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

He is my friend. Stinkeye. I needed to use him. But he was also my friend. And he was also, clearly, incapable of being used at the moment.

What good are friends if you can’t use them. Amirite?

Stinkeye suddenly collapsed into unconsciousness and Choker had to get an IV pump started on him, as well as pull him from the pool of his own filth.

“There’s that…” I muttered to no one.

“There’s what?” asked Punch, coming to stand near me and receive the orders that would get us out of this one. Apparently, I was in charge.

I took a deep breath.

“Well, looks like we gotta do this the hard way.”

“And what way is that, boss?” asked Punch again.

I spat some desert dust off into the dull orange weeds that grew here and there out of the reddish-black volcanic rock of the ridge.

“The hard way, Punch, is where we gotta do it ourselves.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

What the Ultra executioner team guarding the chokepoint across the immense three-thousand-meter span that threw itself across the Crack of Doom spotted was a lone fast-attack Mule with one driver headed across the bridge at a sane and rational pace. Nothing threatening here, folks. Probably a little fast for civilians, but just under SOP for Strange Company. Like the dude driving the Mule was just some savvy rogue staff officer, or even a priority messenger with time on his hands and not looking to make anyone too nervous as they tried to get away mostly unnoticed with some valuable intel or even illegal booty. Just the kind of target an execution team’s Inquisitor would be looking for to put in some time on the cyber-rack. And what the sniper in the hexagonal wide-windowed watchtower would see was someone who looked a lot like Boom Boom, driving. Because it was Boom Boom at the wheel. But that didn’t matter because the executioner team sniper didn’t know Boom Boom, and more importantly he didn’t know Boom Boom, our sniper, was dead. Recently. Punch had blown a real pair of nice sunglasses he’d gotten from some refugee a few weeks ago in exchange for some collectible sidearms he’d picked up off dead Loyalists, to make sure it looked like our dead sniper was really just some shady but basically friendly officer guy out for a drive.

The refugee Punch had traded must’ve figured he was going to need to shoot his way out of stuff more than he was going to need to look cool going forward now that the jig of everything on this planet was up. He was probably right, but the shades did look cool. They were upper-slick mirrored spacer shades. The kind that cost a lot of micro-mem and were worn by people like high-speed frontier scouts and interdiction runners. The kind of people who’d never get caught dead doing Jump Six while barely outrunning blockade destroyers hurling every weapon they had for the kill shot once they’d smashed your shields.

The kind of people who wanted to look cool on their next date. Not go blind from flare flak trying to run a blockade on an interdicted world.

We used the shades to cover up Boom Boom’s dead eyes. Those were kind of a real giveaway since we were betting the Ultra special forces sniper had the best optics the Monarchs could buy. If he was running a targeting life-scan laser then that was gonna be a problem anyway, but we had to play the cards we were dealt. We just had to hope they didn’t have that particular card in their hand. The optics would have spotted the death in our friend’s eyes. So we used the shades and gambled that would be enough to deceive for effect.

The sniper, who would be the first to acquire the incoming Mule, would see Boom Boom, smile on his face… Oh yeah. About that. Choker used medical staples to create that effect, a perma-smiling Boom Boom, wearing his shades and just out for a drive. The position of the sun, now falling into the west, might help some since we stapled his cheeks wide so his white teeth showed.

“He always had nice teeth,” Hustle noted as we stood back to study the work we’d done on Boom Boom’s corpse. “I always admired him for that. He spent money on those teeth. That’s thinking. Like he was gonna have a future.”

“He looks happy,” said Choker as he inspected his work with the medical stapler, device still in hand and ready for a touch-up if he wasn’t completely satisfied. That’s the thing about having a medic who’s probably somewhere on the sociopath scale. Nothing’s off-limits to him. “That’s how I’ll always remember him,” he said.

Everyone gave Choker the look everyone always gives Choker. A look that says our medic has something deeply wrong with him. Something that bothers even mercenaries on a level they’re not completely comfortable with admitting. Especially if this is the guy that’s gonna save your life by pulling off a leech that’s a little too close to an area that men tend to value. And other valuable medical stuff.

“What?” he asked everyone, sensing our discomfort. But no one answered. Again, this is the guy you tell stuff to you don’t share with the rest. Best not to make him… crazy.

So that’s what the sniper in the watchtower saw. Out there across the span where the settlement on the far end needed to be bypassed. The rest of us were now waiting, behind a distant curve blocked by the trailing tail of the ridge of jagged volcanic rock, for our plan to take effect.

Our hope was the sniper would be talking to his team leader about their game plan, which it seemed they’d been running for most of the last twenty-fours since formal operations began. How they’d handle innocent little Boom Boom. Who knew? Maybe they’d had this game going before the Battle Spire ever inserted into the combat zone. Great way to collect a lot of intel and data on the