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

I felt like an old man. Older than Stinkeye who seems long-lived due to Monarch Dark Lab experimentation. The Wastes made Crash the weirdest world I’d been on by far.

We drove until darkness came again and the three moons of this world began their bizarre dance across the big sky. All of us crammed into the last remaining Mule. We stopped as much as we could for everyone to get out, stretch their legs, and try to make the best of a long and uncomfortable journey by rearranging what could be as best they could.

You can only rearrange so much. It is what it is, as some like to say on Symbala. Sometimes you just have to count distance and hours, and suffer silently, happy you’ve still got your life, whereas the trail of dead comrades you’ve left behind… currently don’t.

It’s best to be honest about the state of things.

There were conversations on these long stretches across the desert silence that began, over comm, between myself and the Monarch, as we drove deeper and deeper out into the weirdness of a wasteland ruined by a falling alien starship long ago. Because I now realize the importance of the Crash Wastes, I’ll put down what’s there. What’s in that vast and fractured land, ruined by a stellar intruder long ago. What we passed through, and what I think it is. And of course, as much as the Monarch was able to tell me, so if anyone is reading this account and coming to their own conclusions about what really happened, and what needs to be done about it, well, then they can follow the trail I’m leaving here and now. That’s been the purpose of what I’m putting down here all along. Why I’ve carved it out of the main logs of Strange Company for consumption by whoever finds it. I’ll figure out some way to get it out, some kind of transport or even signal headed toward Astacia Esquival, the company rep for our legal firm. Lawyer. Accounts. She does a lot. I hope they appreciate her. She seems like the kind of person who’ll do the right thing come hell or high water. But then again, what do I know. I’ve never met her in person. She just seems like the type.

Maybe I’m an optimist that way. Maybe some detail I’m putting down is important to whoever needs to clean up this mess that started out on Crash and got us what we couldn’t get out of even if we wanted to. For the record. Maybe they can make things right.

Whatever “right” is anymore.

So… what is the Crash?

The Crash. Not a crash. Proper noun. And not to be confused with the planet, which got named second. After. Because of.

The Crash.

The first scout to reach this world, Amos Ferragamo, piloting a Comet-class vessel, Model 301, swept the system with sensors shortly after jumping in. Alarm bells went off and that old scout, Amos Ferragamo, got some huge pings and interesting data right off the bat. Sensors detected a huge nuclear heat spike on the surface of the fourth world in from a star no one had been much interested in. The system was coreward, toward the galactic center, which was the focus of human expansion about that time, right about when we, humanity, encountered the No, a nasty bunch of cybernetic organisms on Sirius. But this area hadn’t been surveyed much and so it was worth the investigation and attention of one lonely scout.

The No. Not as in Negative. That’s what they called themselves during the first invasion of the colony worlds. History calls them the No Cybarbarians. The No gave humanity their first really big interstellar war, and genocides. For about ten years there it looked like we were going over the hill and into ancient history.

The nuclear signature was interesting to old Amos as he set up the glideslope approach in the cockpit of his scout ship to this strange new world he’d discovered. Jump drive exit put him two months out from orbital insertion, and he spent that two months running scans, developing system hazard maps, and plotting the approach. Which is probably about the most dangerous thing you can do as a scout explorer. More scouts have died approaching unknown worlds than down planetside facing unknown dangers on the ground.

But that’s why they get paid the big bucks, or so I’ve heard them say.

Amos knew he was on to something because that fourth world was Earth-like, and apparently inhabited, if that nuclear signature was any indication. But the closer he got the more dismayed he became by what seemed like conflicting data from both sensors and scopes. Nuclear reaction would indicate a definite Tech Seven level of development. Minimum. That should mean major megapoli, rudimentary starflight, satellites at the least. Big navigational hazards those are. And of course, mandatory radio communication. He was getting none of those things on scanners or comm as the scout hurtled itself toward this unknown world on full-burn dumbthrust. The sensor sweep was only picking up the nuclear signature. And nothing else. Nada. Nope. Everything was real quiet. No signs of cities or civilization of any kind. He spent a week theorizing that possibly he was encountering a civ that did things much differently and couldn’t be measured by the standard Dyson Tech Tree classification. Perhaps they were underground? Or maybe he was looking at a dead civ that had somehow left the lights on in at least one nuclear reactor before they annihilated themselves. Both of those possibilities gave him cause for concern. Easy to get in way over his head in both of those situations. Booby traps and apex predators were top of the list to an old scout with nothing but a fast ship and a rifle. Underground dweller civs had proven to be particularly alien and nasty about intruders during past encounters. There was a reason they were underground, and it usually had a lot to do