Strange Company

by Nick Cole

  Speaking of which, now that the ship was powered down and ventilation wasn’t operational, I was starting to smell the drift of burning chemicals come along in brief hot drafts from the passages that led off to the port side of the ship. Where the burning fuel cells were spreading through other compartments, defying the vain attempts of the ship’s automatic fire control and suppression systems.

  It’s insane to board a burning starship and engage in a firefight. The only thing you should ever do in a burning starship is hit the escape pods and lifeboats and get off. But of course, this was not my first burning starship firefight.

  We needed to do these dudes and get up-ship before the lower decks were fully engulfed in fire. Which would happen sooner than later. Getting caught down here in a runaway and out-of-control compartment fire could be real bad. What about the engineers in zip ties, my mind whispered? Oblivious to the fact that I was on the stalk, running four squads, trying to keep the New Guys from dying and teach the Kid how to soldier before he died too.

  Time to kill, I said to me. Centering myself and keeping the main thing the main thing. All that other stuff would just have to take care of itself until the other side of this.

  Lots on my mind. I raised my slung Bastard and dropped the first trooper in “space marine” gear hoping he was their on-site combat leader. Probably a guerilla vet who’d proved himself and gotten a commission on the side of the “winners” even though he, and they for that matter, hadn’t won. Yet.

  It was dark and shadowy down there in the ship’s passages, and even my enhanced vision couldn’t tag where I got my hits for a couple of seconds as the combat feed updated. It wasn’t until the guy was down on the deck and not being helped, boots and legs doing the kickin’ chicken, that one of the heroes who would one day earn the impossible love of the Monarch overlords, or so that guy and possibly all of them thought, came out to help his downed leader, and my HUD, inside my combat lens, updated with assessed damage and wounds.

  I got…

  Hit. Armor penetration. Upper chest cavity. Possible collapsed lung.

  Hit Lower abdomen. Damage unclear. Possible bleed out and excessive damage to the lower intestines.

  I’d fired three rounds from my tricked-out Bastard, trying to tag his helmet on the last as he went down. Apparently… I hadn’t. But two hits were good enough to draw another target. That guy, the wounded man on the ground, was having a bad day and getting worse.

  Then Hero popped out and I shot him quickly. His helmet cracked, flying apart in two directions as he turned, raising one gloved hand to the back of his skull as if to brush away where I’d tagged him with a six-point-five-millimeter round. People do funny things when they’re dying. I pulled smooth and fast, shooting him again and glad for good hearing protection as I absorbed the recoil of the Bastard in my shoulder. I didn’t have a lot of high-speed gear for my workplace, but I made sure some of my mem went to protecting my ears. All three shots ruined that guy regardless of the fancy-worthless armor he’d been issued and shown, in what was in essence a propaganda film, how to use and how effective it was supposed to be against the enemies of Law and Order. The enemies of the Monarchs.

  It wasn’t.

  Six-point-five ruined that guy all day long.

  Now I had them pinned down in Central Supply Conduit 06 in crew stores deep in the belly of the dying-burning Neptune Clipper. Whoever was in charge tried to get their reaction force to lead the others into the battle. Let’s call them troopers loyal to the Monarchs, who were stacked and supporting their heavy gun that was pinning down Second. They got ruined as First opened up, our Pig throwing a hot hail of deadly AP right through their commander who was trying to get everyone to react to the new threat on their flank.

  Their heavy went silent and I knew their team was reorienting to deal with this new attack. Us. I keyed Hauser’s attack as Second shifted, or stopped, and Third and then Fourth, moving through stores that hadn’t been offloaded, looming like the eternal blocks of ancient lost monuments skinned in shipping graphite, slipped through and into the enemy positions.

  A couple of the enemy troopers tried to re-establish a second line at the exit to aft stores, fighting from either side of a security bulkhead that would not close. Hauser had seen to that, ruining those with his Pig, red targeting laser revealed in the smoke and burnt cordite of all the gunfire in the tight passages. The cyborg advanced like a real live relentless Cyberstein monster from the Age of Technohorror. Even his fake mechanical eyes glowed demonically in the shadows as the powerful targeting laser at the front of the ruthless Pig cut them all down as he advanced through outgoing fire.

  We didn’t even use flashbangs or grenades in the end. They were doing the pop and spray, feeling very action-hero-last-stand as they alternated from cover and dumped fire on us.

  Over the squad comm I heard Boom Boom’s smoky whisper telling me the squad designated marksman was ready to play ball. “Got this, Sarge.”

  He fired once and turned the first guy into a corpse with nothing but red mist expanding away on a heat draft for a head, standing there for a moment perfectly silhouetted by the access bulkhead’s open and well-lit space. The next section of the ship was guest-accessed and therefore had the pleasant gold-and-white lighting of some of the finer starships. Stellar Spa, I’d once heard the theme called.

  Incredible. Even with the dead guy with no head falling over into a clump, Chungo Number Two thought it was time to hold at all costs. My hearing protection, augmented to detect sounds below thirty decibels, even heard the guy bellow, “Let’s give ’em something to think about, boys!”

  Boom Boom landed one of his giant rounds right in that guy’s upper chest. I got the tag as my combat lens recorded the hit.

  “Nice shooting, Boom,” I whispered as all four of my squads basically watched the clown show of untrained troopers thinking they were making a difference for the galaxy.

  Boom Boom shot down four more and then we heard them pull back. Which is a nice way of saying they ran away.

  We were sweeping the deck where they’d made their brave stand, making sure everyone was good and dead, when all the colors, and there weren’t a lot, suddenly popped for me in ways I’d never noticed, and I knew something was up. My brain was suddenly getting syrupy and my eyes were feeling like they’d just learned to open two sizes too big. Everything, and yeah even the dead on the floor, made me want to laugh and giggle like a committed lunatic.

  I stared at the dead for a long second, wondering if I was having some kind of stroke or brain aneurysm, when Punch came up and gave me a report I hadn’t asked for and then remembered I actually had a few seconds earlier.

  No wounded.

  Crusher in Third Herd had taken a round to the chest armor. Spall had cut him an inch away from his jugular. “But he’s good to go, Sar’nt. You all right, Orion?”

  I looked at my assistant platoon leader and saw that his face was melting right before my eyes. I could see his eyes and the worlds inside of them. There was a whole universe in there, man. I blinked my own a couple of times and my vision was normal again. But starting to get murky at the edges.

  “Good to go, Punch. Let’s move up. You take First.”

  I’d taken the chief’s tab a bit earlier than everyone else. I had a bad feeling in my stomach that things were about to get very weird.

  Chief Cook was at my side.

  “Don’t worry, Orion,” he muttered confidentially. “It’s a little rocky at first but hang on and ride it. Then it… straightens out. Hang in there, and if you see any bats they’re probably not real. Unless they are. Whatever you do, don’t talk to ’em. Don’t make eye contact either. You’ll get lost in there.”

  He took off to follow the rest of the platoon into the main sections of the lower decks of the starship.

  The Little Girl passed me in the press of hustling infantry, watching me with
those dark silent ever-appraising eyes. Judging me on behalf of the universe. I thought she might have said something like “Buy the ticket and take the ride, Sergeant Orion” as she followed them off into the damage control’s sirens and the dark of the burning starship.

  But she didn’t.

  That part was all in my head.

  Chapter Eleven

  The next firefight for Reaper went down inside the Clipper’s flight controls processing deck. We’d shifted our route into the detour that took us through this section because the flames were moving fast now up from the starboard fuel cells and crawling across the atmospheric thrust engines there. It was clear the Clipper’s maintenance while on layover planetside had been underway and the flames had crawled through an open hatch and into the engineering access points which were close to the guest decks. Meanwhile more explosions rocked the starboard sections of the beautiful Clipper, and though the ship was built to hold up to internals received either by space hazards or even pirate attack—something that had gotten a lot more common of late the farther out you got—when the deck underneath our boots rocked all of Reaper halted, each of us holding our breath and waiting to be suddenly annihilated by a cascade blast that tore the ship into a hundred thousand flying pieces streaking away in every direction right there at the base of the fantastic terminal we were supposed to breach and secure.

  Y’know… just another Tuesday for Reaper.

  “That one sounded bad,” said Firsty in the silence as the hull rumbled and buckled all around us. We called him “Firsty” because he wanted to stay in Reaper and First Squad even though both Dogs and Ghosts wanted him. So we let him.

  That’s rare. No one’s that dumb. Oh yeah… except me. I’m that dumb.

  “Yeah,” replied Hoser, hefting his Pig to adjust it to cover our current tactical position. “But they don’t pay us the big bucks for nothin’, man.” The pneumatics in the Pig’s cyber-assist were slowly going bad. But there was no mem, and no place, to replace or repair them. When supplies and equipment came forward from the Resistance generals it didn’t necessarily include the fancy stuff like a pneumatic-assist cyber-exoskeleton for the medium squad suppression weapon. A lot of times it was just more new guys to throw at the Resistance and the occasional case of scotch for the generals to peruse the KIAs over.

  Private military contracting makes a certain kind of sense. Sometimes. A lot of the time it’s just human nature at its worst. So why not new kids to throw into the meat grinder and a case of scotch to keep doing it? That either makes sense, or it doesn’t. Spoiler. It does. Both ways. You have to be honest about these things.

  Hustle, the assistant gunner, spaced his belts of 7.62, ready to feed the Pig if things got hot. Or hotter than they were already getting at that moment. The smoke was getting heavy inside the ship now and of course I’d decided to leave the platoon’s chemical masks behind because Chief Cook had told me the retro-agents would handle what we’d likely be facing.

  “What the hell was that?” someone mumbled as we waited for the ship to settle after its most recent explosion.

  Yeah, I was getting that too. What the questioner was wondering. Things felt surreal, and at the corner of your vision you would see occasional shadows moving. Bats. They looked… bat-like for the brief seconds you could catch them in your vision directly. Were these those same bats Chief Cook had mentioned? Warned me about. Don’t make eye contact with them, Orion. Apparently that was just a side effect of what we needed to protect us from what we were walking into. Mild hallucinations that were getting stronger by the second. A gassed environment full of deadly psychotropics was what we were walking into, but the question in my fever-brain was… what we were walking in with… or on… was it more dangerous than what was being used against our enemies?

  “Once both enter your system…” Cook had whisper-muttered to me a few decks back. “Both substances should reach an equilibrium that gives you the advantage over what they’ll, the enemy that is, Sergeant Orion, will be experiencing. Trust me… they’re gonna lose their minds. You’ll only lose half of yours. So that’s an advantage as far as I see it.”

  “Oh yeah,” I hissed at Cook as I waved away one of the bats that had suddenly tried to swoop in at my face and then realized I was waving at something that wasn’t there. I was, in fact, waving at nothing. I felt the tendrils of insanity trying to pry the lid off my actual sanity and jump in the used aboveground pool that is my mind. And strangely, the thought of that made me want to laugh out loud. Giddily. I’ve never laughed giddily. Never ever. Never in my life. And now I had an intense desire to. It was bubbling up within me and I had serious doubts I could contain it. It felt wild and insane. But I’ve felt that way on other gunfights before this one.

  That. I was feeling that. And a strange desire to burn a whole mag. All my mags. All on full auto. Shooting whatever. I just wanted to shoot stuff on rock and roll. That would feel pretty good, man. Unexplainably. Good.

  I never did though. Engage on full auto. Never ever.

  Waste of ammo and bad shooting to go full auto in almost every situation except a few. Why they’d even put that option on modern weapons for pros was a mystery to me. Who knew? But that’s what people wanted. Even pros.

  Well, I almost never went full auto. But right now… I really, really wanted to. I insanely wanted to. It was like an itch I absolutely had to scratch. I had to tell myself not to play with the selector switch. Not to flip to full rock and roll and get it on.

  But, “Oh yeah,” I said to Cook when he told me his half-baked explanation of why drugging my entire platoon with something akin to an LSD trip was going to somehow make everything “work out” in the middle of an op. “What kind of advantage is that, exactly, you blithering psychopath?” I hissed at him in the near-darkness as we trailed the squads. “You just drugged everyone to the gills. I don’t know who the hell I’m more afraid of—an enemy hopped up on drugs and waiting for us with all kinds of automatic weapons, or my own guys who are also hopped up on some same but slightly different drug recipe, also carrying automatic weapons, and experiencing severe perception problems regarding current events. How long before someone mistakes someone else for a bat and starts blasting? Huh, Chief?”

  Chief Cook cleared his throat and tapped into the platoon comm. He held up his index finger. Then he cleared his throat again and said, very officially like he was some kind of authoritative professional instead of the crazed lunatic he actually was. “Uh… attention everyone. Don’t shoot the bats. Any bats… you might see. They’re not real. Don’t shoot them. Also…” He paused. “Don’t make eye contact with them.”

  Then he turned back to me, a drug-addled leer on his face, and whispered, “That should help. Also, I’m technically a sociopath. There’s a difference, Orion.”

  By the time we’d reached the expansive recreation and living decks of the starship, the smoke was too thick and several of the guest suites were on fire now. I couldn’t tell if it was the anxiety of the drug or the reality of the situation that we might get cooked alive inside a starship if we made one wrong turn and got stuck belowdecks that affected me worse.

  “We can move into the subdeck above,” said Hauser over the comm as if reading my mind. Maintenance accessways, or subdecks between decks, can be tight, but those areas are hardened with more advanced fire control systems to protect the ship’s flight operations equipment. “There’s a way through.”

  I weighed the cyborg’s suggestion and tried to block out everything in my mind and eyes that wasn’t true. Later Punch would tell me that everyone thought I had it pretty together, considering. Each and every one of them thought they were losing their marbles, but no one wanted to say anything.

  We moved into the subdeck above our heads and just below the ship’s flight operations control deck, a space on any starship that was generally off-limits to anyone other than flight crew, and only used to run the ship’
s processors and redundant control systems. Hauser found the hidden access hatch in the ceiling of the deck and entered a universal maintenance tech password that generally worked for anyone in the know, and the rest of us watched as the panel dropped open with a soft pneumatic hiss. Yellow strobe lights crossed the midnight-blue darkness up there in the subdeck as once again the ship’s AI encouraged us to abandon the vessel or face possibly severe injury.

  One by one we made it into the dark up there, the first up establishing a security perimeter, the rest stacking with their squads behind dark and cold quantum processors that should have been alive and humming on soft bass notes as numbers for jump solutions were constantly updated. Like ascetic monks chanting space-time in cloistered remote mountain abbeys. Engineers who usually needed to come into this section on starships spent most of their time on their bellies or backs. They used a hover support called a slide to move around and reach the equipment they needed to work on and maintain. For heavily armed soldiers there was only enough room to hunch or duck-walk our way through the tight spaces of the subdeck and all its processors.

  “This is gonna be a trip,” one of the New Guys in Reaper First muttered as he climbed up past me into the darkness.

  I shot my most pissed-off glare at Chief Cook. Trying to indict him and spawn the slightest guilt, and hopefully remorse, for what he’d done to my men. Of course he was immune and just shrugged as he squeezed by, muttering, “Sociopath, Orion. Guilt doesn’t work on me. It’s a feature, not a bug.”

  I knew for a fact he wasn’t a sociopath. He just wanted to be one because he felt that made the dirty work easier. Never cleaner. But just easier. And I couldn’t fault him for that. Doing nasty things to people required a certain moral flexibility if you were going to make a career out of it.