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

plate doing that. We had to take her on her word. Not that it mattered. If you got hit in the plate, which covered your very vital pump and pipes, and the rocket exploded, it was going to blow off your head, legs, and arms.

But your heart and lungs would be okay. Theoretically. According to her. So there’s that.

“What about gel sabot rounds?” Punch had asked. She’d ignored that. Gel sabot burned through mech armor. No carrier plate was going to stand up to ferro-dicyanoacetylene rounds that cooked vehicle armor. Once that gel splashed on impact, even heavy armor melted like butter.

I answered my ever-curious assistant squad leader for her.

“Punch, you get hit by a gel sabot round, you’ll wish you were dead for about five seconds before you are actually dead. The secondary explosion will be a mercy as that stuff melts your chest cavity. Or guts.”

He nodded. That made sense to him. He’d packaged the universe and placed it on the mental shelf where it needed to go once more. Now he could drive on.

The new plates would do this, but they would not do that. I could read that in his eyes. He’s that way. A sergeant must know how his men think. If only to avoid how they might get themselves killed thinking on their own.

Forward, we’d broken the armed ape attack, but the flanks were now in big trouble. I tapped the captain as he thumbed shells into his combat shotgun and scanned for more apes to engage. Hooting and barking from the armed animals echoed off the walls and rocks of the canyon all around us. It was like listening to a chorus of insanity and feral death. Surreal until you realized it was very real, and very close.

“Sir, moving to check on Team Two. You got it here?”

“Get it on, Sergeant,” said the Old Man tersely and moved to pull back Punch and Choker now that we were getting a break forward. Incoming was still peppering the rocks here, but it was unaimed. It was more like they were trying to get into position for another attack here while at the same time keeping our heads down.

It was hard not to fixate on the fact that the animals, the apes, were running tactics.

Hoser stalked forward to a better rock to fire from and took a round in the arm. He didn’t notice and instead opened up with a blur of high-cycle from our right. His face was hard-set and mean and it was clear he intended to do as much harm as possible to our enemies with time remaining. Hustle trailed behind the big gunner getting another belt ready, crouching low and staying back and to the left of our Pig gunner.

I would’ve killed for a gun run from a close air support dropship right at that moment. But beggars can’t be choosers, can they? I headed back to the rear and passed the chief and the Little Girl crouching behind a rock.

“Hey Orion,” said the chief good-naturedly as he ejected a magazine from his pistol and slid in another. His face was red and sweating. His tone familial. As though I’d just passed him on an evening walk through the neighborhood. The Little Girl was squatting down in the shadow of the rock they were covering behind. Her big clompy boots dug into the sand. Her dark coat making her a kind of rock all unto herself. She had the big used hearing protection muffs over her tiny skull and was pressing them together to block out the gunfire all around.

Her dark eyes watched me as I moved past the two of them, heading back to check on Team Two. I was waiting for the smell of autumn. The burning leaves. And the wind suddenly coming up to howl and moan that the two points in space-time were connecting. That her friend was coming…

“We’ll hold until relieved,” said the chief as I went past, leaning over the rock and beginning to blaze away at something forward.

I danced back through the rocks, following the sound of Hauser’s light machine gun and the sounds of the other rifles in that team. Jacks and the Kid. Not really trying to avoid incoming. How could I? It was so wild and unaimed by the apes. Yeah, they were ferocious and fast, but they weren’t great shots. Maybe firearms weren’t suited to their hands. Their manipulation of such weapons wasn’t pro. But I’d seen speed and volume, and savage ferocity, turn lost firefights around in a heartbeat. So they had that going for them.

To our rear were piles of dead apes here and there. I shouted at Hauser that I was coming from their twelve and to hold fire. The attack there was petering out as I managed to get up to them. The apes had suddenly begun retreating back into the crevices and up the rock walls of the canyon.

More fire was suddenly starting up forward and I could hear the boom of the captain’s shotgun mixing with the burping bursts of the Team One Pig. Choker and Punch adding in single shots here and there to pick up targets of opportunity.

Team Two had been knocked around good as I assessed our rear flank. The Kid was sitting cross-legged in the sand. His rifle across his knees. His head down. Hauser had strips of his synthetic flesh ripped away, as was much of his chest rig. It had been shredded to uselessness by terrible animal claws when the fighting had gotten danger close. Real danger close in fact.

Now the cyborg was scanning the distances. Waiting for them to come at us again as the smell of burnt cordite hung heavy in the air.

“We killed twenty-two, Sergeant.”

Jacks was near the Kid, watching the rocks with his shorty Bastard up and ready to engage if they did attack again. The ruck on his back was strapped with claymores. I wondered how close he’d gotten to detting the whole