Strange Company

by Nick Cole

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The giant behemoth that opened up the vault doors to the Node was the largest ape I’d ever seen. Technically speaking, I hadn’t seen a lot of apes. None before today. But today… I’d seen a lot of them. And this thing was easily twice as large as the ape the captain had killed atop the rock with his Hardballer shot to the head. Blowing its brains out all over rock and sky. Their war leader for the assault to wipe us out in the canyon.

  “Get it on!” I shouted as Reaper opened fire. As the thing heaved the door aside and swept a great gargantuan paw in at us. Dead monkeys and one of the auto-gun sentries came flying in right at us.

  Both Pigs drew bright lines of sudden automatic fire across the thing’s broad chest.

  Nothing. It didn’t seem to mind 7.62 moving at twenty-four-hundred feet per second.

  It roared and pounded its chest. Lowering its jaw-heavy skull and baring its immense fangs at us as it roared death right into our faces.

  It bled. Yes. But it didn’t stop its attack. It squeezed itself into the tiny room that would be our tomb for sure, a mass of other apes howling and gibbering to get past it. These were big too. Not as big. But things you wouldn’t want to meet ever.

  The captain fired six concussive booms, adding shotgun slugs to the damage, blowing out one huge malevolent eye in the giant ape’s immense skull. The thing roared, dragged a bloody claw at its devastated eye, and heaved another paw across our line. The captain and Hauser went flying as the tree trunk arm batted them into the wall of the science station.

  I stood, dumped a mag, ejected, and got tackled by a flying monkey. The spider-quick thing was arms, claws, and fangs all at once. It smelled bad and tried to rip through my chest rig as it fought to tear my face off. I let go of my rifle, pulled my karambit, and rammed the blade into its skull as it was the only chance I had with the second and a half left to me. I pulled the blade out and rammed it home five more times to get the thing to stop mindlessly flailing at me. The Monarch was blazing away above, standing over my body, spent brass hitting me in my blood-covered face as I struggled with the feral predator.

  The Kid pulled the monkey off my body.

  I was still holding the magazine I was going to insert when I got to my feet and watched as the team brought down the big ape with more fire. Hauser was back up and spent the last belt walking forward and spraying the goliath everywhere he could with a cone of lead death that washed over the beast. Portions and chunks of its flesh came away in great sprays as the hail of gunfire ruined its massive frame. Monkeys and apes moving past their dying god streaked in at the combat cyborg and tore away more of his own synthetic flesh.

  The captain pulled them off with his bad hand and shot them with his good hand wielding the Hardballer.

  More monkeys were flooding in. More by the second. We were going to get overrun now that our line had lost cohesion and integrity.

  “We can do this!” shouted Punch over full-auto blare from his shorty. “Hold the line, Strange!”

  He’d make a good platoon leader, I thought as I watched the battle from some distant part of my mind. If we survived. But there were so many of them coming through the security door now, over the dead giant and straight at us, that it seemed impossible the flood would ever end, or that we would survive more than another minute at best.

  “Thirty seconds!” shouted the Monarch. “Once I have it, we can fall back through to the next security station. More guns there will buy us time to reach the transport lift to the science base. Hang in there, Reapers.”

  I burned another mag on six of them, unsure if I’d killed any or just shot them a bunch. It was like a lunatic asylum had turned into a carnival shooting gallery. It was madness. Blood spray. And monkey guts. Hard to know what was true in the bloody darkness.

  I’ve fought battles. But nothing like this. And I never wanted to again if any of them were ever going to be like this one. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t sane. And if these were somehow the Simia from a future with no humanity, forced back in time with a lost starship that couldn’t make its way back to when it was supposed to be, then I could see why humanity wasn’t the apex predator in the future. The Simia were relentless when enraged.

  Last mag.

  I called it.

  “Black on magazines!”

  It had been a long day. A very long day.

  “Grenades, Sar’nt!”

  “Negative,” I yelled at the Kid. The quarters were too tight for explosives. We’d kill ourselves.

  “I know!” he shouted over the madness. “Cover me. I’m going to throw ’em out the door.”

  I saw what the Kid was saying. If he could wade through and chuck them out into the main passage, maybe he could buy us some space. But it was a bad idea. A real bad idea. Ridiculous even. The kind a kid who joined up to become a mercenary and really needing to be a hero would think of. Trying to right some wrong no one would ever find out about. And… I didn’t have enough confidence in him to get those tossed grenades through the door under pressure.

  I pulled my sidearm.

  “Pull your sidearm!” I yelled at him. A monkey came flying in. The Monarch shot it, and blood splashed across our faces as the thing thrashed and died. “Follow me!”

  I pulled my first fragmentary grenade. It would be easier to deploy while just working the sidearm. Easier to get the grenades in play. The Bastard dangled uselessly on its two-point sling as I waded out, blazing away at screaming monkeys, splashing skulls with rounds. Screaming for no reason I can remember.

  “Captain!” I yelled as I surged stupidly forward into everyone’s field of fire. “Keep ’em off us now!”

  I’ll take fun last words before fratricide for a thousand.

  I had no idea if that was even possible. To keep them off of us with supporting fire. Gunfire was wild. Emotions and adrenaline high. Survival instinct kicking in above all else. It was here, at the intersection of these points that people got good and killed by their own actions and friends. And not just by the enemy.

  But what other way did we have?

  We needed time to reach the next science station and the protection of its guns. When in doubt, grenades out.

  I shot one point-blank, blowing it back with the force of my weapon. It screamed and staggered away, its monkey claws still reaching to do harm. Another came in and I just pressed the muzzle of my sidearm to its skull and pulled the trigger in one motion, pivoting to engage as I waded through guts and bodies to get close to the door. Monkey brains spraying everywhere in slow motion as I felt my mind begin to fracture. Of course, the Kid was right behind me. Firing and picking up what targets he could.

  I only have shadowy images of what happened next. It’s like my mind doesn’t want to remember what I saw as I pushed past the big dead ape and looked out into the darkness of the rest of the doom ship down a dark passage filled with the future’s monsters. I have images. Impressions. Nightmares. A sea of something so angry and hateful it makes being human seem like a weak and scared thing.

  I was popping the grenades and flinging them out… I felt numb. My fingers were numb and bloody. I got the grenades off my chest rig. The Kid’s too. And I flung them into the angry monkeys crouching and crouch-running forward to do us in. Coming from the darkness like the monsters they were. Are. Screaming and shrieking. Words I could almost understand…

  I think that’s where my mind broke.

  The Kid blazing away behind me because this is the stuff heroes are made of. That’s what we all tell ourselves, right? That’s what the dead were thinking before they went down.

  Gains. Boom Boom. All the others.

  The Monarch in my ear telling me she had what we’d come for. But that might as well have been from far away and not right now.

  The Kid pulling me away as the captain gave the order to pull back to the next station.

 
I didn’t come to myself until we were away from the Node. There was another firefight. Another element of monkeys and apes tried to intercept us. It wasn’t until the lift out of the starship, crossing through a glass tube toward the hive-like science base that had been built in the rock wall of the canyon, that I came to myself. Sort of.

  I looked down at my chest rig.

  The claw of a dead monkey was still hanging there. Clutching in death and its removal from whomever it had belonged to.

  Had I done that?

  Things were hazy.

  The Little Girl was looking at me the way she always did.

  “He’s coming soon,” she whispered. Just to me. I don’t know that anyone else heard it. We weren’t out of this just yet. Her friend was coming to play.

  “Three Ultra Marine Raptor-class dropships inserting onto the station, Captain,” announced Hauser. I looked up and saw their shadows cross over the opening of the canyon above the Crash. We were inside a lift moving from the ruins of the ship to the wall of the tube where a new science lab had been established by the science teams.

  “Well,” said Choker. “That’s just great.”

  I did the reloading work. Wiping away the blood. New magazine in sidearm. The Bastard was dry, and no one had any spare ammo.

  Last mags for everyone else.

  The captain handed me his shotgun. The legendary Beretta 1301 Tactical. A relic from when man was free and made great weapons to keep it that way.

  Freedom. She, the Monarch, was gonna set everyone free with a superweapon that made the mem the Monarchs controlled us with good and useless. Sure. And all that mem Amarcus and Dog Platoon was recovering, it would be worthless too. And wasn’t that our deal? Her deal with us. All the mem we could carry away to get paid enough to fix the ship on Blackrock?

  I wanted to tell the captain. But I didn’t. And I had no idea why I didn’t. I just didn’t.

  Choker was wrapping the captain’s wounded hand as the elevator climbed up along the canyon wall. Raging about Ultras and this being a real gyp-job on the company. Boy, I thought, he didn’t know the half of it. We weren’t even gonna get paid. I had no idea what to do with that info. But as I looked around, everyone was alive. Banged up. Even the Monarch had caught damage from a claw that had dragged itself across her fancy suit. Cutting through armor that should have resisted mere monkey claws. I saw the rage evident in the white flesh and blood there where she’d been caught by the slash.

  Down below us, just as we reached the science base hive along the far canyon wall, I looked back at the ship one last time. It was crawling with apes and monkeys, surging along its length. They looked like demons in the darkness racing for souls.

  Our souls.

  And I heard the Little Girl whisper again, “He’s coming soon, Sergeant.”

  I smelled fall leaves. Fall leaves burning.

  He was coming.

  The Wild Thing.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  “I am currently tapped into the station’s motion detection systems,” stated Hauser as we moved through the upper decks of the science station built near the Crash. “Tracking three Ultra teams moving into the base now. Combat posture alpha.”

  We were in a wedge and we looked rough. At best. Even Hauser was limping from a badly articulating leg joint. His combat chassis had taken a lot of abuse. Abuse meaning heavy damage. A lot more than the rest of us. But he was still carrying the Pig and scanning for targets. We were low on ammo and had to make the terminal for the high-speed tube to the airfield. The problem for us right now was the Ultra Marine Raptor dropships. High-speed hunter-killer variants, down in the main plaza between the terminal and the hive-like science base full of windows and levels looking out at the big wreck of a starship disappearing off into the tunnel darkness.

  The drops had come in and landed their teams. Now the teams were hunting for us and the drops were on ground standby.

  The science labs we were currently moving slowly through were quiet and heavy in that way deeply reinforced data-gathering stations feel. The soft lighting and carpet. The heavy processors quietly humming their number-crunching titterings. The opposite of what we did. Here was order and knowledge. We were chaos and survival. Not just opposites. But aliens.

  The quiet. The massive holographic displays endlessly churning their meaningless, to me, data. Tables spread with the drives and papers. Even empty coffee cups waiting to be filled.

  I was thinking if we passed a machine that could churn some out, then I was gonna hit it and hit it hard. I was thinking about coffee. Not lost starships from the past and the future. Or a race of killer apes called the Simia that are somehow responsible for the end of humanity. My pay grade did not care. My pay grade needed coffee to keep putting one foot in front of the other in this insane asylum of a contract.

  Now we were on the third level, Science Operations, behind tinted reinforced invisi-steel windows, with eyes on the drops in the courtyard below. Punch was doing recon while the Monarch hacked a display and downloaded our situation into a tactical format. Updating it with data from Punch’s feed off of Boom Boom’s rifle.

  I turned to the Little Girl and gave her a look. Asking without words how much longer we had until her friend showed up. I wasn’t opposed to it. I just needed to know. Sending that thing in to wipe out the Ultras blocking our exit would really make all our collective days right about now.

  She nodded her head and silently mouthed the word “soon.”

  I raised my eyes.

  “When,” I whispered impatiently.

  She gave me a look indicating she had no idea. But soon. The way our luck was running it would be at the worst possible time. But I tend to think positively that way. That’s me.

  “We got three crews. Two pilots each. Two door gunners each. One of whom is probably the crew chief. Tagging twelve tangos.” Punch then ran through the weapons he was seeing. We assumed they had full combat loads.

  So, there’s that.

  Our number was currently eleven plus a kid. A little girl.

  Me, Punch, Choker, Jacks, Hauser, Hustle, and Hoser. The captain. The Monarch. Cook and the Little Girl. And the Kid.

  The winds were picking up outside the station. Coming off the desert floor above and sending sand down through the shafts of light. Racing down the orange rock canyon walls and blowing that skirling sand and light debris here and there. It was a high-tech ghost town, and we didn’t have time to wonder what had happened to the science team.

  Either the monkeys had gotten them, or they’d been pulled out now that the Monarchs had begun their final conquest of the world.

  The scene would have been almost beautiful if not for the twelve killers between us and a way out. And I couldn’t find any coffee.

  I checked my watch. Time. There was none to spare.

  One hour to the hit on the airfield. Dog would be storming the bank now after fighting its way through the outskirts of the small town surrounding the desert starport. According to the schedule.

  And we sergeants are all about our schedules.

  Ghost in sniper support. The First Sergeant running the whole show. Our situation looked bad, but I didn’t know who had it worse. The guys taking the bank. Or us.

  Twelve Ultras, even though they were aircrew, were still Ultras. Every one a killer. That’s their motto, according to Chief Cook. Every one a graduate of their most advanced infantry schools. The average Ultra carries sixteen weapons. MX battle rifle. Savage Rampage model short-barreled shotgun. Stuka 9mm sidearm. Six frags. One banger. One Ultra combat knife. Two arms. Two legs. One bucket. Head smashes are their favorite. Supposedly they keep tallies on the sides of their helmets. But I’ve never been close enough to verify.

  Nor do I want to be.

  The captain took a drag on his cigarette and lowered his smoke-stained finger still holding the smok
e to the table the Monarch was updating.

  “Base of fire here with the cyborg and myself. The rest of you move here along this rock garden area off to their left. Our right. If they’re distracted you can make it to the tube station. Board and go. We have to take that ship, Sergeant Orion, once you get there. That is No Fail. The rest of Strange is counting on us, so get it done.”

  The unspoken part of his plan was evident. The cyborg was expendable. And the captain was a real leader. They’d buy us an exit window. Few of us, and especially those who had served in other Monarch support military units, had ever had the privilege of having that kind of leader. Someone who led by example, instead of special privilege. Of course, he was gonna make sure he paid the price for a shot at the company’s freedom. He and “the cyborg” would buy us time to reach the tube station. The rest was up to us.

  The Monarch seemed satisfied with the plan. It got the job done. She drew on the plans an axis of movement for both elements in broad blue holographic strokes. Who was going where. Who was staying behind to die.

  It was possible. The captain’s plan. But the Ultras would ruin us across fifty meters of open ground if we got spotted. The plan could go from maybe to wrecked in about five seconds from what I was looking at. But NCOs are optimists that way.

  “Permission to tag along, sir.” Punch of course. If just for the fight. But also because he was that kind of guy. Reaper would be in good hands with him someday.

  Chief Cook cleared his throat and stepped up to the table.

  “Uh, sir,” he said in his pseudo-officious voice like he was addressing the judges who enforced the laws and revenges of the Monarchs. “Perhaps we could do this another way.”

  The Old Man was silent, pulling his smoldering cigarette away from the table and taking a drag. His way of saying our Voodoo chief had the floor. Any good commander gives warrant officers a lot of room and credibility. Especially when it comes to their areas of expertise. Because they have a practical wisdom about how to get things done the smart way instead of the military way.