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

“And Voodoo… word of advice, Kid, just stay away from them and don’t even get interested when they come around. Trust me on that one. You’ll be a lot happier with all your marbles for as long as you can keep them.”

I pause and make a motion for him to hand me his Bastard.

He seems surprised to see that he’s even carrying the sturdy company S-16 combat rifle he was issued back at the supply crawler. He hands it over.

I run a systems check and find out Biggs has given him one of the good ones.

I hand it back.

“Okay,” I say, indicating the weapon he’s holding. “Now go ahead and load that. You’re in combat now. If you see the enemy, then you’re gonna wanna shoot ’em. And having the weapon loaded makes the process a whole lot easier.”

I don’t add a pedantic Okay like Player does over in Dogs. Because that would be pedantic and people would think I’m a jerk. Everyone thinks Player is a jerk.

Now, if Biggs has done his job, the Kid will pull a mag out of his carrier and load the S-16. Biggs keeps recruits for two days and shows them how to use their gear. He also downloads all kinds of myths that have nothing to do with actual combat, as Biggs, as far as I know, has never engaged in light infantry warfare of any kind. The drone guns mounted all over his supply crawler take care of most enemy interest in his continued well-being.

The Kid pulls a magazine from his carrier, slaps it in, pulls the charging handle back, and a round is in the chamber and ready. I note the Kid checks the safety.

The S-16 is a beautiful weapon system that’s probably as old as humanity’s interest in modern warfare. Way back in the primeval of Earth, a place I’ve never been but who has, the original design was called the Stoner weapon system for reasons I have yet to discover. It’s been improved on over the years and there are variants like the shorty some carry.

“Let’s leave that safety on until we got someone to shoot at,” I tell the Kid as mobile artillery begins to level a block to our west. “If we get hit, don’t panic. Keep thinking and shoot back when you can. The rest of us would appreciate that. Also, it has a tendency to discourage the enemy as far as their initial intentions are concerned. Makes ’em nervous. And we can use that to our advantage. Welcome to Reapers, Kid. Welcome to the Strange.”

Chapter Three

I’m half-listening to the squad comm that’s always in my ear when Junkboy shows up after I asked him to report to my little command post at the center of the artillery-shell-ruined bank. I’m going to assign Junkboy care and handling of the new recruit who will simply be called “Kid” for the foreseeable future until he does something stupid enough to earn the tag he will come to live with for what will most likely be the rest of his life. In Strange Company.

Junkboy’s tag, for instance, was acquired thusly. He has been with the company in So-So’s squad for six months. Joined up at Ryan’s Cross and managed to convince the First Sergeant and Biggs that he was drug-free and hadn’t been kicked out of the Monarchs’ own Expeditionary Snipers on a failed drug test. It took him all of two weeks to teach us that was a big old lie. Go figure: drug addicts lie. Amirite? One night we caught him railed to the gills and shooting prisoners of war from a tower three blocks west of the prison camp the people we were working for were running.

To be fair the people we were working for were not treating the people inside all that well and there were already a lot of dead bodies lying around due to starvation and various rage beatings by the new victors in this mean-spirited little conflict on that world. To be further fair, the people who were prisoners had been earning that particular reward for about twenty years while in control of the planet by running a totalitarian overstate in which ninety-five percent of the population were openly considered slaves.

They were really into this old Earth philosopher called Nietzsche or something.

So Junkboy was up there with a .308 Marcotti that Sleeper used for infiltration. Canned and all, so his shots were going unnoticed for the most part. He was mainly shooting down prisoners who were grubbing for grubs in the bloody dirt where their own had recently been beaten to death…

Yeah, it was really that bad and the general consensus in Strange Company was that we didn’t like the gig and were looking for the first dropship that could get us all back up to the Spider.

Sleeper shows up looking for his rifle because it’s missing, and Junkboy, who we were close to calling “Shiny” because he was always so up and ready to pull any op at all hours of the day or night, had been interested in said missing rifle hours earlier. Intensely interested. It caused note among the normally taciturn mercenaries we’d all become during the darkness of that gig. Sleeper checked the duty roster and saw that Junkboy was pulling twelve to two on the OP tower that guarded our little ad hoc barracks. And there our preeminent sniper, he is basically the rock star of Ghost, finds his weapon being employed in the commission of some serious war crimes.

War crimes we will have to pay for. If we’re lucky they just come out of our company bonuses. If we’re not, and we’re caught, the Adjudicators could have us spaced just above planetary orbit.

Yeah, war crimes don’t mean much out here on the rim of human space, but given the right circumstances and some government types from Central out here on a fact-finding do-good mission, heads might just roll. Or burn up in atmo.

Or our