Strange Company

by Nick Cole

  “Time to go,” the Monarch said matter-of-factly.

  Yeah, it was. I just hoped we could. I crawled into the Mule and pushed Nox’s body out onto the street. Never minding that his brains were everywhere and had drooled out across everything. Never mind I was violating the company’s most sacred ordinance to take care of him even in death. To take care of our own. There wasn’t time.

  I heard John Strange in that bar, telling me something I’d already forgotten. That was today, I suddenly remembered even though it felt so long ago it might as well have been someone else’s life.

  I said a prayer even though I don’t pray because sometimes you do even if you don’t believe. Was I praying for forgiveness for abandoning Nox? Or that the Mule would start and get us out of this firefight?

  As of this writing I still don’t know.

  The engine fired and Stinkeye could barely get himself in as the rest piled into the two remaining Mules.

  The captain’s QRF came in, weapons blazing and cutting down the mesmerized Ultras where they stood.

  And we roared out of there, stopping to pick up Hauser who was just coming back out onto the street. His systems were bleeding coolant and hydraulic fluid. But he’d survived the gunfight. The nanobots inside him would repair what they could.

  I’d seen him hit worse, I lied to myself as we sped away. Off into the night and the rain beginning to come down harder.

  Then the Wraith gunship in the clouds above began to fire, unlimbering her one-twenty-millimeter guns and hitting the fuel point with death from above. Turning it, all of it, into a bright apocalyptic bloom as we disappeared into the night and the east.

  Strange Company breaking up into three teams to arrive at the hit in three days’ time. Five hundred miles deep into a no-man’s apocalyptic wasteland ruined by an ancient alien starship crash long ago that had probably happened before mankind had figured out basic rocketry.

  Or even longer.

  Unknown starfarers never found on any world. A ship whose technology was unknown and might as well have been magic, because even the barest elements of it our best minds could almost grasp were well beyond anything that should ever have been conceived.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  We drove deep into the Crash Wastes that night as the main capital city of that world surrendered to darkness and fire. There were times when we had to go around ruined sections of the outskirts of the city. Bombed-out ruins whose guts and insides had exploded out all over the place while the skeleton of the structure still burned like some condemned criminal on Char-Hallow Night. Or just LDAM craters where Ultra tac strike had decided to delete a grid square for reasons known only unto them. We pulled into underpasses while Monarch HKs hovered over the city like the Grim Reaper Astronaut manifested, and machine locusts bristling with GAU guns and missile packs ran sensor sweeps and looked for something to hit.

  We passed no one. Not one soul. The people who had once lived here were either gone now or hunkered deep down in basements and bunkers hoping to wait out First Pass. Hoping to survive.

  Reaper was down to two operational Mules after the split. Punch, Choker, Hustle, and Hoser, along with Boom Boom, had survived the last fight in the second Mule. Mule Three, which had taken the recoilless round, lost everyone but Jacks. Some were killed in the strike. Others got machine-gunned down in the aftermath trying to fight their way to nearby cover. Dip Weasel and Killer Joe were dead or captured. Which meant dead as far as how the Ultras ran things on First Pass. Also, the six others who’d been rotated into Second Squad before the last op of the war on this rock were dead too. Dead or captured. Which, again, meant dead. We added Jacks to our Mule and rolled through the night with Hauser, the Monarch, the unconscious Stinkeye mumbling promises of murder, and the Kid at the wheel. We shoved Boom Boom onto the back deck so his wounded leg could stretch out. It was crowded on both rides. One Mule carrying all the extra equipment. I had no idea how the rest of Strange had fared getting out of the refuel point. We’d gone to a no-comms silent posture between elements as we split up. The survivors would link up at Lost Road and try to finish the rest of the mission to get us off-world. If there were any survivors.

  Reaper’s route was to the south as all three elements, Ghost, Dog with the crawler, and Reaper, headed off into the eastern desert wastelands, literally called “The Wastes” on the maps and charts of this war-ruined world. Fighting throughout much of the conflict had avoided this vast section of the central continent. Most of the occupied and therefore fought-over portions of the world were along the western coast and throughout the southern isthmus. Strategic bombing and special forces raids hit the southern continent because that was a power base for the locals. No meaningful big battles were ever fought there.

  But the Wastes were a no-go zone for many reasons, and not all of them ever extremely clear to me. What I had noticed was a conscious blind spot on the part of our employers, the Astralonian Resistance, their generals and war planners, everyone, to avoid any kind of conflict in that vast unoccupied desert. To me, a lowly sergeant, I saw the region as a great big opportunity to move about unhindered and hit deep in enemy lines by using the Wastes as a kind of cover to appear from, and disappear into, all along the enemy flanks.

  Call me practical that way.

  But no one would authorize anything in the planning. Even the Old Man and the First Sergeant shut down all conversation on the area, especially when little old me would constantly suggest it as a way and route to get things done better. And by better, I mean less chance of anyone getting killed.

  I thought about all my dead as we disappeared into the desert wastes ’round midnight.

  “That’s enough of that, Sergeant Orion,” the First Sergeant once snapped at me when we were figuring out how to pull a raid on a firebase that was giving High Command some problems and we were near enough to the Wastes to make them of use.

  After that I let it go. I was barking up the wrong tree and no one likes a barking dog.

  The closest I ever got to figuring out why, before the night we were just ordered to go ahead and break up into smaller elements and link up deep within the Wastes, was when I spoke to a local native girl who’d been acting as a scrounger for the company. She was trading us supplies we couldn’t get through the command chain, in exchange for ammunition, which we could get a lot of because the war merchants in orbit made sure both sides had a lot in order to get this thing settled before the Monarchs showed up.

  Funny how it turned out not to be that way in the end. When you thought about it as you listened to the wind and the night in the lonely desert, you realized it was only ever going to end that way. The Monarchs showing up with the Ultra Death Machine kicking things off. That was how it was going to go all along. Where we were all headed, even if we didn’t want to admit it back then.

  I admitted it now because no one cared anymore. It was done, cooked, shot to hell. So why not? Isn’t that the first step in something? Admitting you have a problem.

  I could barely keep my eyes open. There was nothing to see and too much had gone wrong. I needed sleep and maybe this would all be just a bad dream even though I knew it wouldn’t.

  I asked her, the scrounger girl, one time when she managed to scavenge us a case of Rage-a-Hol, this new power energy drink we were all pretty happy with, what the deal on the Wastes was. Why the big mystery no-go zone?

  “It’s like this, Ol’ Boy…” She always called me that. Ol’ Boy. I wondered where she was now the game of war was over. Maybe she was dead. We hadn’t seen her in three months. One day she just stopped coming around with stuff to scrounge. She was street-type and the term Ol’ Boy meant something along the lines of hard boy I respect. Same as all across the Pan. “You really needa know that area is all boogedy. Unnerstanna?”

  When I asked her what boogedy meant she indicated haunted, scary, strange.

  “Weird things h
appen out there. Ain’t right things. Stuff don’t grow. Bigga scars that go for hundreds of miles. And if you find something out there from off da Crash… well, two things happen to ya. You disappear and no one ever hears from yaz again.”

  I told her that seemed like the same thing.

  She told me in her way of seeing things that was two different things that could happen to yaz. I thought the point was moot and let it go.

  “What happens to those people… salvagers or scavengers… I’m assuming… when they find something off the alien ship? I mean what do you think really happens?”

  She looked at me like she was assessing a deal. Weighing out how much she could take me for, or how much I could be trusted.

  “Listen… don’t know. Don’t wanna know. No one likes to talk about dat here on da Crash. It’s like… it’s like we know we ain’t s’posed to talk about what goes on out there, so we just don’t. Kenna? But you know how it is… kids and drunks always gonna spill the savage weed. So things get said. And what I think… hear what I think, Ol Boy. I think bad things happen if you finna thing outta there you ain’t s’posed to. Rico, the old man who steals the Rage-a-Hol you guys dig lotsa lotsa… he drink da mezex way too much at night down by da rivers… he say if you find something out there you kenna get to be a Monarch. Or as rich as one of dem canna make ya. See the Monarchs, says Drunk Rico, they want what’s there. They got a secret base out there and he say everything ain’t what it’s s’posed to mean when you seen and known it. That it ain’t haunted so much as jes’ real dangerous to go pokey pokin’ where yaz shouldna no been.”

  What danger?

  She saw the look in my eyes.

  “Yeah you wonderin’ what the danger is? I tell ya. I tell from the eyes. They don’t lie. Sassamia says eyes the window to the hard drives… know what I mean, Ol’ Boy?”

  I acted like I did.

  “Apes. Dey call ’em apes. I don’t know what da hell an ape is. We don’t got ’em on dis world. But apparently they real dangerous and they all over da Crash. You go in there without guns and government, you gonna die. Tha’s what I think happens to all them scavs that never find no-anything and never heard from again. Know how I know? Monarchs don’t share. You born a Monarch… you a Monarch. Dey don’t make ’em. You got to be one. And why dey pay anyone when they canna just take? Tha’s what I do if I could. Jes take it… you feel me, Ol Boy?”

  I understood more than she even knew. She knew only this world. I knew twenty where the dream of Monarch culture died hard when you saw the smoking ruins of what was left. And it was all theirs to begin with. That was the deal. It only got end o’ days when you decided you wanted it to be another way.

  In the dream I was having right before the Kid hit the giant pothole in the desert dirt road we were on, I was having that conversation with her all over again. Me and the scrounger girl. Sassamina. She was telling me everything like she had that day, except somehow we were in that Bar at the End of the Universe with the blinking neon sign and she was dressed in a red dress that shimmered and sparkled like some Monarch pin-up girl. A gown like she was some singer.

  John Strange was there. Smoking and drinking. Watching me and nodding with his wolf’s face as she spilled the story and other things I knew were true but couldn’t remember, and knew I wouldn’t even as the dream went on. Telling me everything the girl was saying was real important for what was about to happen next to the Strange Company.

  I remember him saying one thing. It ain’t what it’s been told to be, Sergeant. But when was it ever?

  And then he laughed his gentleman rogue’s laugh like the reckless adventurer mercenary the galaxy knew him to be, and I wondered how much of him was true and how much was myth.

  But you could wonder that about every man.

  Then the Kid hit the pothole and the Mule jounced, and I was back on the other side of midnight downrange in the desert no one was ever supposed to go to. We were fifty miles in and not moving fast. Steady, but slow. I’d been so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. I must have nodded off and passed out.

  There were things I needed to do. Get an ACE report on weapons and ammo. Casualties and the dead I knew. Every time I thought about them, I didn’t want to anymore. It had been a long day at the end of a series of long days. I’d hit a wall and the last of Chief Cook’s drugs were still in my system. I felt empty and hollow, dry and husk-like at the same time as the night wind whipped at my face and all that could be heard was the low mutter of the Mule’s twin engines.

  I looked over and the Kid was leaned forward, hunched over the wheel where Nox had died a few hours ago. Nox, who I’d shoved out onto the street in the middle of a firefight. The Kid was staring through the shattered impact glass and the giant hole that had ruined my last driver. Concentrating to keep us on the road and not plummeting into some unseen ravine deeper than the one we were already in. Desperate to follow the Mule leading the way.

  Everyone else in the Mule was asleep as best they could in the open air and the cold. Even the Monarch. And even asleep she looked more beautiful than normal women. She was other. The very definition of the word exotic.

  I looked ahead and saw we were following the other Mule. I blinked my combat lens and brought up the map. I had no idea where we were at first because we’d turned off all tracking and communication. If the Ultras were in control of everything, as the Monarch had told me, they’d have found us and sent out a few HKs to smoke us right where we were. We’d be nothing but piles of burning metal, rubber, and charred flesh. Lying out across the dirt and the desert and the night with no one to find us. And we’d never make the rendezvous where our brothers needed us.

  “You okay, Kid?”

  He looked at me, startled. And then back to the road. It was nothing but darkness and dust and a twisting ravine we were making our way down. I had a pretty good idea where we were now from the map recon I’d done before my own mental hard drive had crashed from fatigue, combat, adrenaline overdose, and Chief Cook combat-multiplier drugs.

  He nodded and grunted something about being good to go.

  Hauser was driving the vehicle ahead. Hauser was a cyborg that didn’t need human weaknesses like sleep. The Kid was barely hanging on. Near death in our last fight was probably the only thing keeping his eyes open as we got scarce out here beyond the cities and the civ everyone had fought so hard for.

  I linked with Hauser for direct local comm and told him to pull over for what was left of the night. We were deep enough in the desert now. We could afford a few hours to get ourselves together.

  Five minutes later we rolled out on a small open area surrounded by ravine and canyon. We were below the horizon. It was silent like a graveyard in the silence after the engines were turned off.

  Hauser, who didn’t need to sleep and had his own suite of sensors, would watch over us until dawn.

  I mumbled something to everyone that may have told them to grab what they could of sleep and literally rolled myself up in my poncho liner and went black near the wheel on the ground. I smelled sage and dust and the military smells of our vehicles as I faded from this nightmare. Somehow after the horrors of the long day, those were not unpleasant smells. They comforted me and I told myself everything would be okay tomorrow.

  That’s the thing that separates the living from the dead. Tomorrow.

  So there’s that.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I can smell dawn in the darkness before morning. Maybe that’s just due to years of NCO skills running Reaper. Knowing you’ve got to be up and moving before everyone else to get everyone pointed toward the training schedule, or the battlefield. Both are supposed to be the same if you run your unit right. Or maybe it’s because of how I grew up a long time ago, far away, not in this place.

  When I finally fall off the cliff in my nightmare as I was trying so hard not to, I wake up lying next to the tire of th
e bullet- and impact-riddled fast-attack Mule. I can smell the day coming. It’s quiet. And peaceful. And I just lie there thinking some thoughts and trying to push others away.

  I wouldn’t mind if the day could just be this, and not my fears of what it promises to be. I try to think of the Falmorian party girl. But she doesn’t come and say her magic words. All I’ve got is the memory of her, and even that fades in the horrors of yesterday.

  So there’s that, I sigh. I don’t know if aloud, or just a whisper in the dark.

  A million thoughts from yesterday come rushing at me but I push them all aside again and get upright. And moving. I was so tired I didn’t even take off my chest rig or boots. So I don’t have to do anything but brush dead twigs and dust off of my bloodstained fatigues. I was so exhausted I slept like a dead man regardless of how I went down. Which is how the dead sleep, I think as I try to figure out how we can get attacked where I left us last night. If an attack comes it always comes now when it’s still dark. More NCO thinking. I see Hauser the dark sentinel waiting for it too. A vigilant shadow in the darkness.

  So, now it’s almost a new day and all I have to do is get moving. It’s really just that easy, I lie to no one who believes my lies. Including myself.

  Hauser the combat cyborg, and my friend, stands still, combat shotgun cradled in both massive arms as his head slowly scans the dark horizon beginning to develop. I pity the attack that thinks it can hit us now. My metal friend will straight-up ruin them long enough to get what’s left of my platoon up and fighting again.

  The Monarch squats down next to me. She moved up on me like a silent killer. What was I saying about surprise attacks?