battle Spire… check. Then the bank ship rolls in and you suck the world dry of hard convertible mem.”

Then he told me, “The Monarchs don’t do this for anything but the mem, buddy. It’s all about the mem, as the kids say. Never kid yourself about that, Sergeant Orion. If you’re gonna believe in anything, and I highly advise against believing in anything, believe that it’s all about the mem. You’ll be less unhappy that way. Emphasis on less.”

Yeah, I think to myself as we drive down the refueling line, five clicks long now, passing vehicles filled with frightened eyes just staring out at us while other vehicles are being looted at gunpoint. Yeah, they’re just now figuring out they’re all losers on this one. Even us. Even the company. The Ultras have arrived to give us all a school lesson on who the real winners are.

Spoiler. It ain’t us.

“Establish our perimeter at the junction,” I say over the comm as we pass the not-so-brightly lit cargo refueling station that’s been left open by someone in this last and latest of most desperate of hours.

Explosions rip through the sky to the west. Huge mega-tonnage