Strange Company by Nick Cole (best way to read ebooks TXT) 📗

“‘But you gotta finish it,’ I tell him. ‘Just switch over to thermal and hit him in the head, right about here.’ I pointed toward my skull right above my eyes, Orion. That’s where the terraclops CNS brain is. Take out the central nervous system brain and the thing’ll die faster than killing it in the heart, or the actual brain. It’s right behind and above the big eye. ‘No,’ he says. ‘That one is no longer a challenge. We wait for another. Plus, it’s already dead. Probably. Who cares. It’s just a dumb animal.’

“Because he shot it. It’s dead. To him. What a tool. That ain’t management. Just ignore the fact that it’s still out there moaning and bellowing. ’Do you hear anything, everyone?’ asked the Monarch. None of them did even though I could, Orion.

“So I stalk off into the night, which I won’t lie to you is pretty dangerous after dark up there in the basin, and I find Stink and finish him off. Used these rounds that’ll do the trick. Did it from five meters away because he was thrashing around so badly in the lotus grass. Wanted to make sure I put Ol’ Stink out of the misery that had been his last hours. Then I went back and listened to them drink and shoot stuff all night long, half hoping they’d cause a stampede and kill us all. But they didn’t. Three days later I got ’em back to the outfitters stockade and they left in a big expensive dropship. Gold of course. Turned around to my pa and told him I was done. Couldn’t do it anymore. To his credit he understood and just let me go. Now that I think about it there was a heartbreak there too. His, Pa. And this local girl… Sue. Her… we were gonna get married eventually though no one had said anything. We just both knew it. Everyone did. She and her family were guides too. Specialized in river snakes down in Sukoy Shallows. Beautiful things. Deadly poisonous though and about thirty feet long. They have these eggs that are like the biggest most luminescent pearls you’ve ever seen. Last I heard, her and my cousin got married after my pa died. But we were on Blue by then, and they’d already had kids that were grown.

“Time’s funny, Orion… you ever notice all the people you once knew, from your home world, the one you came from, they’re always young in your head? Forever. Even though with sub-light they could be anywhere from twenty to two hundred years old and long dead. In my mind Sue is still nineteen and good lookin’ in a pair of tight blue jeans. She had long, straight blond hair. Never wore makeup, y’know. Saw a dancer on Siligo when we hit the bazaar there that reminded me of her when we were on leave. Went back to that place and blew all my money on her there until I was flat broke. Thought about hiring for the night, but that felt wrong, I guess. So we just listened to the music in the club and I paid her to just stay and talk to me. She wasn’t Sue, but… y’know how it is… close enough, right Orion?”

I knew.

I remember you, estrangier.

“So that’s my story,” Boom said. “Funny, I never thought it was one, Orion. But I guess I had one all along and I didn’t know it.”

The Kid finds the tarp in the Mule and we roll Boom Boom up after we lay the tarp out on the ground. I take his rifle and ammunition because I have a feeling we’ll need it where we’re going. We roll him up and strap him to the back deck of the Mule.

“Ya’z all can bury him out here, Little King,” hisses Stinkeye, who’s woken from his coma. He stands up in the Mule where all this has been going on, hitting the totem flask by which the company measures its fate.

Sometimes I wonder if he knows that.

“It’s a good place,” continues the ragged old Voodoo operator. “I wouldna mind bein’ left here for a thousand years. Nice place to wait out the heat death of the whole mess…”

Then he wandered off and it was just me and the Kid. I looked at the wrapped bundle that was our brother and then looked up at our newest recruit. Surprised the Kid had survived where so many had not in the last forty-eight hours.

I wondered if the company would make it. We were close to meeting a bad ending. Close to there being nothing left of us. But then I knew, somehow, some way, it would. Even if there was just one of us left on the other side of this dog of a contract. The company would go on and I hoped it wouldn’t be me. Because maybe if it was, then maybe the company wouldn’t. And it couldn’t be Amarcus because he’d ruin it all and turn us into petty tyrants on some world. And then all our deaths would have been in vain.

Regardless of what John Strange wanted or not.

“Company tradition is,” I said to the Kid who’d helped me with Boom Boom as we stood there, “is you can tell the company log keeper your story before you die. Who you were, before you joined. Confess your sins. Make a last request. Whatever. And the log keeper puts it all down without judgment. You don’t have to, Kid. But you can. Whenever you want. I’ll listen and get it in, okay?”

Then I put my hand on Boom Boom one last time and said goodbye to the guy who taught me how to do reloads. I whispered something. But I can’t remember what it was as I put this down. There were too many dead lately.

“It’s best to do it before…” I said to the Kid. “You know.”

He looked at me and adjusted his sling. Like he felt some