Strange Company Read online

  The AI has about a minute and forty-five seconds of runtime. It’s more like an expendable AI battery charge.

  Then, and this is where Chungo, whose fat and muscle contrive to make him look like a stubby large bull, figure that one out, laughed so hard I thought he was going to have an embolism when he told me later that about sixty-four thousand steel BBs exploded in perfect max kill arcs and destroyed the entire assault force in half a second. A sudden brutal overkill ripping through the night in front of the ruined bank.

  He was right about that.

  There wasn’t much left of anyone.

  “Expeditionary Logistics developed that but had problems, so I got a few on sale when we hit that bazaar on Noaa,” laughed the immense Chungo. Strange’s indirect specialist. A maestro of death from above and the steel rain falling down on your enemies. “It’s really a beautiful system though,” he said softly after he stopped laughing. Almost reverently wiping a tear from his swollen red face. Almost a holy whisper at the end. “It’s only got one problem the Expeditionary couldn’t live with, Orion.”

  What was the problem, I asked him.

  “Oh, that.” He snickered, and I was sure he was going to go for that embolism again. His face turning red. Him bending over his swollen girth. “It has a tendency to target friendlies.”

  “Tendency?” I said.

  “Above seventy percent of the time.” And then he died laughing as he walked back to the CP, when the attack had been stopped and the rest of the night was promising to be a long and tense unquiet.

  I hate everyone in Voodoo.

  But more about that later.

  Chapter Four

  On some date no one will ever care much about, somewhere out along the leading edge of the Stretch, two mercenary companies went to war on one another one dark and rainy night after the defense of LZ Syro—the bank where Junkboy bought it—and the resumption of offensive combat ops by the Resistance. Us. We were back on the move, peace talks dead though some said they were just stalled. Enough mem must have arrived planetside to keep the war going for a few more weeks. Someone somewhere still thought they had a chance to flip the tables. And we were going for it. All this happened during the wide-ranging, and very much lost cause, battle for a world called Crash. Or Astralon depending on who you asked.

  The Stretch is a string of stars out along the farthest edge of human expansion. Crash, or Astralon, resides in a bright little cluster of frontier worlds. You could almost call it a micro-capital.

  Crash was a very mean little war. That year’s mean little war in a long list of small, dirty wars getting longer, and meaner, all the time. One of many, as some like to say. One of many for many, many years since the Monarchs had gotten interested in the galaxy again.

  Like I said, no one would ever care much about the date, much less the war. And certainly no one cared about the junkyard dogfight that broke out between Strange Company and Grau Skull Resolutions on a world some long-dead scout had gotten the honor of designating as Crash on the universal stellar charts for all time to come.

  Getting one on the USC is something if you’re a scout. It’s like getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Like if you’re interested in that sort of thing it makes you a big deal. Kinda.

  Who knows, maybe he, that long-ago scout, wasn’t dead. Maybe the Monarchs had paid him off in longevity and all the mem he could do way back after this world had been found and colonized. Or maybe that scout was in extended coffin sleep, hyper-headed somewhere no one had gone yet. Looking to hack another world for the maps way out beyond the ever-expanding frontier. Name another planet that would one day become a colony and maybe get big enough to go to war on. Get a note in the histories if he, that scout, was on the right side of things. More stats in the Scout Hall of Fame even though I don’t think there actually is one.

  The Monarchs like to keep a tight control on history. It allows them to keep a tight control on everything else. Tell the official story and you can tell any story you want. Especially the one where you’re always on the right side. Where you’re always the hero. That’s how the Monarchs like to run the show. And it is their show to run.

  But out here on this dark and soggy night, as the drops brought us in a few klicks into this week’s No One’s Land and the gunships pulled back to protect the transports with standoffs while the dropships blew mud in every direction and howled off and away into the darkness, it was just us. Strange Company was here for the hit. And of course, the poor scumbags who’d signed the dotted line on a contract to be our enemies over at the Skull this time. They were the victim tonight.

  They just didn’t know it yet.

  Grau Skull Resolutions. Like they were, note the usage of past tense, some high-speed security conglomerate with offices on Bright Star and Rigel. Made mercs run by suits wearing the best of suits and sporting cybermodel escorts with six trillion follows. Doing high-tech security contracts with state-of-the-art death merchandise for the slugs in Grau Skull to actually go forth and do said mayhem.

  If you’ve got to be in the PMC biz, being a suit running the contracts ain’t a bad life. It’s all show and dough with none of the hardships like violent death, disease, and more violent death.

  They weren’t all that. Grau Skull was just like us when you got right down to it. Mean and desperate. Crash, or Astralon, had reduced us all down to our original binary. We were back to being what we really were after six months of fighting. Just code and no fancy plug-ins. Getting paid to do some pretty shady stuff in this mean little dogfight for all the marbles out here on Crash. Or Astralon. A war no one knew about, or even cared much about, back on glittery Bright Star. This was over on the Eastern Corridor Front after Syro LZ. We were part of the big push for the capital now that the Resistance had gotten financed by a new infusion of mem. Crash City was the goal. The wide vast sprawl of brutalist apartment blocks that went on for featureless kilometer after kilometer. Built back during the techsplosion at the turn of some century. Back when this world looked like it was going to turn itself into something respectable, and the Monarchs were thinking about setting up vacation estates to oversee their holdings. Back when the frontier was here and not fifty parsecs farther out toward the dark and crazy of the rim. Where it gets all weird and scout service ships go missing all the time if you believe the fakes. Back when bucketloads of mems could be made by the fistful if you were willing to haul anything labeled “essential cargo” out here to the boomtown worlds so they could get going and uplink with the big river of mem that feeds Earth day and night.

  That’s all history now. No one in either of the two merc companies about to shoot it out tonight for some meaningless target reference point on the map cares for the back when or even the why.

  We deal in body counts.

  To a private military contractor, the past is not prologue. The past is someone else’s problem. Oftentimes you’re just the solution to that problem. Kill who you get paid to kill and collect your mems. Blow the world on the next ride outta there and let someone else figure it all out for the official histories. The details tend to bother a little too much if you take the time to think about them.

  The human rucksack is only so big. Take care what you stuff in it, because you’ll carry all of it all the way to your grave.

  But of course I don’t do this. The stories are my jam. Officially I’m the company log keeper. Details, pay, supply, deaths, actions, intel. I got the job because the Old Man found out I collect forbidden histories whenever I can find them. He also knows that everyone doesn’t have much of a problem telling me their darkest and innermost secrets. I guess I’m just a good listener.

  Like I said, none of that matters now as the skies turn dark and gray with night rain and Strange Company gets ready to make her attack against an old cyclopean chunk of industrial living progress that still stands out here in the No One’s Land. None of that matters to us. The east
ern front of the war on Crash isn’t the sexy front. To be sure. If it was, we wouldn’t be here. It’s nothing but occasional sociopathic ground battles with arcane objectives and more often savage raids against rando enemy positions as everything shapes up for the real big show we’ve been promised next week, or maybe in two.

  The starport that serves Crash City is the big show. It’s practically running movie trailers on our brains when we close our eyes for a few hours’ sleep.

  No one’s calling in strike fighters or air cav for us tonight. Only the Strange Company has been dropped off and sent in on foot to dislodge Grau Skull from their mighty FOB inside No One’s Land. High Command back in Tolois, a strange little town thirty kilometers behind the line, won’t be watching the outcome tonight. They’ll get the details in the morning brief as the hungover generals drink coffee from small delicate porcelain cups and murmur over reports from the night before. Rumor is the generals redirected one of the cyborg circuses into the MDA, the main deployment area, and they’re getting first crack at the honeys before the line units.

  Rank has its privileges. Mercs not so much.

  So tonight, both Strange and Grau Skull are going to fight it out with automatic weapons, high-ex, and whatever else they can bring to the dogfight. Fighting over one of the last remaining block-living structures in that sector of ruin on the final approach to the starport. If we’re successful, High Command for the rebels, which just happens to be the legitimate government of Crash, will be able to oversee the battle for the port of entry to the west. That is if we win and don’t die on the objective. If not… they’ll throw another down-and-out company against Grau to make it happen. They’ll burn troops until it gets done, never mind the pay. Dead mercenaries have a way of not needing to get paid. Everyone knows that. It’s win-win for the generals if we buy it. Then the Big Contest in maybe two weeks’ time.

  Tonight’s target is Objective House Party. House Party is a block-living edifice that once housed thousands of workers during the boom. Again, it will be very important in about a week, or two. Maybe. Unless plans change to attack the starport.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight, it’s just a junkyard dog fight between two down-and-out companies that have seen much better days. Hell, Strange and Grau Skull fought together on the same side in other messes not this one.

  But not tonight. Tonight, it’s just business we tell ourselves as we sneak toward the kill in a long, winding patrol column with Ghost Platoon out front and scouting. One of us, Strange or Grau, needs to see dawn and be in control of the last remaining structures at the far edge of the ever-shifting No One’s Land. Most everything in No One’s Land west of our position got wiped out in a heavy D-beam strike from orbit three months ago. Both sides have just been fighting over the mess that’s been left behind. Fast attack force raids in and out to hit, destabilize, and ruin further the enemy’s position along the approach to the starport. Nothing personal, just business. The business of war. Next week we do the main port of entry for Crash.

  The big show we all can’t stop imagining.

  I keep saying that. I know. It’s on my mind. I have a bad feeling about that one. Guys have been telling me their stories. That’s a bad sign too. It means they can feel it. They can feel the Grim Reaper Astronaut sharpening his scythe for that one. There will be casualties.

  Soft rain begins just after twilight. It’s miserable, wet, and dirty by the time we advance on the objective. We caught some rain hanging off the dropships while coming in. I was riding on the portside cargo deck. Open to the night and the wind. Mist and sudden squalls washing over the patched and well-used drops, relics from some other conflict, as we all sat there in the darkness, blocking out the engines and constant chatter from the flight crews. It felt good, and washed some of the day, hot and dusty, off of me. And my gear.

  Rain doesn’t bother me. I was zoned for the mission. A gun sensei I once trained with told me a little meditation before a shootout didn’t hurt no one. Especially… if you knew the fight was coming.

  That’s always the hard part, ain’t it. Knowing when the fight is gonna happen. So I guess you just sit around on the edge of a fight, just left of bang, and wait for it to go down.

  Then you get it on and hope you get to see the other side of it. Which can last anywhere from seven seconds to four days according to my general experience.

  Like I said. No arty prep from High Command. No precision D-beam strike to boil the defenders inside the block structure from orbit before the building exploded and left a thirty-meter-deep scar in the world’s surface. A brief sudden violent blue death beam of superheated plasma straight down out of the heavens like something from an age of fantasy and myth. Cutting a wide scar into the dark mud and literally slicing the massive structure in half as it ruined the defenses and cooked those within a three-kilometer radius alive. Problem was, the rebels lost the ship that could do that, the Beowulf, to sub-orbital fighter raids a week after the strike, during the truce talks that fell apart as soon as the Beowulf took multiple internals and lost her main drive and had to limp away off to the system’s edge. Or face a core melt, so the official story goes.

  So, now we’re just going in to take them out. Those guys defending the last structure in No One’s Land. Grau Skull. Guys who could have just as easily been us if the contracts had fallen differently when this all kicked off and the suits were signing deals before lunch with some beauty in a bright chrome-and-glass palace of dining gentility. We’d fought alongside Grau Skull back on Blue out in the jungle highlands campaign five years ago. Pacification. Hearts and minds against the Gobies. A mega-corp wanted the mining rights inside what someone said the Gobies considered “most very sacred mountains.”

  Now, here on Crash, High Command needs that structure intact for the big show in a week or two at the starport. No doubt another circus will be redirected for the generals while we go in and spill each other’s blood all over the tarmac around the green terminal ring at the stellar port of entry.

  On the ground and working dark, Ghost Platoon, Strange’s scouts, make their way toward the objective and we listen to the zero chatter they generate over the net as they take out a Grau Skull LP/OP a hundred meters out. Ghost is pro. Slick trains them relentlessly even though there’s a lot of freedom within the understrength recon platoon to do what needs to get done. Everybody runs the weapon systems and gear they know best in the recon platoon. In Ghost you do your job and the rest is just noise, as they like to say. Don’t do your job and you’re up for grabs… that is if anyone else wants you. But why would they? You’re just broke, and why would any of the other platoon sergeants in Strange Company want you at all if you couldn’t cut it in Ghost?

  That’s how people end up back in Reaper again. Because if no one wants you, I get you.

  With the LP/OP eliminated, the Ghost platoon sergeant is thinking we have about fifteen minutes before Grau Skull figures out we just did their guys and moves to a guns-up posture, knowing things are about to get real imminent and intimate in the next few.

  Surprise blown.

  Ghost does their job again as one of the snipers whacks a spotter on the roof of the blocky structure we’re about to assault from our angle of attack. Like I said, Ghost is pro. Suppressed shot at medium range in the rain and dark isn’t easy even if you are running a Kang-Mueller acquisition and targeting scope on a Volk Predator sniper rifle firing dependable 7.62.

  I know the sniper and I know his old rifle. Sleeper is in the house. I also know the job was important enough that Sergeant Slick would rely on just that guy to get the job done for us.

  But anyone in Ghost could have made that shot. Everyone in Ghost is high-speed-laid-back all the way. They’re so pro it seems like they don’t care much. In other words, they don’t get bothered when things get focused.

  Seems is the important word in that sentence.

  Being a PMC is nine
ty-percent actor. I’m not saying you’re not pro at private mercenary work. That’s gratis if you’re going to stick around. But so much about what we do is attitude. Outnumbered, unwanted, and desperately needed, your acting skills go a long way in convincing allies, enemies, and predators regarding your intentions.

  It also helps when you’re low on ammo and running out of options.

  Or at least that’s how I view it. Your parsecs may vary.

  So, if you don’t cut it there, in Ghosts, then you’ll end up in the Reapers getting all the whack jobs no else wants to die getting done. Stuff that needs to get done never mind the odds. When new guys come into Reaper they think it’s super-cool because we’ve got a nice patch with, of course, the iconic Grim Reaper Astronaut straight out of all the ancient myths of star travel and legends like NASA, Mars Command, and SPEC. A symbol as old as time itself. Something that’s stood for death in vacuum, plague, and general stellar exploration danger zones to be very careful of time immemorial. A warning turned into a tattoo worn proudly. Either chalked on a bulkhead inside a busted hull, or flashing on some still-active terminal deep inside a rock where someone found something they shouldn’t have. You get into Reaper and think you’re super-cool on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Later you realize Reaper is just where the First Sergeant sticks you until someone figures out a name and a skill set and picks you up thus making you legit instead of the lost little sheep you really are. Until then you got to survive all the whack things Reaper gets assigned by the captain.

  In Reaper you either die or get made. Those are the only two ways out. Strange rules for a Strange Company, as the senior-most still like to say. And until you get made you do all the worst stuff with the highest level of promised mortality. It’s really easier for everyone that way. Trust us. If you’re gonna die, then why take the time to come up with a tag to call you by. Tags are a lotta work. Things have to be considered. It’s a waste when they get wasted ’cause you got dead.