Strange Company Read online

  Officially it’ll be called a massacre.

  The kids don’t even know we’re operational. That PMCs have been hired to come in and fight for Astralon, which doesn’t want to be called Crash anymore and wants to be free of Monarch influence. They’d freak if they knew Stinkeye had been thinking this one up. Even just the sight of the old war toad would have had them running if they knew what was good for them. A lot of people like to pretend they’ve been there and done that. Well, our ancient space war wizard or whatever you want to call Stinkeye, has. And the things he’s seen and done are only found in the darkest parts of the galaxy. I heard someone once tell him, after he’d lost a game of Cheks, getting completely trounced by three trolls, that Stinkeye was the galaxy’s very own Heart of Darkness.

  The old little man nodded soberly, waving one scarred finger back and forth at the speaker as he stared at his bad hand.

  “I ain’t dat, little soldier,” he replied, drunkenly slurring his words. His eyes bleary. His head weaving. “But I seen it once. And it wasn’t a thing I wanna see ’gain, tell you so.”

  We ate the breakfast burritos and drove to the kill that hot sweaty morning the war started. Hot and getting hotter. Looking like laborers wearing work coats over our tactical rigs. Rifles down and out of sight.

  Maybe, sometimes I think, that’s what got them killed. Those three brothers of Strange Company who didn’t make it a couple of weeks into this show we call the War on Crash. It was too easy at first, and it felt like the whole world was just gonna flip because Stinkeye said boo that day. But I coulda told them, our three dead of Strange Company, and there would be others, that it’s always the same. You start every contract with momentum like you’re really gonna do something… and then end up running for your life, swearing you’ll never merc again and that you’re gonna quit the company as soon as we reach the first decent major port world.

  But you never do. You never quit. You just buy it one day and your time in the rotation of the galactic lens is done. Your hash settled. Grave marked.

  As a sergeant I could have told them that. The three dead who were riding in the technical on Stinkeye’s mission to “make some trouble” that day. As their sergeant I should’ve told them that. Warned them about what was inevitably coming.

  And they wouldn’t have listened. They never do.

  No one thinks they’re really going to die.

  I once spent a weekend with a Falmorian party girl. She sang softly as we lay there in the dark. Exhausted and watching the fan on the ceiling turn. Counting the hours until the game was over. It was a song about not having regrets. In French. She sang it in French, and I thought that was so odd because the native Falmorian are part eel, which is why everyone wants a party girl from that world. At least once in their life. Falmoria was an early colony world for the French after they left Earth.

  “What do you think,” she buzzed, and stroked my chest with her long and slender hand. Electricity coursed through my body like some drug that made you sleepy and happy all at the same time.

  “About what?” I asked her, dreaming of better things than what I’d seen out there in the dark along the frontier worlds.

  “About zee song,” she purred softly, her deep voice like electric velvet. “Iz it true?”

  She was cobalt-colored. Her eyes big and luminous in the dark. Watching me. Her curves like liquid darkness.

  “Can you have no regrets, my estrangier? In zis life? Are zhere none?”

  She called me that. Estrangier. Stranger. I never asked why. Just guessed it was because she knew who I worked for. Just another mercenary with the Strange Company. But since then I’ve wondered if it was for another reason.

  “It’s a nice sentiment,” I murmured to her and the twirling ceiling fan above us. Falling into sleep for a little while. Falling into a better universe not this one. “But it ain’t true…”

  I don’t know if I said But I wish it was. Or I dreamed that I did. I still don’t know now, when I think back to that night with her.

  Private military contracting is the best casino in the galaxy. You always win, until you lose. Then you lose big time. You lose everything in fact. So, who cares. Because your life got lost along the way too.

  If you’re going to lose… think about it, then really lose. Lose… everything.

  We lost three within two weeks. But on that first day of operations we were a whole company just starting out on a new contract on a new world that thought it was ready to try the Big War Show. Hardrop, Crisp, and Twopeat would get killed in the future beyond that day. But not that day as we drive through the streets of the Heights, ready to do war. None of ’em told me their stories before they went. I guess they weren’t expecting to die on the days they actually did die on.

  Death is ironically surprising like that when you’re a private military contractor. Every day you’re expecting to die. Buy it in some hellhole going from bad to worse not just by the second, but by the bullet, and the air is thick with them in that unexpected moment, and then the day you do you’re completely surprised it actually happened to you.

  Trust me. I’ve seen the look when guys first get hit. Fatally. It’s completely unexpected. But what did we think would happen? Then you do your best to wrap your mind around it. Or at least that’s what I think.

  All four technicals fanned out that morning to different streets with vantage points over the mall in the bowl of the capital below. We’d parted ways with Stinkeye on the way in. We pulled up to the curb as kids in their new gear and carrying shiny new weapons and protest signs streamed past us. Heading to the party. Heading to the mall. Stinkeye, our Voodoo asset for the mission, looking like the galaxy’s mangiest warrant officer who’d never make private in any real army, hobbled off down into the crowd-swollen mall. His bandy-legged stride wobbling his squat frame back and forth as he waded into the press of the young bright-eyed warriors who would return this world to the Monarchs. Hell, in their minds they already had.

  They had no idea.

  Chiefs Stinkeye and Cook utterly hate each other. That’s pretty much the only thing generally known about the inner workings of Voodoo Platoon. Those two would do each other in if they weren’t so damn afraid of the captain.

  We call Stinkeye Chief. But we’d never call him sir.

  “What if we hit you while you’re down there?” asks Sergeant Slick, Ghost’s platoon leader, as our chief warrant officer leaves us to go make his particular brand of mayhem among the locals down there playing soldier. Making it on our behalf down along the mall as the operation begins.

  “You won’t even see me,” croaks Stinkeye over his shoulder, and as we watch him walk down the trash-littered dusty street on that hot summer morning as a war kicks off its opening day on this dying world even though it doesn’t know it’s dying yet, he begins to waver and fade from our view right before our eyes. Like some heat mirage that was never really there all along.

  The warrants in Voodoo are pure freaks.

  One has to wonder what the big super brains of the Monarchs did to him in those Dark Labs. What a super-genius-level AI can think up. And what was the price of the “gift” they gave Stinkeye. His ability to do Psyonix.

  And what would it be like if there really were no regrets.

  We mount up and move to our first shooting positions once we part ways with Stinkeye.

  It’s an hour later and all four technicals are blocks away from each other when we get his signal to engage targets. It’s hot and the sun is directly overhead. We pull back the dusty old tarps for the snipers so they can shoot, and they start firing according to Stinkeye’s instructions. All the technicals are divided into two groups. West Group and East Group. All of us are on the extreme edges of the massed “army” we’re looking down on. Hiding in the streets above the mall. Watching the Loyalist kids frolic as they play conquering hero on this eternal morning. Snapping
pictures with their devices as they pose in front of the guns and reflection pool past generations long gone and much forgotten put up to be remembered by. Silly history… don’t you know you’re just a plaything for would-be tyrants? Smoking joints and cavorting around growing drum circles as slogans they think they’ve actually come up with on their own are chanted and reverberate. The Loyalists have won the war before it even ever got started. Huzzah!

  That’s how easy it is.

  It really does feel like a festival as our snipers begin to shoot them.

  Ten rounds and we shift to a new shooting position.

  The silencers are huge and the noise suppression is luxurious. The shots really sound like mere mouse farts. Whispers of ghost breaths. And of course, the snipers are covered by the tarp except for their rifles. Just a couple of workers standing around a truck is all anyone sees. The expended brass is just staying in the bed of the truck as it drizzles away from the ejector ports of the big rifles in steady-slow streams. I run three-sixty for my technical and listen to the shots puff and hiss as the big fat silencers deal with the noise suppression. No one is interested in us up here. But our rifles are out and we will engage.

  Down below no one is screaming. Not yet.

  At least not for the first five shots. It’s on shot six I hear some girl down there start to scream bloody murder as her friend’s head just magically comes apart in front of her. I don’t even see this, but I hear Soups, the spotter for Wulf, say just that.

  “Got ’em in the head, Wulfy. Nice shot.”

  I chance a glance down to the mall and iris in with my combat lens dialed in for daytime combat. I scan and spot. Edges of the crowd on our side. Out near the boundaries of the greensward that is the mall. I count three corpses down in the grass and I see the screaming girl, some chubby chick, university age with red-dyed “super hair” as they like to call it, on her knees and crawling away from the guy she was just standing next to. She probably dyed the hair red with an expensive nano-wash to support the movement that morning or at some other recent time. The guy Wulf just blew the head off of doesn’t care anymore about supporting hair.

  Four more shots and we shift position. The other technicals are beginning to engage as we move to our next loc.

  Down below, the protestor-resistor-looter-justice army doesn’t quite get what’s going on now. Collectively. Why? Because they’ve been trained to only operate collectively. To take their orders and participate in groups when they attack others, destroy property, and generally make a nuisance of themselves without any kind of actual resistance. They’re like jackals. Suddenly forming a mob and going after the law-abiding to demand more change. But things are different today. Right now, they have no clue they’re today’s victims. Prey. Hunted. Collectively. Individually they just know some of their own have suddenly been shot dead. And in the few cases of exceptionally good shooting, watched heads turned to bone spray and red mist on the hot summer air.

  There are gut shots because of course.

  Clearly this was not what was planned for Conquering Hero Victory Day. Months of the easy victories of smashing glass and fighting the powers that be with endless slogans, chants, and marches in the streets, and full media support, are collapsing as the realization settles in that war is something completely different than one ever imagines it to be. And that it is starting today, whether you like it or not.

  None of them realize they’re just pawns being used by the Monarchs to show that the Resistance, Strange Company’s employers, are nothing but murderers of children.

  Everyone must play their part. And yes, there are regrets. It was just a dream I once had that there weren’t any.

  We know what’s happening down there. And this isn’t even the Stinkeye magic of Psyonix outlined in his self-aggrandizing drunken op order back at the FOB. Chief Cook making sarcastic remarks from the back of the briefing room and saying things like, “You call that a plan, you old lush?”

  Stinkeye barking at Chief Cook that he’d turn the psyops specialist into a junkie who craved nothing but tales of the outer dark until he was little more than a gibbering mass unrecognizable to his own mother. If he even had one. Chief Cook laughed and waved Stinkeye off, all very theatrically. “I read that stuff for fun already, you old fraud. Your feeble powers are nothing more than cons to pull on weak minds. Admit it, Stink. You couldn’t suggest your way out of a paper bag, even with a hull torch in one hand, you ridiculous old carnie. You know nothing of how to really break minds and bend hearts.”

  This last part was pure sinister.

  Trust me, we’re all brothers in the Strange Company. We really are. But that doesn’t mean we’re friends.

  So, we know the plan even though the horrified kids down there on the mall don’t. They’re just sitting around like the children they really are, stunned and crying, as the horror that they are under attack begins to spread like an out-of-control grease fire across the milling crowd. Us in the technicals, Reaper and Ghost, we’re shifting to new positions to shoot some more. Playing our part in this opening scene of the tragedy we’ve all come to act out today for the galactic stage. Adjusting to how the crowd is now trying to develop its response. Some of the leaders down there are trying to explain that everyone needs to go to their fighting positions. That they are under attack. The street festival is definitely over today. It’s time to play war, gang.

  The kids would like law enforcement and the adults to take over now that there are owies. Someone’s not playing fair and that isn’t right. Didn’t you hear our slogans about equality and justice when we smashed your stuff and looted your businesses? You can almost hear them think this silliness about the universe and how it really works.

  We make our next position, for us in team four it’s a three-story parking garage. We hit the shadowy darkness of level two, which is open and guarded only by flex wire along the open edges. The lot is empty. Since the riots, no one has been coming into downtown much. The children have gotten dangerous. Tarp back, weapons ready, the snipers begin to do their work again. This time shooting down more of the enemy along the edges of the mass of angry and frightened “soldiers” who’d just won the “war” before it even started. Driving them to panic and run for the center of the mob now.

  Only now do they realize the war is just beginning. And that they are the enemy.

  What happens next is terrible to behold. At least it is for me. Some of the Strange find it funny. If only because distance lends perspective and we’re able to watch the terrorized and terrible children who are in it suddenly react out of utter mindless fear. They have no training to speak of. They are not actually soldiers, like we are, and no amount of sloganeering is going to do that for them. They’ve merely been dressed up for war to play war. Now they are really in it. War. People, friends, their comrades, are dying along the edges of their “army” and the kids at the edges want to be anywhere but where they see people dying all around them.

  So of course they run toward the center seeking help.

  Both edges of the same army down there do this at once.

  And for some unexplainable reason, they just start shooting each other. And this has to be pure Stinkeye mind-voodoo down there. Within seconds, using his mental powers no doubt, he has confused enough of them to mistake comrades for sudden predators amid smoke, heat, and blood spray. Or what some call the Fog of War. A series of accidental firefights break out as both sides try to get away from the edges. Must get away from the edges. Must own the center.

  A girl who had been a Molotov thrower, probably targeting spike shops and banks in the early days of the liberation as she thought of it, unslings her rifle and dumps a whole mag into her compatriots coming straight at her. Un-aimed and wild she does credible damage for an amateur. She’s screaming and telling them something as she spends all her ammo and gets a dry click at the end of the party, no doubt. All we can see from up here is her mo
uth and lips moving in an angry snarl that suggests she would kill more if there were unlimited bullets. She has more mags, but swapping out for a full one doesn’t even seem to occur to her. A moment later some guy, a good-looking dude with wire-rimmed virtu-specs who was probably just there for the chicks and had learned to talk a good game about the literature of Early Sauvagan, blows her brains out. And in seconds both sides of the same team are tearing away at each other viciously, shooting anyone they can, and running for their lives straight at those trying to do the same in that terrible-to-behold moment.

  It is everyone for themselves down there. Get back to the Mom and Dad you turned your back on and called stupid and old-fashioned in the lead-up to when all this liberation craziness began. Falling for Monarch propaganda is bad. Dying for it’s worse. Even ridiculous.

  A minute later and it’s a sea of corpses at the center down there.

  Then one of the light machine guns, a plaything and picture set piece for their social media blasts moments earlier, turns and opens up on the crowd for no sane or rational reason. I honestly can’t believe it’s happening. And trust me, I’m the guy who’ll tell you he’s seen just about everything. Guess not. Its suddenness is horrible because I know what those weapons systems can do to crowds. They’re made for them in fact. Traverse and squeeze is a machine gunner’s dream. Drums from the drum circle cease but trumpets still blare like that should be a call to remind each other that today was supposed to be a celebration. A festival. A moment of triumph and unity for them all. The conquerors who beat the old guard with nothing but love and peace and all the broken glass that could be smashed at the expense of the status quo.

  This was their day.

  Sadly, it’s not. It’s time to get real, children. And that’s what happens when private military contracting companies show up planetside. They smell money to be made like sharks smell blood in the waters of every world we’ve ever found them on. Things get real whether you like it or not. We are not hired out for anything else other than to ruin people’s days.