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

swirled all around. If you’d been stuck out in it, like some desert shadar nomad, it would have driven you mad.

We pulled the vehicles in close to the crawler once we arrived at the rally and covered everything in tarps that could be trusted to hold against the hot dry thunder winds. The other platoons and elements had made it there before us. Ten minutes later I was at the briefing with the rest of the command staff as the wind rocked and beat at the multi-ton supply crawler we met inside. Which was something when you really thought about it. But I was tired and there was hot coffee. And I was grateful for most of the faces I saw. Some I thought dead were alive. One I wanted dead, was still alive. And of course, we exchanged the grim totals of who had fallen. Their stories blossoming inside my skull as I kept their secrets.

Sergeant Biggs laughed grimly from a corner of the briefing center inside the big multi-sectioned tracked crawler. He cut salami with a combat knife as the huge vehicle shook at a sudden tempest that had come from out of the deepest parts of the desert to buffet the thick outer armor.

“Ain’t like no desert I ever been in afore,” he muttered like some great sabertoothed bear in the deeps of winter.

The First Sergeant strode in and got the meeting started once he’d made his presence generally known. The Old Man and the Ghost platoon sergeant were missing. As was the Monarch.

So that was curious to me.

“Here’s the situation, men,” began the First Sergeant. “Captain and Sergeant Slick are out with Ghost picking up some supplies our employer saw fit to stash out here before all this got started. I have a frago from the captain that will get us started on what we gotta do for the next phase of the op to get off-planet. No gripin’. No changin’. Everyone’s got assignments. So to break it down, here’s how it’s gonna go, boys.”

He flicked on the projector and showed us a map of the area surrounding the Crash. A lot of details were curiously absent. But of course, I’d seen redacted maps before. This was the best you were gonna get with a site this sensitive.

“We have two objectives we have to hit in the next twelve hours to make the LZ. Which, I might add, is gonna be a hostile takeover no matter what drone recon is saying right now about the situation on the ground. I expect things to get out of hand, but that ain’t no problem for Strange Company.”

I checked the drone recon update of the airfield we needed to take. So far… no enemy units. No Ultras. Light to almost no drop traffic coming in or out. That was unusual for a world everyone was trying to get off of now that a full-scale invasion was underway.

“Smells like an ambush,” remarked my personal devil, Sergeant Hannibal, from nearby. His voice that of a bitter farmhand hoss who wasn’t gonna buy the latest snake oil to make town. He was studying the drone recon data too. And he was right. I was thinking the same thing. That site had ambush written all over it. Except this time, we couldn’t just vaporize it with one of the Monarch’s trick grenades. We needed a ship on that field for our ticket outta this mess. We had to take that LZ with gunfire and bad intentions. Fast, quick, and brutal.

I was already looking at places to set up kill zones with the two Pigs I had left in Reaper. Traversing gunfire in a wide space like that was going to be our best friend.

We did need more ammo though. We weren’t critical, but we’d get there fast in that kind of situation.

“Yeah, Amarcus,” said the First Sergeant a bit testily, “I bet it is. But that’s the way out. Monarch says she’s got a flight coming in that thinks it’s picking up hard mem from the local depository. Armored transport. Hard part is they don’t know they’re about to act as a taxi service to get us all upwell to the Spider. To make that happen we need to hit this site back here away from the airfield…”

He brought up a new saved feed from the drone footage.

“That’s where you and your boys are gonna do what needs to get done, Sergeant Hannibal. Dog will hit the bank one hour prior to the arrival of our taxi. I ain’t gonna lie to you. This ain’t a surprise hit. You’re gonna have to fight your way through several streets to reach the bank. Now, obviously local forces’ll be thinking you’re going for the airfield to hijack a ship and get off-world. Which you and your Dog boys won’t be doin’. You’ll hit this bank, breach, and clear. We’re looking at a small defending force on that location, highly motivated, we suspect high-paid mercs. But that’s your specialty, ain’t it, Amarcus. So do the guards and blow the vault. Take as much hard mem as you can get your hands on once you’re inside. That’s company money to pay out our contract whether the generals like it or not. We’re gettin’ paid on this one. One way or another. But you also have to go to Box 88 inside the prime security vault two floors below the sub-basement, blow that, and retrieve a mem drive. Expect auto-gun sentries to that approach, Amarcus. What’s inside the box is the Monarch’s. She gets that, we get off-world.

“No mem drive? Then Strange goes to Plan B and we just take another ship ourselves. She can wave off our original transport if the deal goes south. But odds ain’t real good on that route and the situation is already a Pan Fire Drill with blindfolds. We got three elements in three places trying to coordinate a bank heist, an infiltration and ship capture, with as much sniper overwatch as