Strange Company

by Nick Cole

  Someone fired at Dip Weasel and he took a solid hit in the front plate. You could hear it ricochet from where I was covering with Third. Dip took the shot dead center, but it just knocked him back about two steps, and then he turned and fired at whoever shot him as though he hadn’t been hit at all.

  “He’s possibly reacting a little more than he should have. Ahem. To the gas,” whispered Chief Cook suddenly next to me as Third waited for the next orders. “It’s not one hundred percent, Orion. Did he take his tab? He might wanna take another. That could even things out. Maybe. Two negatives making a positive and all. Dr. Goodbuzz would definitely prescribe that course of action, Sergeant.”

  I had no idea who Dr. Goodbuzz was. I doubted there was one and had a feeling Chief Cook had some kind of alter ego who justified the weirder contingency plans. Again I had no evidence. Just hunches.

  I also had no idea if he had taken the tab. I gave the order. But who knew if they did. This was nuts. I was supposed to be assessing the situation, identifying enemy concentrations, and then organizing assaults to wipe them out. Not making sure they took their meds.

  Jacks, Second’s squad leader, ran out into the concourse and tackled Dip Weasel just as the enemy machine-gun team opened up from the coffee bar across the way. An animated projection of a giant cartoon cat pouring coffee was tripping me out as I tried to focus on the rapidly disintegrating situation. The cat was speaking in Pan and going on about “Hot Time Lucky Brew.” Apparently its AI processes were targeting Pan travelers who must have recently passed through the terminal. Or there was some kind of malfunction in the station’s processing hubs. Or Loyalist troopers were opportunistically stripping out the mem where they could get away with that. The enemy probably was too. That made me wonder if things were as bad on the pay front for them as they were for us.

  Deep and meaningless wonderings in the middle of an assault. That’s why they pick me for the tough jobs.

  I had no idea in those first seconds if either the squad leader or Dip Weasel had been hit by any rounds in the high-cycle automatic gunfire that suddenly brrrrttttted through the terminal, devastating everything it caressed. Must’ve been a 20mm squad suppressive cannon.

  Second and Third opened up on the machine-gun team within seconds and instantly the firefight was everywhere across this section of the immense terminal. Everyone was shooting everyone else in a desperate bid to kill as many people as quickly as possible. And all of us were on drugs.

  Bats swarmed my vision, and anxiety welled up within me. I was certain I was going to get killed because I knew how stoned I was. Every muscle tightened and I felt like I had some kind of maniacal rictus grin death smile pasted on my face. This was not how I imagined my heroic death. The one the Falmorian party girl would never hear about. Or anyone else I ever once knew long ago in another life not this one. I’d always imagined her estrangier giving a good account of himself in his last seconds. Not that it would matter. I just liked to think it might go like that for me.

  For two seconds I was frozen as I struggled to get out of the black cone of immobility and do something to generally help out.

  “Get it on!” I screamed wildly and burned a mag on full auto against the covering SSC team. It was all I could think of. If you can’t do something, then one, get everyone who can to start to do anything. And two, try to look like you’re helping with the attack, even if you’re just expending brass. At least look good doing it. Who knows, one of the New Guys might get inspired enough to do something incredible and earn a tag before they got killed.

  Obviously, the Loyalist troopers were under the effects of the psychotropic gas. There was no organization among them, and their shooting was random and wild, at best. Within the first minute of the firefight it was pretty clear they were hallucinating wildly too. The machine-gun team across the way, even though they had good cover, burned through a belt and then just sat there staring at us as though they were still firing on full auto from some kind of magically endless belt of myth and lore. The kind in action-hero slashers you go see because you’re on leave, you’re hung over, and you want to hide from your squad because your liver can’t take another epic all-night drinking binge at some bar your mother would disown you for even passing by.

  I irised in with my combat lens and tried to ascertain if we were getting a break from the suddenly silent machine-gun team working the squad suppressive cannon, and if we should just rush them as they swapped belts. Murdering them with automatic fire before they could turn up the ammo burn on us. But all I could see over there behind their tripod gun with matte-black twin barrels spinning madly and smoking, was wide eyes and gas-giant-sized pupils, jaws dropped open as they stared in amazement at something unseen and amazing. They were doped to the gills and seeing other realities.

  “Tracers are messing with ’em, Orion,” hissed our warrant and then laughed like he had rock miner’s cough. Wheezing and gasping. Like he’d just found some vein inside a spinning cold rock that would make him as rich as a Monarch forever. I looked over at him, and he had an even more crazed look on his face than usual. Which was saying something for him. He was sweating buckets and grinding his teeth as murder and mayhem abounded across the terminal.

  Then Chief Cook stood. “Hand me a grenade, Private,” he barked heroically at a nearby New Guy. My soldier did as he was ordered, and with almost no pretense at cover the chief pulled the pin, popped the spoon theatrically, and over-armed the grenade right into the coffee bar across the terminal like he was throwing out the first ball on opening day back at Yankee Ball Park, the Bright Worlds’ best stadium.

  A second later the grenade hit the back wall of the coffee bar and bounced, and I lost track of it for a weirdly uncomfortable moment. Live and loose fragmentary devices have a tendency to do that to an NCO. And then the blast ripped the bar to shreds with all the ceremony of a sudden belch. Wall fragment splinters sliced through the air and the concussive effects popped my ears and made me swallow hard.

  Over the comm I heard someone in Third screaming about a Cylorian sabertoothed bear. Which, check my subscription to Stellar Geographica, should be nowhere near us on Crash. Or Astralon. But then he added, “Engaging,” and I felt that was probably the best outcome I could hope for under the circumstances. Hopefully he was mistaking the enemy we were facing, and who was trying to kill us, for the apex predator bear local to a world seventy-five light years distant. And hopefully he was ruining his nightmare and its all-too-real stand-ins on behalf of Reaper.

  My guess was it was Honcho in Third. He had a thing about bears. He’d been chased by one as a kid. Every world we did a contract on got a hard flora and fauna review from Honcho though no one asked him to. He didn’t mind vipers, monkey-spiders, Subari, or anything that could pump you full of lethal poison and make you wish you were dead for the next thirty-six days. But bears… bears were his white whale. He was absolutely terrified of them.

  The First Sergeant had used that term. White whale. I had no idea what it meant. I’d never seen a whale. I’d heard they were a big fish back on Earth. But that they weren’t as large as the gill serpents of Marlay.

  One of the huge bats that had been making runs at me, red eyes glaring, swooped in, and I watched in amazement as it raced away into the battle full of shadowy rounds and lightning tracers zipping this way and that. The bat was trailing an inky black wash that was simply fascinating to watch.

  “Moving to recover Sergeant Jacks and Corporal Dip Weasel,” intoned Hauser as he strode out into the battle like everyone wasn’t shooting at everyone else. “Detecting near-lethal levels of some kind of hallucinogenic compound, but my systems remain unaffected, Sergeant Orion.”

  The inky black inside the wake of the flying bat that had roared at me and then screamed off in another direction like a living ghost being drowned in a cobalt arctic sea… yeah the descriptions are purple, but I’m just putting it down as I remember it going d
own… and the rest of the surreal data coming through my dry and wide-open M-one eyeballs, a First Sergeant term from the long ago of arcane military units that don’t exist anymore, was still messing with my ability to engage in basic communication. I stuttered eloquently, sure I was issuing a series of meaningful orders to react to threats, get organized, and generally get it on company-style.

  In all probability I was probably chattering like a Quick junkie rushing on his run.

  “Roger,” I said to no one, sure that I had just gotten comm from my mom to do something important. I made up my mind to kill Chief Cook when the opportunity of a blind alley presented itself.

  I was alone with the Little Girl as the battle in the terminal raged all about us. I’d lost time. There was a fight going on out there, but it wasn’t a firefight now. My mind thought otherwise. Later I’d learn that my squads were just murdering the drug-ravaged enemy troopers in the fighting positions they could make sense of how to defend. Fighting off bats and weird stews of memories of their own that were turning into living nightmares made all too real.

  “I got this, Orion,” crowed Chief Cook over the comm. He sounded like some religious zealot who’d suddenly received a new revelation after a bad case of food poisoning. “Popping some more Quick and I can stay ahead of it.”

  I had the feeling he was going to cackle wildly and scream, Things are gonna be different this time. But he didn’t, and I had no idea why he would want to say that. That was just what my drug-ravaged mind said the script should read.

  I had no idea what any of that meant at this moment. I knew only that the sky was going to suck me up into it and I’d be lost forever. And there was a part of me that was fine with that.

  The Little Girl, wearing a military gas mask, sat nearby hugging her knees and watching me as we covered where Third Squad had left us useless people. Out there I turned and saw Hauser, walking through the drifting smoke and falling glass in the middle of the fight, scanning and firing short bursts from his Pig at unseen enemies.

  Like some man-made angel of death. Some parody of humanity that was more human than we’d ever be.

  The battle was a mess. And it was my mess.

  First Sergeant was trying… trying to get ahold of me. Comm was chiming, and messages, indecipherable, were appearing in my combat lens. But I was busy somewhere else losing my marbles. The worlds of the universe are all marbles. Little tiny spinning multicolored marbles in the darkness and the broken crystal. And the universe is just a game, I told myself. The universe is just a game of marbles.

  Nothing more.

  Nothing less, estrangier.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Yeah. I don’t believe in weird existential stuff. I’m not religious, and of course there are real mysteries out there in the galaxy. Strange stuff that defies explanation like the Reverse Floating Pyramids of Kyberia and the Sky Noise sometimes heard on the outer worlds in the loneliest reaches of those faraway planets. Or the fact that there’s a world, habitable, out in the Gothica system, a dying red dwarf, where people say that not all shadows are just shadows. And that sometimes the shadows talk and whisper things that should never be heard. The secrets of the universe, or at least that’s what the DRK cultists say. But in general, the science I understand, jump and hyperdrive, dumbthrust included, but not fold as used by the Battle Spires, is what I think the universe is made up of. Physics and the rules thereof. There’s some quantum that can bend or break the rules. But of course, there are always exceptions to the rules and if you really think about it then that’s just part of the rules too.

  I measure my life in expended brass. The most truthful moments in my life. It stands in, not just brass shell casings but sometimes the linkage of a belt-fed machine gun, for battle. For ruin and destruction. For what we all really are. What we discover when a bullet finds and explores a body, devastating ideas and preconceptions in the cold moment of its sudden intersection with all your plans. That’s the way I measure the universe and test what’s real. The Dao of Lead. This is how I measure twice and cut once. How I move through it all and navigate life’s tough questions. Fire, or return fire.

  The best defense is always more offense.

  And believe me, I’m not especially violent. I’m not Hoser, Hoss, Punch, or half the guys in Dog. And no one’s close to that dark psychopath that is Sergeant Amarcus Hannibal. Enemy mine.

  But I’ve learned it’s best to shoot first. And shoot a lot if you can.

  You can’t even trust mem. Even though it’s the greatest currency in the human expansion since the Sindo, you cannot trust it. A devastating war we didn’t ask for, and a war we barely finished with our collective human lives, the Sindo taught us currency is fiction.

  The illusion that money can spend you through a tough time or bring back sixty million dead. Lies. The illusion of currency died a hard death during the Sindo. Then came mem. But mem is just currency too. Even though you can use it. Spend it. Save it. Run your ships and weapons with it.

  The only thing that ever made sense to me when someone tried to describe what currency, any currency really was, was this. It’s just distilled life, Orion. Estrangier. That’s all it is.

  I’ve found that to be true even though I’ve done everything to disprove it.

  Currency is just distilled life.

  But that, the Sindo, was a long time ago and I didn’t see much of it. Just grew up during its darkest parts. As in real dark. But like I said, I’m a pretty meat-and-potatoes guy when it comes to reality. Yeah, I’ve heard there are cracks and places where it gets thin. And weird. Especially if you happen to be around an operational Monarch Battle Spire folding space. But as far as I knew, when the sign in the bar flickered on, signaling Cocktails in flowing red script, right there in the middle of the firefight inside the main terminal for green ring, I was sure reality had just suspended itself for a few seconds.

  Drugs or no drugs, I was about to experience an intermission.

  I got up, knowing there was a battle going on, or at least thinking it was a battle and not the slaughter of my men, led by the cyborg Hauser and the wild-eyed Chief Cook, who were currently conducting, routing the enemy and rooting them out. Shooting them down as they tried to figure out why reality didn’t make sense anymore. I looked back at the Little Girl hugging her knees and wearing the giant gas mask that made her look like a bug-eyed alien. And then once more I looked at the seam that had opened up in the universe. Inside that bar with the neon red Cocktails sign. Blinking on. Blinking off.

  And I must’ve muttered something dumb. Like Cool. Or Far out. Or even the popular-decades-back Swimmin’.

  Junkie benedictions.

  A swanky little jazz bar that reminded me of one I had known long ago was in there past the seam. But that wasn’t right. It shouldn’t be here. But it was… and maybe…

  I felt myself getting up from the carpeted floor of the terminal. Spent brass rolling around down there. My body was tired and swimming through syrup straight from a hypnotic goo-sugar tree in the jungles of Hitaarr. Every muscle felt rusted shut. I was still holding my Bastard and I wasn’t sure what the status of the current mag was. Loaded, empty. Half full. Wasn’t important bathed in the red neon light of the bar sign.

  That expended brass should have been a clue. But I cleverly ignored it and just went with the automatic reactions of a soldier who’d soldiered long enough to make the lethal merely mundane.

  The illusion was real. And reality was just an illusion. Right there in the middle of a desperate firefight was a bar I could just walk into. One I’d known, and one that was unlike anything I’d ever know. I was hallucinating, I knew that. But it was as real as it gets.

  I felt my assault-gloved hands doing the reloading trick. Eject. Pull. Slap the new mag in. As if my brain, currently on vacation and considering making it permanent, didn’t mind if they, my hands, just went ahead and swapped for a
new mag. Better safe than sorry is the tattoo every soldier who lives long enough has somewhere on their brain. And often you have to ignore that tattoo and do something really stupid because no one who’s trying to kill you is expecting just that. I crossed the thin terminal carpet, feeling the hollow thump of the floor beneath my dirty combat boots. Like some fairy tale giant walking the outer worlds. I felt slow and ponderous.

  The sign outside the seam in reality lit up and stayed lit up. Not blinking like it might in some noir slasher flick now. Cocktails, it had flashed.

  “… and jazz…” I mumbled to myself. There was someone who used to be important to me in there, I told myself because I remembered the bar from another life long ago and not this one anymore. Some reason I’d left the known of everything I’d once been, for what I’d become in the Strange Company for the rest of the days that remained me.

  Then I had a thought that had nothing to do with anything. I blame the drugs. And it wasn’t a thought. It was a realization. I’d left this bar because I was nothing. Never would be. Back there in the Bright Worlds. And I’d come to the company to lose myself and found a way to be something else. Someone else. If just a record in the company logs. If just an estrangier to a girl who’d never know what world I’d bought it on. There was something noble in that. Tragically noble. Something no one in the Bright Worlds would ever know, or even understand.

  I had no idea of that when I first signed the contract. But later, when I became the official log keeper of our deeds, it was the reason I stayed.

  You have to be honest with yourself. You can lie to the universe. But it’s best not to lie to yourself.

  I went in and sat down at the bar.

  She wasn’t in there. Not like she’d once been long ago. The reason for why I joined the company. But the ghost of John Strange was. And the bartender of course. I didn’t recognize him. He was new too.

  By that time I realized it was just the drugs Chief Cook had given me mixing with whatever he’d pumped into the terminal that was making me think this way. Making me imagine I’d walked into a bar in the middle of firefight like some bad joke no one ever thought up. No one ever thought worth thinking up. A soldier walks into a bar in the middle of a firefight… I was only dimly aware that I was supposed to be in charge of an ongoing battle, and it was too late by then. I wasn’t in charge anymore. I was in the bar at the end of the universe now. And something important was about to happen.