Strange Company Read online

  That’s not even politics. That’s just watching the news and reading between the lines.

  It’s just reading the road map and seeing what lies ahead whether anyone likes it or not.

  Most Strange Company don’t get that deep on subjects of the way things are going. It’s too sober.

  But Chief Cook usually just says to me, “You know, Orion.” Gives me a wink and keeps on moving. I’ve taken to pretending I do know. But who knows? Sometimes it pays to play both sides. Know what I mean?

  As far as we can tell, Chief Cook is uncannily good at what he does. Which is mess with people’s, the enemy especially but sometimes randos and even us, he messes with their heads on a grand scale. As has been noted, he hates Stinkeye. Utterly. And the hate is reciprocated in full, if not more so. If the company is ever overrun and given the order to die in place, once all the brass is expended and we’re pulling into our last positions calling out “last mag” to meet our bad end, I fully expect to see those two going at it with knives. Two lunatics who thought the enemy was really just practice for the real villain they saw in each other.

  Getting down to the business of settling scores with what little time remains.

  But then I remember Sergeant Amarcus and I don’t think too badly of them. Everyone’s got a villain. Or, in someone else’s story… you are someone’s villain. You’re the bad guy.

  I try to keep everything in perspective. It makes the mental sight picture work much better. And, as an old sergeant once told me, “Front sight forward isn’t a bad way to live when you think about it, Orion.”

  I test it out all the time to see if it’s still true. So far it has been.

  “No worries,” Chief Cook’s telling me and the rest of Reaper as we watch the cargo terminal off to our left begin to gush clouds of black smoke, each of us praying we’re not suddenly going to get graphite rained-on in the next few minutes. The black billowing smoke looks like a demon’s chest heaving and getting larger by the second as the fires over there consume and combust more material. “They were storing some illegal munitions that came in last week on the Archon of Delago,” mutters the warrant officer behind us. Chief Cook. He’s a big mutterer. A low talker. Sometimes you can’t even tell what he’s saying and you miss half of it at that. “Big freighter. Torpedoed by our bombers as she tried to make the jump. So…”

  Chief Cook paused and exhaled, whistling through his wide-spaced teeth as he did so. Studying the local apocalypse we were all watching, and wondering if we had to go fight in shortly. Honestly, it looked to be devoid of enemy even now. Who could’ve survived? But uncontained radiation does have a tendency to freak one out. Especially if you have to go mucking about in it, looking for a fight.

  “So… what you’re looking at there…” lectured Chief Cook like he was some instructor back at EOD school, “is about five tons of high-ex munitions that got hit somewhere in south shipping will-call, as far as I can tell. We knew it was there. Inside man tipped us off. Well, he’s probably dead too now. We were gonna take it. Guess not. That’s the way things break, kids.”

  I can’t tell if Reaper actually believes our psyops spook, but they sit back down in the culvert and return to getting their gear ready for the attack. Deciding what’s too heavy to carry for the rest of the day across all the kilometers we’re going to need to fight our way through to reach the main terminal in green ring. And deciding what’s necessary to do that fighting.

  The worst thing is to be in a firefight and need what you don’t have. Then you have to get real creative, or real violent.

  I stood there scanning the morning’s destruction. It was zero-seven-forty local. The day was promising to be a big mess. I could feel that. I knew from the op order that we wouldn’t be going into that mess to clear. That was Dog’s job. But we were supposed to transit to keep our profile low on the approach to the main objective. Now I was getting an updated feed on our order. Our job now, as of the update in my combat lens, was to move through the tall dead grass surrounding the port and reach the first landing apron’s edge in the thin morning shadow of the main terminal for green ring. I was worried about that. The tall dead grass catching fire from the nearby explosions, while we were out there in it. That could happen if that storage facility kept burning like it was and exploding like it was doing. Then we’d be at the landing apron, a wide half-kilometer circular highway that encompassed the entire green terminal ring where the big ships set down. And it would be quite a view for the defenders watching from the smaller terminals and the docks we would be approaching.

  So, let’s just call that the kill zone. There was no way to cross that without taking a lot of incoming. Hence Reaper was getting the job.

  As you can see… I was worried about those areas. Not so much about the fighting until the terminal, but a lot of open ground to get shot at in.

  Which, let me tell you, is actually no fun. I was now thinking better of carrying a ruck full of supply ammo. I’d need to move fast. But then again the new guys, especially that Kid, had a tendency to burn mags. Being dry inside the terminal wasn’t going to do anything for anyone, except the enemy.

  I looked at Chief Cook and wondered what he was doing down here, down with Reaper. The freaks from Voodoo rarely get involved in CQB. Off to the right I could see Dog ready and waiting to go forward. Like they wanted to. What a bunch of… they actually liked this. I kinda wouldn’t have minded just throwing up. Except I had nothing to throw up. I told myself to eat a protein bar so I could throw it up before the attack. Each of Amarcus’s people had their entire ruck stuffed with all the weapons and ammo they could do. They were going in heavy. Amarcus had them carrying all the AT he could get his hands on. I knew secretly he had this fear of getting hit by fast-attack armored cavalry. An infantryman’s worst nightmare if you were on open ground and on foot and got caught in a sudden raid.

  The AT weapons were for that. Though he’d use them on entrenched defenders if he needed to. “Fire in the hole” was Dog’s most commonly used phrase. Or as Duster, one of the EOD guys over in Dog told me once, “Why try when you got explosives, Orion.”

  “What’re you doing here?” I barked at Chief Cook. My voice sounded dry, like I was spitting clipped words. I sounded bitter and irritated. I never slept well before a battle. If only because there was no time. And any time you had was another minute to get ready for whatever it was you were gonna face the next day. Whatever it was that was gonna try and kill you in that day.

  “Came down to give you a little good news, Sergeant Orion,” said the warrant officer crisply.

  I doubted it would be good news.

  I picked up my ruck and put it on. I wasn’t making most of Reaper carry one. It was going to be a long hot day with a lot of crawling. Under fire I wanted them to move fast. Not tired. The supply crawler could bring our gear up later. I’d carry as much spare ammo as I could. For everyone. I’ve learned that fear of getting shot will get me moving fast enough if I need to. No matter how loaded down I am. Incoming has a tendency to motivate.

  “And what’s that good news?” Like anyone in Strange I was expecting the “good news” to actually be bad news. Chief Cook was smiling, his teeth white and big and gapped. Theatrically he raised his giant steel watch, probably very expensive, and noted the time. Then he executed a perfect left face and studied the distant terminal that was our objective.

  “See that Clipper berthed below the big thirty-nine on the OBJ, Orion?”

  I did. There was a beautiful Clipper-class starship berthed alongside the main terminal. Our objective.

  Yeah. It was a standard Star Clipper. Long command neck and hammerhead bridge, wide-disc graceful main hab, huge engines and thrusters erupting from the engineering stack at the aft section of the vessel. But every line spoke of distant tropical worlds untouched by us. Natives and enterprise. Adventure. Maybe even lost alien ruins undiscovered and guarding some o
f the secrets of the universe. Every kid’s fantasy of such places. We’d all grown up on Stewart Young of the Starship Horizon streams.

  “That was,” said Cook, continuing to study his watch, “the Neptune Clipper, just in from the Sweet Worlds. Commissioned six years ago at the Martian shipyards in the actual vicinity of Earth. Owned by the Pan-Stellar Starways line. Captain—”

  “Was…?” I asked, interrupting him to note the obvious use of incorrect tense. You know like soldiers do and all?

  His eyes went wide as though he’d suddenly been jolted by some random wandering bolt of electricity. He looked up from his watch and then very theatrically turned around, like some teenage boy playing tricks and miming dumb at the same time. That was the thing about Chief Cook. His age was indeterminate. Some days I would have sworn he had to be younger than me. Like some kid who’d just gotten out of university and needed to pay off his loans with a little military service. And then there were other times you’d come upon him in the dead of a late-night op, catching him unawares with his mind intently working some problem in the thin ghostly light of a battlemap, seeing some horror he never spoke of, and then, it was at those times that he looked older. Much older than me. And I look pretty wrecked, in my opinion, for a guy just turned thirty-six standard years. Technically, I’d been rode hard.

  Coffin-sleep flight time has made me much older, also technically. But really, I’ve only had thirty-six years of actual non-cryo waking life. Still, I look every kilometer of it, and some.

  The Falmorian party girl thought I was handsome though. “You are like zee avenger from one of za early romantic novels written by Luc Desaix,” she said in her pidgin French with the Falmorian buzz of the humanoid eels. “A man withs many scars zhat make him zo attractive to ze woman who zeeks a competent and daring man who has done ze zhings normal men are too afraid to do. Walked ze night unafraid. To fight… when others will not. To pay back wrongs zat must be answered, my estrangier. You look like such a man.”

  My estrangier.

  I think about her a lot. Still do. I wrote her one time.

  But that’s a common side effect of Falmorian party girls. Ask any penniless mercenary.

  So back to Chief Cook’s little playlet.

  “Was…?” I’d asked as he recited the vitals of the big beautiful Clipper docked out there on the green ring near Gate 39. Even from this distance it was huge, rising high into the morning fog, heedless and serene as artillery rained down on the terminal off to the west. Ships were considered off-limits by the powerful Commercial Nav Guild. Too important to be wasted on petty conflicts. For the most part, both sides abided and didn’t target. Of course, there were accidents and those got decided in Stellar Appeals Judiciary. One downed ship could wipe out a company like Strange and force us into bankruptcy, or piracy.

  Whichever paid better.

  He’d executed that perfect left face and raised his hand to his tanned tight forehead to shield his brown eyes from the morning sun burning through the gauze overcast. Except now I noted he had his mirrored aviator shades on. As trademark a part of him as the spec ops beret and shiny black boots he polished alone at night, listening to acid jam from forty years ago, big during the desperate years of the Sindo, muttering to himself and finding certain things funny. As though telling himself jokes he’d never heard before again. Jokes only he found funny. Jokes he’d never tell another living soul. Secrets too.

  Then I saw a downpour of smoking artillery out there, more ghostly-ghastly shells arcing through the sky to rain down on the area near Gate 39 and all over the serene Neptune Clipper waiting to lift and heave off to those worlds we all dreamed of.

  Someone swore back in the culvert as it went down. They saw it too. Shells smashed into the shining white-and-blue upper hull of the beautifully graceful starship getting ready to take on high-paying evacuees no doubt. Those who’d realized the game was over on Crash, or Astralon, or whatever.

  Engineering was hit first. One massive round straight through the superstructure. One of the wings portside took three shells and lost her landing gears as the indirect rounds went straight through, tearing dark maintenance decks and components like lifters and inertial stabilizers to pieces. An explosion in the outboard thruster tanks sent hull plating into the shattered glass at the back of the terminal. Huge sheets of the stuff cascaded down in great waterfalls. But we heard nothing at this distance. Only saw its slow-fall destruction. Compartmentalized, as all starships are for that kind of damage, the ship simply and unceremoniously collapsed along her port side onto the tarmac and landing apron, listing like a drunk who couldn’t find his way home after a night’s binge. Other rounds struck the beautiful Clipper but none caused destruction so fantastic as the damage to her portside wing.

  One round went wide… on purpose possibly… and nailed the nearby APU pylon that powered the ship while she was docked. Fuel cells went up, and there must’ve been flammables for refueling nearby along the tarmac. Now black billowing smoke was coming from that area and also the portside wing array of the Clipper.

  Chief Cook turned back to me, smiling that wide, skeletal, almost perpetually psychotically happy-trip grin.

  “Was,” he stated officiously.

  I studied the scene for a moment. It was right in our lane. We’d have to go through that.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Figured you’d need cover, Sergeant Orion. Generals up at High Command don’t want to hit that section of the terminal because some of them have, how shall we say, recalcitrant cousins among the defenders. So I noted that the artillery plots were going to make sure that section of the terminal didn’t get hit at all. Then they could murder you on the approach. And… oh boy oh boy, Sergeant Orion, I don’t need to tell you how much weaponry they’ve got in there to repel, but it’s a lot if the long-range observers are right. So I figured we’d hit the ship, get you a smokescreen going, and if you move your men just right you can keep the smoke of the ship, and in fact use the ship, to hit the terminal without taking too much incoming. Black oily smoke and flaming starships have a tendency to obscure the field of battle. That’s straight out of the Ultra Marine field manual, Sergeant. Trust me. Top secret stuff. I’d have to kill you if you told anyone.”

  I thought about that for a second. I could see the merits of what he was saying. Using the ship as cover to hit the terminal might work.

  “But the ship’s on fire.”

  “It is, Sergeant Orion. It is indeed. Once you reach her engineering stack you should be able to use the main spine inside the ship to get up to the hab docking arm and infiltrate through to the terminal. No one will expect an attack through a burning starship. That’s crazy, Sergeant Orion. Right? Gonna be a big surprise for them when it actually does happen. You and your boys pop out. Bam. Pow. There you are right inside their line. Pretty cool, huh? It was partly the Old Man’s idea. You could say I’m here to officially change your orders and have you assault through the Neptune Clipper to breach the enemy line. Once you’re in, the rest of the line is going to hit the terminal on cue in this sector. So, we’d better get going, Orion.”

  “We…?” I asked the warrant. I didn’t like this. Voodoo had priorities that didn’t often match up with those of keeping my men alive and completing the mission. Half the time it seemed like they just wanted to do some darkness as Punch once put it. That’s whack, Sarge.

  Again, the theatrics of surprise from the chief. Behind us, coming down the aqueduct, I could see a mammoth fuel hauler with twelve massive big ball-wheels, low and flat, smoking and belching as it came up shifting through its gears in the morning mist never mind the distant explosions and flames. I recognized it as old war surplus from the Monarchs’ military supply units. Soldiers who knew it, and there were very few left who’d seen this kind of vehicle in active service, called it the Land Whale. It was used to fuel supply guppy dropships back in the Sindo.

 
; Cook cleared his throat.

  “Uh, yes, Sergeant Orion. I will be following you in with the,” he turned to indicate the Land Whale, “HMWVFT 195 as you can see. I call it the… uh… Ice Cream Truck. For purposes of the operation henceforth.” Then he laughed mischievously to himself because this was all very funny to him.

  Of course, I had to ask.

  “And why do you call it that, Chief Cook?”

  “Well, Orion,” he said grandly, holding up one tanned long finger I could see small white scars on. “It’s loaded with near-deadly, and almost certainly deadly in oversaturated doses like those currently contained within the HMWVFT 195, psychotropic gases. Real, real crazy stuff, Orion. We used this back in the Call-Galli in sixty-nine when things started to go pear-shaped big-time. Highly effective. Extremely deadly in high doses. And… critical to Strange Company’s mission objective to take the main terminal in green ring. We’re gonna drive this pig in there and gas ’em until they can’t distinguish between reality and the Nine Hells of Qua.”

  Chapter Eight

  I asked Chief Cook if we needed to mask up before the assault on the port of entry green ring main terminal. Chemical warfare was not unheard of in the world of private military contracting along the outer worlds. In fact, it was expected. Especially if you accepted the soldier’s evergreen maxim that if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’. All soldiers and mercenaries live by that wisdom. The Stellar Judiciary might have strong feelings on the subject of chemical warfare, but we’d go chemical on someone just as fast as they would on us. That was the way it got played if you were playing to win. And we were always playing to win.

  There are no second places in war. In it to win it is the only way to play.

  Winning meant you got to fight another day. Or, it just meant you survived.

  Chemical’s a hassle, but it beats gettin’ shot by a… well, it beats getting shot by a long shot. If anyone ever told you war was fair, or that it was supposed to be, they were lying to you because they wanted to do some very unfair things to you by surprise.