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

It was like looking at a crack in the universe no sane person was ever meant to see.

“Time to go,” the Monarch said matter-of-factly.

Yeah, it was. I just hoped we could. I crawled into the Mule and pushed Nox’s body out onto the street. Never minding that his brains were everywhere and had drooled out across everything. Never mind I was violating the company’s most sacred ordinance to take care of him even in death. To take care of our own. There wasn’t time.

I heard John Strange in that bar, telling me something I’d already forgotten. That was today, I suddenly remembered even though it felt so long ago it might as well have been someone else’s life.

I said a prayer even though I don’t pray because sometimes you do even if you don’t believe. Was I praying for forgiveness for abandoning Nox? Or that the Mule would start and get us out of this firefight?

As of this writing I still don’t know.

The engine fired and Stinkeye could barely get himself in as the rest piled into the two remaining Mules.

The captain’s QRF came in, weapons blazing and cutting down the mesmerized Ultras where they stood.

And we roared out of there, stopping to pick up Hauser who was just coming back out onto the street. His systems were bleeding coolant and hydraulic fluid. But he’d survived the gunfight. The nanobots inside him would repair what they could.

I’d seen him hit worse, I lied to myself as we sped away. Off into the night and the rain beginning to come down harder.

Then the Wraith gunship in the clouds above began to fire, unlimbering her one-twenty-millimeter guns and hitting the fuel point with death from above. Turning it, all of it, into a bright apocalyptic bloom as we disappeared into the night and the east.

Strange Company breaking up into three teams to arrive at the hit in three days’ time. Five hundred miles deep into a no-man’s apocalyptic wasteland ruined by an ancient alien starship crash long ago that had probably happened before mankind had figured out basic rocketry.

Or even longer.

Unknown starfarers never found on any world. A ship whose technology was unknown and might as well have been magic, because even the barest elements of it our best minds could almost grasp were well beyond anything that should ever have been conceived.

Chapter Thirty-One

We drove deep into the Crash Wastes that night as the main capital city of that world surrendered to darkness and fire. There were times when we had to go around ruined sections of the outskirts of the city. Bombed-out ruins whose guts and insides had exploded out all over the place while the skeleton of the structure still burned like some condemned criminal on Char-Hallow Night. Or just LDAM craters where Ultra tac strike had decided to delete a grid square for reasons known only unto them. We pulled into underpasses while Monarch HKs hovered over the city like the Grim Reaper Astronaut manifested, and machine locusts bristling with GAU guns and missile packs ran sensor sweeps and looked for something to hit.

We passed no one. Not one soul. The people who had once lived here were either gone now or hunkered deep down in basements and bunkers hoping to wait out First Pass. Hoping to survive.

Reaper was down to two operational Mules after the split. Punch, Choker, Hustle, and Hoser, along with Boom Boom, had survived the last fight in the second Mule. Mule Three, which had taken the recoilless round, lost everyone but Jacks. Some were killed in the strike. Others got machine-gunned down in the aftermath trying to fight their way to nearby cover. Dip Weasel and Killer Joe were dead or captured. Which meant dead as far as how the Ultras ran things on First Pass. Also, the six others who’d been rotated into Second Squad before the last op of the war on this rock were dead too. Dead or captured. Which, again, meant dead. We added Jacks to our Mule and rolled through the night with Hauser, the Monarch, the unconscious Stinkeye mumbling promises of murder, and the Kid at the wheel. We shoved Boom Boom onto the back deck so his wounded leg could stretch out. It was crowded on both rides. One Mule carrying all the extra equipment. I had no idea how the rest of Strange had fared getting out of the refuel point. We’d gone to a no-comms silent posture between elements as we split up. The survivors would link up at Lost Road and try to finish the rest of the mission to get us off-world. If there were any survivors.

Reaper’s route was to the south as all three elements, Ghost, Dog with the crawler, and Reaper, headed off into the eastern desert wastelands, literally called “The Wastes” on the maps and charts of this war-ruined world. Fighting throughout much of the conflict had avoided this vast section of the central continent. Most of the occupied and therefore fought-over portions of the world were along the western coast and throughout the southern isthmus. Strategic bombing and special forces raids hit the southern continent because that was a power base for the locals. No meaningful big battles were ever fought there.

But the Wastes were a no-go zone for many reasons, and not all of them ever extremely clear to me. What I had noticed was a conscious blind spot on the part of our employers, the Astralonian Resistance, their generals and war planners, everyone, to avoid any kind of conflict in that vast unoccupied desert. To me, a lowly sergeant, I saw the region as a great big opportunity to move about unhindered and hit deep in enemy lines by using the Wastes as a kind of cover to appear from, and disappear into, all along the enemy flanks.

Call me practical that way.

But no one would authorize anything in the planning. Even the Old Man and the First Sergeant shut down all conversation on the area, especially when