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

later we were looking at one last chokepoint on the Eighty-Eight to cross and then we’d head southeast along old smuggler trails to reach our rally point near the Crash.

Punch came downslope with the Kid and Choker to where we’d parked in the shadows of low and jaded mountains. Punch had Boom Boom’s rifle. He’d been using its advanced target acquisition features to download intel into the sand table flexy Reaper used for planning.

“This is what we got, boss.” He unrolled the digital mapping tool and spread it out on the hood of the shot-up Mule, tearing off a ragged piece of fibre-armor that had reacted with a micro-explosive to redirect incoming fire. The piece interfered with laying the map flat so we could all study it.

“That Reaper executioner team is down there all right. I’d bet your life on it. They got the checkpoint on the other side of the bridge all secured and everything. We ain’t gettin’ through no how, no way, boss. That is unless you’re up for shooting our way through, and I ain’t Hauser with the facts and figures processor he got… probability and statistics hurts my head and makes me less optimistic. But I don’t rate our chances of success none too good if we try to run and gun.”

I studied the map. I sensed the beautiful Monarch hovering over me, studying it too. She smelled nice in the dry desert air.

What I was looking at on the sand table flexy was a tactical layout of the terrain on the other side of the broken volcanic rock ridge we were hiding behind. All the terrain out here was steadily dropping down to an elevation of about four thousand feet below sea level at its lowest point way out there. But that would come much later on as we got nearer to the Crash site. Right now, we were on a high shelf deep in the Wastes looking at what the map called the Apocalypse Descent. A steady drop in the land bisected by a deep fissure that ran for several hundred miles. It was called, hilariously enough, the Crack of Doom.

Fun times, huh? Some scout had a real sense of humor naming features on this dog of a world. Or at least I assumed it was a scout. If I ever became one, a scout, I was gonna think up nice names that reflected what was really there. Even for horrible places. Because it’s horrible either way, but at least the name is pleasant. Might as well enjoy yourself even if it’s your funeral. Or at least that’s my reasoning.

Anyway, just beyond the ridge, downslope from our position, the highway came to a huge span that bridged the Crack of Doom fissure. This was one of three highways where crossing the fissure that ran north and south, roughly, was possible in land vehicles. The bridge, like the fantastically wide highway, was beautiful and elegant as it threw itself across the ragged fissure in the land. The fall below was deep—at least two miles according to some of the elevation markers—and the bridge was just under three thousand meters long. On the far side, where Punch, using Boom Boom’s rifle, had tagged the execution team, was a small settlement that had grown up around the desert marshal’s station that watched over the bridge and used it as a base of operations in this area to run interdiction against smugglers and scavengers working the Crash Wastes for forbidden alien tech.

“See here…” Punch moved in and expanded the map around the settlement. “They’ve got a sniper in the control tower. I tagged him. I don’t know where the rest are, but if I was running the defense, I’d have myself here with assaulters and support from these buildings.”

He pointed to two structures that made sense for these elements to operate from. He shifted the map with the hand that had lost a finger in the terminal yesterday. I saw where he’d cut that finger off his worn assault glove and the thermaplast showed underneath. Enough money and he could have the finger re-grown. If we got off this world alive and reached a planet with that tech capability in the medical sciences. Stranger things have happened. Some of the platoon had even bet against themselves on the outcome because that was the easy money, and you could wager hard because how was anyone gonna collect if you were dead?

“So here’s what they’re doing…” continued my assistant squad leader.

I didn’t need to be told what the Ultras were doing. I’ve seen massacres before. And yeah, I’ve even participated in them. That’s war sometimes. I could see the bodies the flexy was showing. But Punch told the rest of us anyway. Because that was the situation.

“They’re killing anyone who approaches the checkpoint from across the bridge. Most likely they’ve disguised themselves as desert marshals or are running holograms until whoever it is gets close enough for them to open up and capture the survivors. Then they either drive the vehicles off into the canyon or take them back to this lot behind the settlement. And those are…” Punch pointed toward the bodies stacked in the shade of a small garage near the back lot showing on the flexy’s feed. “…what they are.”

I looked at the Monarch.

“Why?”

As in, why are they doing this. And also, why is a thing like this even ever done. Whoever these people had been before they became bodies stacked like pallets, they were just trying to escape with their lives. Point made. The Monarchs ruled the galaxy. Got it already. They rule everything and always will. There was nowhere you could go that the boot of the Ultra couldn’t be felt next to your carotid artery. Got it. Why the senseless slaughter then, like what the flexy was showing me?

She just watched me with those cool blue eyes and seemed to read every unholy thought inside my head. Anger, and all the rest of it.