Strange Company

by Nick Cole

  “Sir, the way I see it is, uh, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way.”

  “Which is the violent way?” asked Punch. “For the record, I’m extremely comfortable with violence.”

  Chief Cook gave him a quick brothers-from-another-mother smile and continued.

  “Ah. Then that would be the easy way. Hard way was the captain’s plan. So, here’s how we could really crash their mental hard drives…”

  Ten minutes later, me, Chief Cook, and Hauser walked out into the courtyard. Hauser was carrying the Old Man’s combat shotgun hooked to the back of his carrier. What was left of the ammo from both Pigs had been linked to make one and a half belts. Enough to ruin some days with.

  We’d each had a pull from the flask Stinkeye had loaded up for us. Chief Cook was the first.

  “Well, if the old bastard was trying to kill me, he certainly arranged the right set of circumstances to make his dreams come true. Here’s to ya, you old fraud. Hope yer already dead somewhere.”

  He studied it for a brief second, then hit it. He winced. Coughed.

  “Ain’t bad. In fact… I feel… purty good, for the record. Like I could take on the whole galaxy and not really care much who won or lost.”

  We each had a shot. Even the captain.

  Hauser mimed a pull and passed it on. I loved him for that.

  All it did was make you feel invincible. Like you could pull something just about as crazy as we were about to pull and get away with it.

  “We’re gonna shake the pillars of the universe,” whispered Chief Cook as we walked out into the Ultra door gunner’s kill zone. Ready to pull our last trick.

  So there’s that.

  What the Ultra aircrews were seeing, or so we hoped, as the three of us strode into the courtyard, was three things.

  A Monarch spec ops intel officer. That was Chief Cook, who always kept his old green beret handy in his ruck, according to him as he quickly walked us through the skullduggery he had planned.

  A combat cyborg model trained for asymmetrical urban warfare. Spec ops worked with them often. That was Hauser.

  And a prisoner.

  That was me.

  Because hey, why not?

  Chief Cook had even put a cyber collar around my skull. If it worked properly, the cyber collar, I’d be rendered little more than a walking zombie taking orders from the command voice authenticated for the collar.

  I could play the part. I was pretty sure I could act dead on my feet. I’d been infantry long enough.

  “So,” muttered Chief Cook as we walked out into the orange sunlight to begin the show. “Like I always say. Just because it’s dangerous doesn’t mean it’s not fun. Be cool and don’t start shooting until I do the crew chief. That’s the signal for get it on time, boys and girls.”

  Girls made me think of the Little Girl. Her friend showing up right now would be downright awful. Yeah it would kill the Ultras, but we were a little too close for comfort. It would be like playing tag with a tornado.

  It made me nervous the chief was repeating our plan. Like he didn’t trust it and was trying to find some last-minute weakness in it so that we’d know exactly how we got killed even as we had no time to correct the deficiency.

  “Copy,” said Hauser, sotto voce. “The simians are engaged with the Ultras at the lift on deck six of the science station. Cliffside. There are casualties already. Acting cool now, Chief Warrant Officer Cook.”

  “Not you, Hause. You just act like you. Orion. You act dumb. Me. I’ll do the cool part. Ready…”

  Guns came out fast. The door gunners drew a bead on us and a crew chief carrying a short automatic carbine came out, weapon aimed right at us.

  “Hold on, boys,” croaked Chief Cook in the dry desert air. Then, “Warrant Officer Foster, Two-Twenty-Second Tactical Com Operations. We’ve been planetside for weeks now. Me and the Tin Man bagged us a high-value target and I need to turn him over to your commander for transport if you’re heading back into Centcom.”

  The Ultras were all business. They weren’t stupid. You had to score high on intelligence tests to join or so the rumors say. Every Ultra was highly trained in all protocols and procedures. They’re highly efficient killers trained to combat cyborg levels of competency. They are the very definition of razor-sharp and if the plan had involved any edge being gained by our hopefully clever deception, I would have had no hopes as I stood there and looked brain dead.

  Mouth open.

  Drooling a little. Chief Cook said it would help.

  But that wasn’t our plan.

  Suddenly the lead dropship started her turbines. The lead pilot whirled his hand giving the mount-up signal. The main engines, bulbous cylinders along the aft fuselage above the cargo deck, began to spin up to their idling howl. Drops two and three started seconds later, the pilots working through their start-up sequences, as the crew chief approached. Weapon pointed at Cook. Obviously the commander on the ground while the Ultra infantry were out sweeping the facility, probably looking for us.

  “Intercepting packet bursts on their comm. It’s encrypted,” said Hauser. “Running decode now but my combat probability assessment indicates the Marines are in trouble and falling back to their ships for immediate evacuation. Estimate arrival in six minutes. The simians will be in close pursuit.”

  “We only need two, Hause,” muttered Cook from the edge of his perma-grin. Then to the Marine he said, “All on the same side, Sergeant…” as the high-speed low-drag Ultra in combat armor came forward fast. Short carbine ready to dust us all if he smelled anything he didn’t like. And this was when he made the mistake he made.

  Combat cyborgs are fearsome predators. For other people. When you’re Ultras you regularly work with them. Maybe like an aircrew might, dropping them well behind enemy lines among a civilian populace to go cause their particular brand of mayhem and harm. Then you tend to see them as just other military tools. Weapon systems. The crew chief wasn’t totally convinced Chief Cook was on the up-and-up. Maybe seventy percent. Cook was going to give him some bogus authentication codes that would have bought us another five meters closer to being covered by only one of the door gunners on the three drops. Five meters closer to the one in the drop we wanted.

  But the sergeant stopped like a pro at just the right distance to keep us covered by at least one other gunner on another drop. Like it was SOP and Ultra DNA at the same time.

  “Get down!” thundered Hauser, lowering the Pig and greasing the Ultra Marine sergeant at close range with a sudden burst of automatic fire.

  While the sergeant was still stumbling backward, his chest armor ruined by smoking holes left from high-power AP 7.62, I faded behind Hauser, clearly not zombified by the bogus cyber collar, and dragged the shotgun off Hauser’s chest rig as incoming fire from the door gunner, depleted uranium incendiary, smacked into our combat cyborg and erupted across the dirt of the garden courtyard. Hauser absorbed the fire as best he could even though this stuff was perfectly good at jacking him up. Rounds came in hot, smashed into his metal frame, and began to melt it.

  Without flinching, Hauser returned fire with the Pig and dusted the door gunner at twenty meters.

  Chief Cook was doing some kind of awkward combat roll on the ground to get away from the door gunner’s fire. When he came up with his sidearm, lying on his belly in the dust, he screamed and unloaded on the door gunner facing us from the other drop on his flank.

  I had no time to see if he got hits.

  I was coming around Hauser, watching pieces of his metal frame and synthetic flesh fly away from the dying door gunner’s last burst as I dragged the combat shotgun up, loaded with slugs, and unloaded on the pilot through the glass canopy of the drop we were gonna take.

  Surprise, super-soldiers!

  The first two slugs smashed safety glass, and the third tore off his jaw, blowing brai
n matter and blood all over the front windshield. I could see pilot number two pulling his sidearm, but he had no shot on me. I raced for the cargo deck trying to get an angle on him for my last three shells.

  He came out onto the cargo deck. But he was slow with the draw and I only needed to shoot him once, blowing him out onto the plaza on the far side of the drop.

  Hauser pivoted and unloaded on the drop crew Chief Cook was targeting. Raking the aircrew with his particular brand of highly accurate and efficient fire.

  The third aircrew was reacting and failed to see Punch, Jacks, Choker, Hustle and Hoser with the captain dragging the Kid out into the sunlight, while the Monarch picked up targets and engaged with her wicked little submachine gun, come at them from an opposite angle. Leaving the shadows of the data relay comm tower they’d come out of. They moved fast, using carbines and sidearms to sweep past the ship while Jacks tossed in his last explosive. Not a big one. A door charge he’d packed with tape after wrapping lots of fragments he’d found in the science lab. Steel screws he’d found boxes of.

  The improvised explosive devastated the aircrew as flying metal fragments tore through armor and skin. Ruining instruments and hydraulics. One of the engines ingested something and exploded a second later, sending more debris across the courtyard. A fire started onboard that drop and by the time we were aboard the one we were taking, Chief Cook sliding into the pilot’s seat and running through the startup sequence, flipping switches and tapping contacts, that one was fully engulfed in black smoke.

  “You know how to fly one of these?” I asked as we strapped in. The engines beginning to howl.

  “Every Monarch intel operator knows how to jack a vehicle,” bragged Cook in a voice I’d seen him straight-up lie to people in. “Got five whole hours of stick time on one of these babies. Did an op on Venemah. Part of the train-up.”

  At the same moment the Ultra teams, or what was left of them, appeared from the main hive of the station, running fast. Behind them were all the monkeys and apes in the world. Raving and racing to drag them down. Animal eyes murderous. Fangs working.

  I watched as a sergeant, covering their rear, turned to unload with the squad automatic weapon. A storm of monkeys jumped him and dragged him down. Pulling the weapon out of his gauntlets as they tore at his armor.

  Then he detted one of his grenades and blew a cluster of them in every direction. Including himself.

  “Hang on to your butts!” shouted the chief as the Monarch slid into the blood-and-bone-matter-caked co-pilot’s seat next to him and started helping to get us ready for lift. “Combat takeoff in effect.”

  Then we were airborne and turning away over the top of the station. Engines straining for lift. Orange daylight washing the cargo deck.

  Some of the Ultras stopped to fire at us, assessing the situation. Seeing the carnage. Angry they were about to get the short end of the stick for once.

  Those Marines got flying-tackled by more swarms of monkeys with guns, spears, and knives. Ripped apart by the larger apes bounding and racing for a piece of the action.

  Hustle turned the Little Girl’s face away as we climbed. “Don’t look, honey,” he murmured over the comm.

  The sun flashed through the blood-washed windows of the drop’s cockpit as the engines howled and we lifted away and over the desert, picking up our course track. Flying through the black billowing smoke of the forever engines of the Crash. And then the desert beyond and below. The wide white endless desert sands here at the bottom of this world.

  “ETA fifteen to starport.”

  The captain leaned back against the seat in the rear cargo deck opposite me. He looked tired as he gave me a thumbs-up.

  We’d made it this far. Just a bit more to go.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The Kid told me his story during the last flight out of Dodgeistan. The last view of the science station near the Crash site was nothing but a sea of predators overwhelming everything like some grim foreshadowing of everything the Monarch had told me so far. Now I watched the clean desert pass beneath our hijacked Ultra dropship. Not even the best of the Ultras could have survived back there.

  I watched Hoser put a found flight helmet on the Little Girl. Comically too bulky for her already giant head compared to her tiny, lithe, lollipop body.

  We’ve never bought her a lollipop. Like you should for little girls whenever you have the chance. Girls love sugar. It’s a stand-in for love in the time of no love. Or at least the love they crave and cannot have or that will not give back. But then again, we’ve never passed a place that sold lollipops. We were too busy doing what we did. Which is war. And maybe those two don’t mix but I’d bet Choker would tell me they did.

  I heard the captain making our plan to take the armored transport on the field once we hit the LZ. The Monarch would fly that one. Chief Cook, along with Hustle and Hoser, would stay aboard this one and make gun runs until Strange Company was aboard the larger transport and clear to depart. Choker was trying to fix the damage to Hauser, suffocating the burning white phosphorus incendiary rounds with packing gel. Some of the fragments were still smoldering in his synthetic flesh and metal frame. The medic was watching with ghoulish fascination as he did his work.

  But that’s Choker. A war crime to the rest of the galaxy. A brother to the company. Bullets and lollipops.

  “My story ain’t nothin’ special to anyone else, Sergeant.”

  But it’s important to me, I could hear, reading his mind. It is, Kid. Even though the galaxy conspires every day to tell us all our stories aren’t important to the big turn of the wheel of the galaxy spinning about the hot central core. But I don’t say that. Best to listen. Too tired to do anything else. More to do in just a few minutes.

  Listening to the chatter of the comm that the LZ we’re about to hit is gonna be lit.

  “Just thought you should know it,” continues the Kid. “I’ve heard some others. From guys since I’ve been part of the company. But…”

  He said nothing after that for a few seconds.

  The dull hum of the comm waited between us. I was monitoring the captain’s orders. We were getting reports from the First Sergeant on the ground at the objective. Things were bad. Real bad. Bank hit went rough. Wounded. Sergeant Hannibal fighting a retreat to the airfield. Package in hand though. The Ultras have shown up and are dropping indirect fire all over the route as assault teams hit the perimeter from air cav.

  One of the Ghost snipers has eyes on the armored transport we need to get the whole unit off-planet. “She looks like she’s getting ready for dustoff.”

  This could be hopeless. If it leaves we’re gonna have a lot of explaining to do to people who are interested in explanations.

  “Stay on mission,” said the captain over the comm like he was reading all of our thoughts. “We’ll find a way.” Pause. Dull hum of ether. Distant howl of the engines as Chief Cook pushes it to max throttle.

  I smell the burning leaves of autumn on all the worlds I’ve ever been on. One in particular though. Or is that just the engines? The draft washing across the cargo and flight deck. And not the Wild Thing coming soon.

  “There’s a way,” finishes the captain as we get ready to go.

  I tap the Kid and give the hand signal to continue. Twirling two fingers tiredly. Old as time. Veteran to Kid. Old man getting older and taking the time to listen to the so real problems of the young. So important. So damn important back then when everything was life or death. The reasons you wanna die. The stands you make. The things you’re gonna have to live with whether you like it or not.

  No one cares, Kid. But you don’t tell him the truth of that. You just listen. Old men listen.

  Soldiers live and wonder why, right?

  “So…” continued the Kid. “There’s a girl. I was straight crazy about her. I think she was crazy about me. Once. We were both at different schoo
ls. I’d already been in the local military. No combat. Now in university. We were… we were gonna get married. We had plans. Y’know, stuff you say when you’re in love and it’s like a secret no one else can know because it’s so good. See the galaxy together and do all that adventure stuff.”

  Casualty report coming in from Dog. It’s not good.

  I can see the sky and desert past the Kid. His face is haunted and blackened by smoke and gunfire. He’s different now. Different from whoever she thought he’d ever be. I think to myself, If she could see him now, would it matter? But I don’t know who she is. Haven’t heard the whole story. Then again, I’ve probably heard it before.

  “Five minutes,” shouts Cook over the comm. Hustle stands and goes to the swing-mounted door gun. Hoser pats the Little Girl’s flight helmet and makes sure she’s good and strapped in. Then he goes to the other door gun. Checks it. Racks a round and runs through the traversing motion like he’s already looking for targets. He nods at the captain with a big smile. Get it on, he mouths silently. The Ma Deuce is always a privilege to fire. Has been ever since there were soldiers to fire it.

  “One night I drive over to her college to pick her up. We were gonna see a spectacuthriller. Lethal Monarch. Ever see that one, Sar’nt?”

  I hadn’t.

  “She ain’t there. At her dorm. Friend tells me she’s at this guy’s. So… I go over, knock on the door, and he answers. Shirtless. Smile on his face like he knows what’s up is up. Real Jodie type. Know what I mean?”

  I do. I really do.

  “I ask for her. Sinda here? He says no. But I hear her, and she says yes she is. Like someone else was coming to look for her not me. He disappears, and she opens the door a crack and I’m just standing there, and the look on her face is…”

  Two minutes to LZ. I check my weapon. I can see the airfield out there on the desert floor. There’s already black smoke rising from across the city of low buildings around it. It’s clear we’re flying into a battle. But like all battles it looks peaceful from above. Almost lazy. I’m betting it’s a real different story down there right about now with Amarcus and company fighting a street battle to take the airfield. Ghost shooting down as many as they can while moving from position to position. The First Sergeant running the whole show with his particular brand of relentless good humor.