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

And now I knew the answer. Or at least I thought I did.

I had choices here and none of them were good. Behind us the crawler was rocketing off into the night. Dog was pulling out to cover the retreat.

The captain was in my ear on comm.

“Reaper, what’s your situation?” Dry. Cool. Calm. Collected in a gunfight.

I tapped the comm and covered one ear.

“Reaper’s holding the junction, sir. We got Ultra rifles at fifty meters and closing. Wounded and dead.”

“Pull back. We’re rolling, Reaper.”

I didn’t know if that was possible. I hoped it was. But I didn’t know if it was.

I looked at who I had on my side of the bullet- and explosive-riddled Mule. The hot Monarch babe. The Kid. She had her sidearm out. The Kid was rocking his Bastard and watching the far corner of the vehicle for us to get flanked. Behind us, the other Mule that had been hit, burned. Mule Three was still active and engaged.

I looked down at Stinkeye. He was muttering and his old wrinkled eyes were squeezed tight shut. Silver tears ran down his tanned and weathered old cheeks.

Sweet. My Voodoo asset had just gone fetal.

Way to go, Orion.

“Pull back, Reaper,” said the Old Man over the comm. “We are leaving this area.”

“What the hell are you doing, Stinkeye?” I hissed. The Ultras were closing. I could hear their boots and the dribble of their expended brass. My hearing protection was fritzing out because of the volume of fire.

Jacks came around the side of the vehicle, rucksack in one arm, rifle in the other. I could see he had three claymores ready on the top of his ruck. He’d toss it and det as a last line of danger-close defense. Odds that we’d get ruined too were high.

“You see ’em,” muttered Stinkeye to himself. “You see da corpses, da lost souls and all da wretches o’ da darkness… come look at what’s waitin’…”

He murmured like some ancient wizard casting dark spells. Or the tech-monks of Kal Mandoor chanting code in the early evening as the icy winds sweep across their brutal mountains and high cold monasteries. Promising death and salvation. Life and endless sleep. Code forevermore.

“Da blood and da ruin of all dem murders…” he hissed. He was starting to rock back and forth, twitching and trembling as he did so.

“Is this something, Stinkeye?” I pleaded. “Are you doing something that will pull our bacon outta the fire, or…” Are you just drunk and deciding the middle of a losing battle is a great place for the DTs? But I didn’t say that last part even though it was my growing fear.

He looked up at the Monarch woman, glaring pure murder right at her. Black murder and rage deep within those red-rimmed, red-veined, cloudy eyes that claimed to have seen the Outer Darknesses. Hate. Endless cold hate was there too.

I’d seen the same look when his gambling went particularly bad. When he couldn’t buy a good card to save his life and the whole table was just dunking on him. But this was worse. Orders of magnitude worse.

“You at Leon, whore?” he suddenly hissed at the Monarch firing with her sidearm when she could get a shot off. Then he roared it at her.

“You at da Massacre of Leon, witch woman?”

She ejected a magazine and looked at him like this was all just business and even his semantics and histrionics were part of some horrible game she knew she had to play to get where she needed to be.

Then she nodded once.

“I was, slave.” Her voice was cold and cruel. Imperious. What a Monarch is. What they sound like. Who they really are.

Then Stinkeye gave a malevolent smile and hissed evilly.

“Good, girl. Then come to me.”

And whether she liked it or not, he reached out an old claw, his wrist adorned with prayer beads and leather thongs. Charms and stray bullets caught along their ancient twining. His dirty fingernails gripping her alabaster skin between Combat Skin and tactical glove. The one holding her matte-black sidearm.

And he jerked his head back and screamed himself hoarse like he was being burned alive from the inside out. Howling and begging like a sick dog.

“What the hell is he doing?” I shouted at her.

She just watched him. Watched Stinkeye like a mother feeding a child. Patiently.

Then she looked up at me, showing me those deep-blue ice eyes like some world that knew only frozen mountains and cold, endless cold. Eyes as wide as those of the Katari hunters who rule a jungle world as undisputed apex predators. Some of the most feared killers in the galaxy.

“He’s showing them the dead they’ve killed. Watch, mercenary…”

And then she looked toward the battle.

I turned and saw sudden shadowy phantoms like the zombies straight out of horror thrillers. They were endless as a dark sea of rotting and raving corpses can be. And they came running out of the darkness, swarming for the Ultras like plague ants, ripping them to shreds. Tearing them limb from limb as they downed them and pried them from their armor for the tasties they might find inside.

The Ultras, closing to extremely close murder range, began to fire at one another, unable to disbelieve the illusion our Voodoo specialist had just created. I could see both things at once. Reality. And the massacres they’d participated in. Whole planetary populations done to death under the merciless brutality of their cold barrels. Except in this trick the dead didn’t die like they had. In Stinkeye’s vision they kept coming even though they’d been long dead. And then they did worse as the Ultras fought for their lives. These murdered souls screamed all their names and all the death cries as they washed over the death squad like a deep and endless ocean that had more to give than you could ever take. It was horrible and hypnotic all at once. It was real and it wasn’t.