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

explosions light up the low cloud ceiling and reveal leviathan mechs like monsters walking in the night out there on the horizon. High-intensity targeting lasers sweep for ground targets. It’s the stuff of nightmares. It’s the end of a world if there ever was one. It’s right now whether anyone likes it or not.

And for the umpteenth time I try to do the chain of events that has me here and now.

“We’re too close,” says Nox as I direct him toward the center of the three-road intersection we’re to hold for overwatch while Dog and the crawler come in to top off at the refuel point. Nox swears about how close we are as we watch those night monster mechs closing on their objectives out there. Missiles streak away and devastate a building half a mile to the west.

“Someone musta been putting up a fight,” he mutters, leaning over the wheel, his face hard and mean in the bare light from the instruments. He’s not even thirty, and he looks like a mean and bitter old man already. Give him five years and he’ll have a ruck hump and be chewing light painkillers with every meal. But if he’s still alive he’ll be known as a mercenary everywhere he goes and there’s a certain kind of cool in that. For whatever that’s worth.

I’m beginning to wonder that it might not be as much as I used to think it was.

I turn around and stare at the Monarch behind me. Prompting her to illuminate us regarding Nox’s observation that someone is still fighting.

“They have an attack profile matrix,” she says coolly in the waiting dark. “Much of this phase, initial planetary assault entry, is nothing more than an advanced full-spectrum terror campaign. There’s not a sane unit commander alive who thinks he, or she, stands a chance against the Monarchs’ executioners at this moment in the assault. There are a lot of lies told in the universe but the Ultras are not one of them.”

“Then what are they doing,” I mutter as Reapers Two and Three, and the other Mules, move into position as we arrive at the position we’re supposed to hold. We’ll support each other from here and be ready to react to anything trying a fast attack on the company from any of the three road directions. Also, we hold the route out of Dodgeistan. We aren’t taking MSR Lifeline. We’re heading east into the Wastes. We’re departing from the known. Even the most desperate of refugees would avoid the Crash Wastes. It’s sort of a Vanished Triangle in the Ho Nebula meets Desert of Despair kinda place from those spectacuthriller movies about the ring and the boy wizard who becomes a sparkly vampire and kills a werewolf.

Not a very nice place. I’m pretty sure there’s no beautiful actor boys and unreal actor girls. It’s just all forsaken lands and cracked earth that occasionally spews forth lava and burning salt. I’ve heard it even rains rocks out there and there’s supposed to be some local predator that’s pretty nasty. Hunts in large packs.

A real no-go zone no one really wants to go to in the first place.

“Then what’re they doing lighting everything up? Hasn’t everyone pretty much surrendered?” I ask her.

“Clearing a space for the Battle Spire to set down, is my guess,” she says. The Monarch. The Seeker. “Even though the a-grav fields will crush the city flat, they don’t want any detonations underneath. No one wants six kilometers of starship suddenly toppling over once they set down to start the uplink with the bank ship.”

So Chief Cook was right. I’ll have to tell him to get a prize out of the prize drawer. They’re gonna suck the planet dry of all the war-accumulated mem.

“Has that ever happened before? A Battle Spire going over on its side?” To my knowledge it never has. But remember, ninety percent of the knowledge database in the galaxy is nothing but complete and pure Monarch propaganda.

“Once,” she says as she watches Dog’s vehicles surrounding the crawler as they come into the refuel point at high speed. Hostile takeover of the pumps going down. There’s shooting, of course, because it’s Amarcus’s show. The rapid bark of the shorties Amarcus’s men run. It’s harsh and cruel. But…

“Them’s the times,” I mutter tiredly as I watch Strange Company swarm the area and take control. The crawler heaves in and the lines are disconnected for both fuel and charge. It should take ten minutes just to get that massive thing topped off alone.

The night feels sweaty and hot. Like it’s gonna rain more. But it hasn’t yet.

Thirty minutes later, two gang fights have killed several people and the captain had to come in with the quick reaction force just to shut that down.

I have no real idea what’s going on over there by the main refueling point other than the chatter coming over the comm and the sudden unstable bursts of frantic and frenetic gunfire mixed with bare single-shot pops that feel wanting and pathetic.

“Somebody gettin’ done in the head?” asks Nox, who’s more interested in what’s going on over there than what’s not going down in the dark streets we’re oriented toward.

“Targets acquired,” says Hauser over the comm and just above my head. He’s on the fifty in our Mule.

“Who?” croaks Nox.

“Where?” croak I, the sergeant in charge, at the same time.

“Building at two o’clock. Fifth story, Sergeant,” says Hauser automatically. “Two. Sniper and observer. Deep in the room. I can engage with one burst and am calculating a ninety-eight point six for initially fatal hits in first strike. One hundred percent achieved with successive use of at most ten more rounds.”

Hauser’s targeting system is state-of-the-art.

I’m almost on the verge of saying, “Light ’em up, Hause,” when she stops me with a gentle yet surprisingly cold hand on my shoulder. The fingers are long, and the grip is firm. And it’s not unpleasant.

“I wouldn’t do that yet. That’s a scout sniper team, Sergeant.