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

slugged his drink with the other. Priorities. Safety first. “It’s constantly assessing and interfacing with the Combat Skin they wear over their faces, you dumb spook. They see the whole battlefield in ways we don’t, Stinkeye. Hell, it might as well be damn magic as far as we’re concerned.”

True enough, I thought as I pressed the firing button on the minigun and tried to carefully murder them. Some clown in the background circus of my mind giddily chiming in that I was probably going to kill half of them the way normal guys die when you burned two hundred extremely high-cycle rounds in their direction at this range. Not Ultras of course. But the clown of infinite possibilities laughs insanely at this bit of reason and merely tells me to just enjoy the fun of full-auto gunfire whoopee.

They moved fast. The Ultras. A little faster than humans. Scattering to get away from my burst. Some got hit. Bright flashes indicating glancing blows from rounds that would go through an engine block and then kill a roka boar gone mad on savage weed.

The clown in my mind who’d been giddy about killing everyone now cried out in melancholy at my failure to commit mass death. Oh well, he moaned and twirled away as he chased a balloon while I watched the Ultra death squad mostly survive my hail of gunfire.

The clown was probably some of the drugs still coursing in my system. Yeah. That’s it.

“Team One neutralized!” shouted the Monarch in the silence once the fifty stopped killing. “Switching to engage forward!” she barked like a boot drill instructor.

I had no problems with that.

The rest of Reaper was engaging forward. One Ultra was down in the open as the Ultras out there disappeared into the shadows, their armor shifting camouflage to adapt to light and shade for maximum concealment. Return fire came and Nox died with a hole dead center in his head. Still sitting there in the driver’s seat.

They say the Ultras are all next-level shooters.

They say true.

I was gonna die.

We were all gonna die.

Chapter Thirty

The Kid slid out of the back of the Mule and began to fire short, controlled bursts at something. That made me happy. I was hoping he had targets and wasn’t doing that new guy thing of just contributing bravely with wasted ammo. Motivation and fear mixing for the sublime cocktail of Hey, I saw a guy do this in a spectacuthriller once.

Questions I would ask if I had time, and there wasn’t any due to incoming:

One. Was that guy in the spectacuthriller just some rando who got killed by the main dude and went down looking good? A stunt guy and not the hero? ’Cause the rule of thumb is stunt guys are always dead guys. Just sayin’.

And two. You realize that’s just digital entertainment, right? Simulated surreality. Real gunfights, in real reality, are short and violent, said the sergeant now into the first full minute of an actual gunfight with real live Ultras and wondering when the adrenaline was just gonna peter out and leave him real tired. And out of ammo.

Above me the Monarch called the Seeker was sweeping the street with suppressive fire. I felt a rumbling through the frame of the high-speed vehicle and realized it wasn’t coming from her weapon. It was coming from the ground beneath my worn combat boots. A round and a couple of its friends skipped off the pavement nearby around our ride and made me wonder what it would be like to have my ankle or foot blown off right about now.

This was too much like a fair fight. And I hated fair fights for sure.

“Quake…” I murmured as I fumbled in a new mag, my fingers feeling thick through my assault gloves even though I’d cut the index finger on the glove off. That finger was trembling like Monarch action heroes don’t in the latest spectacuthriller.

Then the building Nether was near during our initial comm interaction just collapsed in on itself, imploding in dust and moaning steel at once in an almost underwhelming and unceremonious anticlimactic moment. He’d created a null space in reality beneath the foundation and just dropped it. The buzz and the hum were gone, and I realized they’d been there, building like some unholy atonal orchestra of the damned through the first moments of the gunfight. That had been pure Nether and it had gotten so loud I’d had to block them out over the high-pitched whine and blur of the minigun. The weapons system I was now dumping as much as I could at the enemy from my hiding place down in the well of the passenger seat. Incoming rounds were nailing the Mule and making small explosions or sharp cracks. Spider-webbing the high-impact glass and smashing into the armored engine block. Later I’d find out the explosions were a result of the vehicle’s reactive armor skin. Small explosions on impact directing the force of the rounds away from the armor and critical systems.

These things were way above Strange’s pay grade. Too bad for that special operations det that got blown all over the sea. Good for us.

I had doubts we’d roll out of here in this thing. Serious doubts.

But then again, I had hopes. If just to have something to hold on to.

I was fear-swearing when I told the Kid to use his ’nades.

A couple seconds later I heard the spoon pop on a fragmentary grenade and clatter on the Mule he was covering behind. At that moment, out over the city, doomsday sirens began to open up, finally moaning and then wailing at all the horror and violence that was being done. I don’t know if that had anything to do with this fight or if someone had simply finally gotten around to sounding the general alarm usually reserved for stray comet strikes, falling meteors, and bad starship re-entries. Not that you could do much about those. Not that you could do much about Battle Spires