Strange Company Read online

  Reaper and Ghost got assigned the first mission planetside. The Massacre. Dog was still digging in our first FOB and filling industrial-sized sandbags for our little fort. Of course, Voodoo was in the mix. But you never know if it’s gonna be Nether, Cook, or one of the other freaks. No one knows how they, Voodoo Platoon, interface with the Old Man and decide what tricks they’re gonna play on the enemy on our behalf. That first op planetside, it was Stinkeye dealing the cards from the bottom of the deck.

  Stinkeye does magic. Stinkeye does fear. Maybe he can do other stuff. But maybe because he’s such a miserable old alcoholic, the fear is what he knows and what he can do best drunk. It ain’t really magic. But it might as well be. Whatever Monarch Super-Voodoo science lab cooked his brain and turned the dial to do what they call Psyonix, might as well have called it magic as far as I’m concerned. I’ve seen him pull some crazy tricks.

  That was the situation as we started the battle for the starport, on the day we’d meet the Seeker. And after that… well, that’s what this is all about.

  Chapter Seven

  That was how things on Crash, or Astralon, kicked off. How a disagreement about the future of a world turned into a snipers’ shooting gallery and a total bloodbath, and then a war both sides needed someone else to finish. But hey, that’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it?

  Someone picks a fight for two other guys who’ll do the fighting. Same as it ever was.

  Now, we were being told, this was how things ended once and for all on Astralon or Crash, as we moved on the starport. Winner take all. Resistance elements in this sector attacking the starport from half the points on the compass. The winner would decide the future once there were enough dead to make it clear who’d actually won. And the Strange Company had certainly stacked their share of bodies in this little conflict. But that was what we did. Now we’d take the port of entry for Astralon, or Crash, or whatever it was being called this week, and then the Resistance would control the re-entry beacons to the system and therefore stellar trade and navigation.

  In a galaxy full of all kinds of starflight—jump, hyper, decades-long dumb-thrust hovering just under sub-light, and of course the rumors of other darker weirder things in development, or for private use by the Monarchs only—those navigation systems inherent to every populated star system were still very important. And whoever controlled them got to determine what was important.

  Whoever controlled them was definitely the winner at this stage of the conflict.

  That’s why the port of entry had remained relatively untouched by the other side. Destroyed, it was utterly useless to everyone. For a long time during the course of the war it had been held by the Loyalists and was used as the main Monarch-paid resupply base for most of their war effort.

  Stinkeye had once hissed at me in passing, “Whoever controls the spice, controls the galaxy, Little King.” He was drunk and laughing to himself while I was out checking the night watch one hot summer night. We were about a week away from the big fight at the Hooper Reservoir. “Know what that means, Little King?”

  When Stinkeye is really drunk he calls me that. Like it’s an insult, which it is. And I know you’ll think this is strange, but I’m one of the few people Stinkeye talks to when he’s not drunk. Which is something. Sober he’s still crazy, but you get some fascinating tales. So I don’t mind it. Stinkeye is half legend and half unwanted old relative. He commands a certain amount of respect in the company just by virtue of having been around for longer than anyone can remember. He’s been here longer than the Old Man has been commanding. There are logs hundreds of years old that mention him, or someone a lot like him using different tags.

  I had no idea what Whoever controls the spice controls the galaxy meant. Half of what Stinkeye mutters is chalked up to nothing more than just drunken nonsense.

  “Book back on old Earth,” he slurred. “Read it when I was a kid and there was still such a thing called NASA. Can’t remember the name… Little King, can’t remember it… no more. Can’t remember. But it was a thing that was. And that used to mean something, Little King. It really did.”

  He took a long hot pull of the jet fuel he called hooch.

  Waved it at me.

  I declined. Because of course I wanna live. And that stuff will kill ya unless you’re actually Stinkeye.

  “It means, Little King, that when… when… you control the thing that allows transportation between these little islands we call… the stars… well then, boy, it means you control the stars themselves. Trust ol’ Stinkeye. Always trust me, Little King. It’s truth straight from the deep dark well o’ the universe. Cold water, whether you like it or not, eh?”

  Depriving our enemies in this war of the base that was the port of entry would be a major, if not final, blow in this six-months-long struggle for the supremacy and control of the main habitable planet in system.

  This was for the entire bag of marbles.

  For us in the Strange Company, it was like we could see daylight to getting paid off on this dog of a contract. There were problems though, of course. There are always problems. There were rumors running through all the platoons that the Resistance generals weren’t putting mem in our accounts like they were supposed to. And of course, each platoon’s barracks lawyer had it all figured out down to the bit. Stinkeye was the main prophet of this heresy, and the First Sergeant had barked at the chief to “shut his damn drunken mouth about stuff he didn’t know nothin’ about.”

  Stinkeye promised he’d peel back the senior-most NCO’s sanity like a banana and show him the true nature of what he muttered was, “da dark side.”

  But the rumors about short and no pay were actually true.

  Payments to our lawyers on Bright had stopped six weeks ago. Our current account rep, Astacia Esquival, had advised the captain to conduct no further operations until some of our back pay was settled up. She’d even advised him to withdraw us off-world for our next contract and let the lawyers figure the aftermath of the struggle with whoever ended up in control of the planetary assets.

  Oftentimes the Monarchs’ reps would do just that.

  There were two problems to this though. The Spider could no longer make planetary landings, besides being no longer jump-capable. We needed a starport with extra-orbital transport to effect the eighteen-hour flight for link-up with our ship and to get off-world to our next contract. And with no mem on hand we couldn’t hire orbital transport. That was problem one, and it was a big one.

  The Resistance was paying all the merc dropships in mem by the bucketloads for excessive contracts. The only transport we had was wheeled. And no matter how much of Stinkeye’s hooch you ran it on, no high-speed battle goat was going to ever achieve escape velocity beyond a few meters of height on the bad roads between everywhere we needed to go.

  Problem two was there were only three starports on Crash. One was currently a giant smoking crater, the result of a tac-nuke early on down in the southern hemisphere. That was a denial-of-service attack being that the port was away from the main action and therefore capable of operating as a major supply hub for our enemies. The Resistance generals hit it just to make their case for the main port of entry being critical. That main port was the one we were trying to take this unseasonably hot morning. And the third starport was five hundred miles out in the desert wastes and dead seas west of our position. The Crash Wastes, as it’s officially known. Near the famous landmark that gave this world its name. The Crash. That starport was nothing more than a dry lakebed and a lonely old terminal with a small settlement built up around it. But, big valuable but, it ran its own tracking beacons and could be used to make system entry and planetary landing. That made it extremely valuable once the main starport went down.

  The only caveat was that any ship setting down there had better be able to get itself off the planet otherwise it was stuck forever. No services out there.

  It wa
s a smuggler’s port. Every world had them. And it was amazing how they defied destruction even in the worst of conflicts. Probably because the leaders of both sides were using them to line their coffers with smuggled contraband in the event of either a win or a loss.

  It pays to play it both ways sometimes.

  All that was the big-picture strategic view of what we were trying to do, and what needed to be done, as we got the order to move on the starport along with almost every other ground unit the Resistance had in our sector to throw at the Loyalists.

  First the Wraiths came in before dark. Stealth bombers shaped like flying crescents that hummed on evil notes in the predawn overcast skies that were already hot and expectant with the day’s heat and battle. They were like the black blades of Death’s scythe flying through the darkness to hit their targets. These were actual Astralonian air power assets. Astralon had once had a carrier group but the Monarchs sent it in with the first wave at Mistral Bay and of course we all know what happened there.

  That was a bad day for everyone. Including the Monarchs.

  Since then the Astralonians had developed a great planetary air force but had shied away from carrier production, preferring to transport their aircraft off-world via bulk carrier and deploy them planetside on whatever world they’d been ordered to fight on for the Monarchs.

  So the Wraiths, jet-black and moaning like drowning ghosts in the night skies, swept in and hit a lot of targets to the southwest of our staging positions. Deep in the rear of the front lines of the Loyalist units. Probably nailing supply columns and staged units that would react to our impending assault. Now they were blown to bits, covered in burning fuel, and trying to scramble out of meters-deep craters along the main MSR at two hours before morning light.

  Hot chow was most likely canceled.

  Dawn came up hot and steamy within the misty gloom. The day felt tense and sweaty just as the long night had. Reaper had spent the darkness in a culvert located along the main aqueduct that supplied this district. A large and impressive engineering feat worthy of any of the Bright Worlds. Water was a big thing on Astralon. In some places it was everywhere. In others it was nowhere to be found. Sometimes the dividing line was so clear it was unnatural. It made you uneasy to see a desert scar and a tropical forest divided by a rushing boulder-strewn river that seemed like a tear in the world. Many people chalked this up to the actual crash site itself. Saying that somehow the crust of the planet had been fractured long ago and therefore the water tables, moisture, and weather patterns of this world were all ruined from that long-ago impact with something the expansion of humanity couldn’t yet wrap its mind around.

  But the planet had reached a strange kind of equilibrium with the early colonists building these huge continent-spanning aqueducts that would have needed to be hit by at least hundred-megaton warheads to destroy. And even then, the water would have just found its way past the irradiated lake that had formed in the hundred-megaton crater.

  The giant structure of the aqueduct feed we slept in that night, or didn’t sleep in in the case of some of us, made you feel insignificant. I spent a lot of time outside the feed to the culvert where everyone rolled out, smoking and watching the stars and the big concrete colonist-made riverbed that was currently dry.

  The Loyalists had control of a dam upcountry and they’d been cutting off the water supply to this sector in prep for our attack.

  Its vastness made you feel insignificant, like I said. Like it was some temple where you just contemplated truths, pushing away Stinkeye’s drunken mutterings, and tried to find what the stars knew. Or what they cared about.

  Spoiler: They don’t care. They’re just giant balls of burning gas. If anything, they’re amused. But only slightly. Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I spot Betelgeuse thundering across the night dark. Betelgeuse don’t care. Betelgeuse gonna Betelgeuse as they say on a frozen world called Horn.

  The starport was hit with a lot of artillery in the first hours of morning light as we waited to commence the assault. We watched from the far lip of the aqueduct we’d moved into the night before, studying the terrain we’d cross in the next few hours. We were assaulting from the northeast section of the giant landing field and our first objective was to take the main terminal in the outer green ring of the port. Which was the outermost ring and where some of the largest ground-capable starships came in to transfer cargo. The big lifters, inter-system cargo, and some of the heavier independent operators docked and offloaded cargo or passengers in better times there. Smaller ships and the main passenger liners came in at the central terminal a few kilometers further in at the blue and gold terminal rings. That was where the underground tube led into the main city.

  We watched as ghostly artillery shells began to fall through the hot morning mist out there toward the positions the enemy had chosen to defend, and which had been identified by nightcrawler scout recon spotters in the days leading up to the battle. Of course, the main cargo stacks got hit hard out in the storage areas of the vast sprawl at the port’s edge. We knew the Loyalist troopers would be emplaced with infantry heavy machine gun teams there, and main arty gave a lot of attention to the cargo area and distribution centers. Several explosions rocked that facility as secondaries went up after the high-impact anti-personnel munitions started getting used in effect.

  The sounds were crazy as starship loading cranes bent and immense mobile crawlers groaned and twisted and fell into the stacks like distant tiny models of such giant things represented in miniature scale. War shows you how temporary everything is. Strange, almost science-fiction sounds screeched out across the sky as the exploding munitions rattled through the heavy metal cargo containers. Ricochets and sudden ringing notes like ominous noises rumored to be heard in the vast wastes of lonely edge worlds. And even then, in their most remote places where few seldom dared go.

  Legend and myth were legion regarding those noises and their sources. Hearing them now made you uneasy about the day ahead. Like they were something unseen and close by that was going to ruin everything. Including your neatly packaged view of the universe you were currently so certain about and carrying around like it was something that could be exchanged at a bank for meaningful credit. And your sanity. Something large and relentless and bigger than you was stomping around at the edges of the universe. I could hear Reaper muttering about that, getting quieter with each titanic strike out there across the fields we’d cross.

  A sergeant has to listen to the battle, and his men, at the same time. Knowing his men are only listening to the battle. Trying to get ready for what they might find within it… so that once they’re in it, they might survive it.

  The thinking of the enemy defensive planners was to create bunkers out of the cargo containers filled with off-world goods. Our planners had decided high-impact artillery rounds with AP munitions should do the trick to ruin their defense in that sector off on our flank. Maybe it did. But something hit something, as they like to say, and an unexpected series of utterly huge explosions suddenly rocked the distant facility we were most likely going to have to sweep through to reach our assault lane. Gargantuan masses of bent steel flew away, end over end, in every direction across the morning sky as the main admin terminal for the cargo facility blew its lid like some reactor going suddenly and unbelievably redline. And then some.

  Chief Cook came up behind us in the unreal quiet that followed, hands in pockets and smiling, as all of us wondered if someone’s gun back in main arty had just hit a local on-site reactor no one knew about.

  Would black sand graphite come raining down through the white fog? Dosing us all with lethal levels that would start as sunburns and then melt our flesh off over the next two weeks?

  Fun.

  “Nah,” said smiling Chief Cook. He’s always smiling. His teeth are spaced far apart, and it gives him an almost skeletal grin that makes you think he’s genuinely happy except that you sus
pect he isn’t really and it’s all just an act. And that bothers you. He’s thin, medium height, and incredibly tanned. Wiry is what people would call him. He dresses like a Monarch spec ops advisor, pressed jungle patterned-gray fatigues, tight pistol belt with sidearm, bloused boots, and a black beret, because he was one. His specialty before he parted ways with the government was psyops. Now he does it on our behalf and because he does it so well, he’s a CW3 with the freaks in Voodoo. Chief Warrant Officer Three.

  Most Strange Company feel very nervous around him. He has this way of making you feel like he knows a lot more than he’s letting on. A lot about stuff that isn’t supposed to be known. And maybe he knows so much he even knows why and how you ended up in the company. Men keep conversations with him short. And it always seems, when I observe these interchanges from a distance, that he’s sad to see these one-sided knowing conversations end. He likes to talk politics and he’d love to go on. But he lets you go and watches you for a long time after you’ve left. Studying you. Like he’s completing some note in a mental file he keeps on everyone. I’ve seen this. I’ve watched him do this. Studying them as they go. And he’s seen me seeing him. Then he smiles at me, waves, and moves off like he’s had someplace to be all along.

  I chalk all this up to being a specialist in psyops. They’re masters of the human psyche. They know what makes people tick. And more importantly they know how to freak you out and get you to do the thing their commander wants you to do, tactically, so you can get killed by his men.

  Think about that. I tell myself that every time I deal with Chief Cook. Whom I actually like. Our politics aren’t dissimilar. In fact, he thinks, or has convinced me to think, that we both share the same nihilistic view of galactic culture. And that we both know how it will really end. Which is very badly. For everyone.