Strange Company

by Nick Cole

  But it coulda been. It sure could’ve.

  The Kid looked at me as he swapped in a new mag for his smoking Bastard. His look was pure fear and wild bewilderment. Punch calls that the “in it now” look. I’m sure there was the same on my face looking right back at him as he gave me the “what are we gonna do about that” look. In it now. But not bewilderment. That wasn’t on my face. I knew what had to be done. But that didn’t mean I’d like it.

  I’ve made too many mistakes not to know what was coming next.

  “Punch,” I said, tapping for comm-direct to all squads. “Covering fire. Moving on…” The air was hot and my voice didn’t want to work right as I gave the orders. And by right, I mean hero-right, or at least even some kind of confident and capable leader. I’d settle for capable. Last thing anyone needed to hear was their sergeant freaking the hell out in the middle of it all. “… speedball,” I croaked at last as my vocal cords found some moisture and moved enough for me to make some sounds. Yeah, a movie star I’d never be. I couldn’t even get my lines out.

  “Copy that, Sarge!”

  Punch loves war. Loves it because it’s really just fighting. He’s easy-going and generally highly motivated, and easily the scrappiest dude I’ve ever met. In the moments after he lost his finger inside the data stacks aboard the Clipper he just swore, muttered promises about what he was gonna do to the next bunch he found, and tapped off the stump. Choker gave him a handful of pills and he chewed them angrily, swallowed some water, and hissed “Get it on” to show me he was good to go.

  So, he’s having fun. At least someone is.

  I didn’t wait for everything we had left to open up and dump all we had for covering fire for us to move on the speedball. I just shouted, “Follow me!” like every dead infantry commander since time started keeping track of grunts, and pushed off from our sweet cover, running for everything I was worth to reach that special delivery package before the Savage mech overran the terminal.

  The concrete, hot and burning through my boots, shook as the massive thirty-three-ton behemoth took its next step and unloaded with a fusillade of whooshing micro-missiles that salvo’d on the terminal. The deadly GAU-88s began to spool up to hot, sending streaking fire, smoking the outsides of the terminal tower, turning the elegant neo-universal structure to swiss cheese in seconds.

  We reached the speedball in the looming shadow of the death machine, knelt, and got it open. It was literally little more than an aerodynamic clamshell with ablative heat shielding that had burned away and distributed reentry heat. Then an a-grav braking thruster one-shot slowed the delivery down to terminal speed and allowed a hard landing as the thing came bouncing and skidding across the AO. That rough landing might make this all for nothing. Speedballs were only for danger close and desperate situations. Safety parameters got disabled to get it done on time. Hopefully the package was still intact.

  Hopefully. Because if it wasn’t, well, then I was out of tricks. And for the record I’ve never told my story. But maybe that’s for the best. In a big universe I’m nobody. So who cares anymore. The important thing was I did my best until it was time to check out. Then my shift was over and all the problems got handed off to the new Sarge.

  Inside we found cans and drums of ammo. Not good against a heavily armored walker. But enough for the platoon to resupply some. I pulled a few of the cans out and found a long slender missile-launcher crate along the bottom of the speedball. Conveniently packed so as to be the last thing I could get my hands on when it was exactly the first thing I needed right about now if we were gonna live to see the next two minutes.

  I swore and began to dig, shouting at the Kid, “Cover us!”

  The walker moved again, and the ground strike shook the area all around. I glanced up when the downed sub-orbital, burning internally, groaned and collapsed along one side of its wide bat-wing. There were dead bodies thrown out all over the pavement around us from the crash. I hadn’t noticed them on the way in. That was the funny thing about being a soldier. A mercenary. Sometimes you just didn’t see the dead anymore. They weren’t targets now. They were just done. And in the world of predators everything is just targets, and the dead who don’t bother anyone much anymore.

  But then sometimes… all you see are the dead. All the dead you ever knew. All the dead you ever made. And occasionally the one you didn’t. But with them it’s just something about that one you find that sticks with you through the rest of a long day’s march and into the late watches of the night. Asking yourself who they were, that one you found hunched over and dead, lying off in the brush where they died. Where the stray or intended bullet found them. Or sprawled in the tall grass and staring dead-eyed up at the sky and swiftly moving clouds on a late winter’s day on a cold world as you swept your sectors, looking for his friends. Asking yourself what was the difference between them and you, and how you could avoid such fates.

  Or whether you even could.

  As if….

  Knowing anyway that someday some other joe was gonna find you just like you’d found that one. And then they would be the ones wondering who you once were on the long march across this galaxy. Who was waiting for you on some other world not this one? But that was no longer your burden. You were done now.

  And maybe there’s some cold comfort in that. Like a thin blanket you’ll just have to make do with on a long wait until morning when you can move around again and get warm by the simple act of merely being alive.

  The launcher was an AAV-4. Anti-Vehicle Four. Affectionally known in the business as a Hammer. More incoming fire whistled past us from off to our left. The enemy ground units, staging to support the Savage, were pushing on us once again. Supporting fire from our line opened up and ruined a squad that got caught out in the open. Sucks to be them. The dead twisted as they fell, Hauser’s mint-green tracers showing the squads exactly where he wanted more fire to make sure they were ruined and wouldn’t be bothering us. The Pig had done most of the work to stall the assault on our flank, but there were still squad DMs trying to take shots at us.

  Designated marksmen are always a hassle.

  “Keep their marks down!” I shouted at the Kid as I deployed the launcher. It had four tubes, hence the designation. There were single-shot Hammers and an AAV-6 model I’d fired once. There was even a rumored S model, but I had no idea what that one did.

  Each Hammer round was recoilless and fired independently. The company had paid good money we didn’t have in order to get this system to Reaper at just the last second. Whatever I’d been feeling in the moments before about being abandoned by the Old Man disappeared. He’d authorized company credit with the arms dealers in orbit to get us a weapon system that might change current events. And keep some of us alive for just a little bit longer.

  I shouldered the weapon, kneeling once again and remarking at how damn heavy the thing was. But the rounds inside were loaded with high order gelatinous dynamic pentaerythritol tetranitrate.

  Super dynamite, as it’s sometimes known.

  The last half of the round is a solid core steel-tungsten rod riding on a gauss rail that fires the round into the explosive for maximum kinetic damage to the target. The rod also has polarized charged magnets that cause it to rotate end over end for maximum damage, and fun.

  The weapon interfaced with my combat lens and asked to assume a targeting overlay.

  I blinked and accepted, muttering, “C’mon, c’mon…” as the Kid engaged a shooter who simply would not die despite an entire mag dump. I heard a round whistle past my bucket and knew the enemy shooter had skills.

  “Kill him,” I muttered through gritted teeth. “Before he kills us both!”

  The walker loomed suddenly to targeting life inside my augmented vision. My vision irised in on the killer war machine’s insectile head, where the pilot could barely be seen behind the forward weapons operator inside the armored canopy.

>   The first firing solutions developed, moving from spiraling telemetric circles into urgent target reticules, switching from red to yellow as the data acquired the likely kill shots. Then blinking into critical red indicating I was good to fire.

  “Target acquired!” I shouted as I’d been trained. “Back blast area clear!”

  Old habits die hard. Good training never does.

  I dumped all four rounds as fast as I could push the launch trigger just below my shoulder.

  The air around us suddenly lost all its pressure. Then a second later had twice to three times the pressure. My vision blurred but the shots were away as the concussive effects of the launcher’s recoilless system scrambled our already fried brains. Two point five seconds later all four rounds tore through the three-story terminator.

  The first round streaked into the Savage’s guts where most likely the munitions for the GAU-88s were kept. The tungsten rod ignited and blew munitions and mechanical systems all over the back of the runway behind the immense walker.

  The second round ripped off a GAU-laden arm, destroying the massive eight-cylinder rotating barrel and turning it into hot melting fragments flying away in every direction. The third round did the same to the other arm. And the fourth round seemed excessive at that point as it turned the main control canopy into a volcano of molten metal.

  Then the shock wave hit us and knocked us to the hot tarmac. Grit and debris raced over us and I was looking up at the sun a minute later when I came to my senses and saw the mist, haze, clouds, and smoke of the battle racing away to the edges of my vision as the shock wave above from the four missile strikes continued to expand. Pushing the atmosphere off in every direction.

  I sat up and checked the Kid. He was on his knees and hacking. I made sure he wasn’t spitting up blood. That he hadn’t inhaled a flying molten metal fragment or took something right in his own guts. He hadn’t. He’d just had the wind knocked out of him, like me. That was standard for AAVs. I was used to it. He wasn’t. Caught him by surprise.

  War is a learn-on-the-job workplace. No matter how much training you do. You don’t know it until you know it.

  “Killed… it,” I gasped, trying to catch my own breath. Where the giant walker had been was nothing but burning mech. And to an infantryman, there literally is no better sight.

  “C’mon,” I said, stumbling to my feet, my battle rattle feeling not so heavy, but also not so tight. It had been a long day. My helmet had been knocked off. I grabbed it. The chin strap was ripped away. “Gotta drag the speedball back inside,” I shouted hoarsely over the mech’s internal explosions as more rounds cooked off like fireworks into the hot sweaty daylight above.

  The squads would need reloads if we were gonna hold until relieved.

  Chapter Twenty

  We made it back in, dragging the speedball and all the resupply it could contain. We humped it as quickly as we could back up into the main terminal as the next push started from the Loyalist forces now swarming the tarmac and taxiways beyond the terminal. To our rear more than half of the burning starship was fully engulfed. I worried about secondary explosions and reactor core cascades. Things I’d wanted to learn about, but never had. Things were going from worse to end of the world on all points of the compass. Roads not taken were starting to look real appealing.

  “Second’s in good shape, Orion,” Chief Cook reported, speaking rapidly to apprise me of changes in Reaper’s situation. “What remains of your squad and Third are plugging holes in what’s left of Fourth. They took it right in the face. So-So’s dead. Lots of wounded. Everyone who can’s carrying a rifle.”

  He whistled and polished off a cigarette he’d been inhaling as he tried to tag enemy assets with his targeting binoculars.

  I looked through the shattered main terminal windows, wan with dust and smoke. Out there the enemy walker we’d just toasted burned, ammunition cooking off thunderously at odd intervals.

  The situation was my platoon had just fought off a major enemy push that had managed to get inside our perimeter for a few hot minutes. Enemy dead were being stripped of their ammo and mutilated for trophies. This always happened when things got grim. It was as though Strange Company, sensing things about to go horribly wrong, wanted to get in their insults while they still could.

  I watched Choker, our medic, cut off some hero’s nose and add it to a necklace he wore just above his chest rig. There were about five noses on it. When it came time for Reaper to start calling out “black on mags,” he wanted the enemy to know. Wanted his executioners to know it was him who’d done their friends. Why? I don’t know. But I guess he was hoping the execution might go a bit quicker if they were hot about it and didn’t want to be patient enough to think up something really gruesome. And painful.

  The First Sergeant was in my ear.

  “Reaper Six Actual,” he said over the company comm. “This is Doghouse.”

  “Go for Reaper.”

  I was keeping things short as I moved among my survivors and made sure the Kid got everyone’s mags topped off and watched as Punch collected dead hero ammo and redistributed what we could use. Some high-ex woulda been real useful right about now, I thought to myself on a background app my mental hard drive kept running in survival mode.

  To defend. Yeah, sure. And to save us some trouble doing ourselves if things got real bad. That too.

  I hadn’t had time to get my body parts necklace together. And also, that wasn’t my style. I didn’t mutilate my enemies just because they got paid by some other guys than the ones that hired me to do to them exactly what they were trying to do to me. I was hoping for a little mutual respect or at least professional courtesy.

  But many in Strange say I’m naive that way.

  “Sar’nt,” thundered the First Sergeant through the static of ECM interference and the howl of the Mule’s twin turbine engines. He was in his combat utility ride, an M876 Sindo-War-surplus Mule and headed somewhere fast. For a brief second, I wondered if this was it. If the company was dissolving right here and now, and Top was just being decent in letting us know what the score was as everyone hightailed it for all points beyond the area of operations.

  I was full of dark thoughts like that right about now.

  “Captain’s got you a ride outta there, Sergeant Orion. Ya need to get your men and fall back up to the roof o’ the terminal. Establish a defensive perimeter there and mark the LZ for dustoff. ETA fifteen, Sergeant.”

  I copied.

  “Repeat, son,” yelled the First Sergeant as the electronic countermeasure interference got worse. “Repeat. He will be there. Dustoff hot LZ or no. Be on those birds, Sergeant. Everything’s gone real pear-shaped.”

  And then he said something that got lost by the jamming but it sounded like “Be advised… static… entering the battlespace.”

  For a brief second my combat lens reconnected with Resistance Strat-Intel. I got a quick updated look at the battlefield from the strategic POV. Pear-shaped was an understatement if I was reading the map right.

  Our line, the Resistance front that had been staging a full advance this morning when all this kicked off, was now three klicks to our rear and disintegrating. The attack hadn’t just stalled, it’d turned into a full-blown rout. Tagged enemy units, motorized, walker, and tracked, were sweeping past the terminal as we spoke. Enemy close-air was hitting the division tactical operations center. This was a classic breakout. The Loyalists had stacked everything on one avenue of attack and just busted through. Now they were racing for the rear and chewing up our line from the newly developed flanks. A lot of our people were getting caught by surprise.

  A lot of people were dying.

  Pear-shape confirmed.

  I’ll be honest here. If I was the Old Man, I wouldn’t be coming in to get us, Reaper, out. Chances are those drops were gonna take a lot of ground fire on the way into the LZ we needed to establish
. Mobile AA moving might set up, acquire, and tag a bogey for a kill. Things were going so well for the Loyalists today, that wouldn’t be a surprise.

  Confirmed that the situation was getting weird. It wasn’t supposed to have gone this way. No. Not at all. But here it was… going that way whether we liked it or not.

  “Somethin’ ain’t right, Orion,” said Chief Cook nearby and conspiratorially. “I was all over the Div-TOC during planning. Those boys up at Division had this set up-up pretty good. No small help from yours truly, of course,” he said, puffing out his spindly chest. “But this was supposed to be our breakout. Not theirs.”

  He was busy thumbing rounds into his spare mags. His teeth gritted. Sweat running down his tight forehead. I could tell he was feeling it and that somehow made me feel a whole lot better. It was nice not to be the only one stressing. Nice to see one of the most certain blowhards in Voodoo realizing plans never held up much past crossing the line of advance.

  “So what’s that mean?” I asked, getting back to business.

  “It means…” began the psyops chief, pausing to look up as though trying to see some data crawl I couldn’t. His ever-updating Voodoo intel mixed with Psyops, planning black works of dark magic way beyond my pay grade. “I think it means what I don’t want it to mean, Orion. Aaaaaand…” he said, shoving his last refreshed mag into the TACO mag holder on his pistol belt, “I ain’t gonna say it because if I do, two things. One, it’ll freak everyone out. And two… ain’t a damn thing we can do about it if it’s so. No, Sergeant. We gotta hold that LZ and get outta here. Best guess using Monarch battle planning straight from the Institute on Mars… forty percent of us are gonna ride that last drop outta here alive. And that’s me being real optimistically generous with the numbers, Sergeant.”

  He pushed off from our cover and went off to do whatever it is Voodoo chiefs do when you’re surrounded and in the middle of a ongoing firefight. Enemy SDMs were already taking potshots at us from down below, and out behind cover on the ramp. Covering their assault elements moving in now. They were going to some trouble to get us instead of just dropping mobile artillery all over us. If there was a way out of this, it lay that way. Not killing us outright and giving us a chance to shoot someone to fight our way out of here.