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

bulk into the crust of this world. What I saw as we rounded the last crimson-and-blood-orange-colored rock bend in the narrowing trail, where the rock had heated and boiled long ago, was unbelievable.

I would have told you right there that Stinkeye was right when he said the Crash might be something other than what everyone thought it was. Or whatever he’d said. Something along those lines. But I don’t think this, what we were now seeing as we stood on the edge of the fantastic chasm, was what our chief Voodoo operator and oldest living member of the company was talking about. What we were seeing was something completely different. Orders of magnitude different. Something that destroyed the Monarch narrative everyone had either been told, or inherently believed, about one of the great wonders, or mysteries, of the galaxy.

The ship was still intact.

Ruined for sure. Crushed and damaged along vast sections of its incredible length. It was easily larger than a Battle Spire from what we could see of it as it raced off into the cavern darkness at a down-angle of at least fifteen degrees. Which is to say it was huge. And it had driven itself straight into the planet long ago, creating a tube down into the crust.

“I always thought the ship was destroyed. That it was… it was actually a crash,” I murmured aloud. Everyone else was too dumbstruck to answer.

As the name on the official planetary maps implies. The Crash Wastes. I was supposed to be looking at an incredible crash of vast alien technology that was rumored to be fantastic. The Monarchs had held claim here, declaring Ol’ Amos’s patch of the desert specifically theirs. Allowing the rest of the planet to go to private investors willing to take a chance on the stellar frontier.

But perhaps that had been the game. Maybe they’d sold the whole Crash Wastes story about the total destruction of an alien anomaly of unexplainable origin. Naming it a crash, the Crash, was a great way to keep the serious at bay. Ever seen a starship crash? There ain’t much left. Ships that do light and just under have a tendency to leave very little but a giant crater. Put some apex predators out here to keep everyone away, sow some superstition and paranoia, and you can quietly keep a working alien starship unlike anything we’ve ever encountered to yourself.

Even this far out along the frontier.

The Monarch stared out across the chasm at it just as the rest of us were doing. Incredibly, power was still on in some sections of the immense starship that weren’t too badly damaged. Other sections were crumpled like crushed beer cans. And across the gap in the chasm, vines dangled or were tied to either the cliff or the canyon wall. Except they weren’t vines. They were ancient hoses and systems that had been torn from the ship and anchored to the chasm, or to the ship itself.

“That’s how they get across…” muttered Punch. “They swing. The apes. That’s how they do it.”

“Hard pass,” said Choker, who hated ship-breaching ops. Too much lack of control for a narcissistic sociopath.

Everyone ignored him. He always said that when it came to hull breaching. We always sent him first anyway. He had skills and was actually fairly good at it if you didn’t mind the hyperventilating.

“That’s correct,” said the Monarch softly. The silence was deafening inside the tube of the wreck. Maybe all you could hear was the black smoke boiling up from the gargantuan engines high above us. A dull kind of puffing bass rumbling that seemed to come from somewhere deep within. Her voice was monotone, like the voice of someone almost hypnotized by what she was seeing. A fully intact generational starship. Something out of Earth’s distant colonization past. Here, mostly intact, inside a deep canyon that seemed to fall away into an unknowable darkness to our left and down below. Where the ancient vessel had driven itself into this world long ago.

The whole scene played with your sanity.

“It almost looks familiar…” muttered the captain, who rarely said much beyond orders or questions on company biz. I could tell he too was taken aback by what we were seeing. The wreck was almost as much of a mystery as was his fabled past with the Ultras if that were to be believed.

“I thought it was a crash,” I said to her again. Staring at her now. Accusing her and not hating myself for doing it. Dismissing her otherworldly beauty and the pheromones that seemed to fall from her whether she liked it or not. Starting to feel angry at her. I wanted answers. I needed answers and I was beginning to feel we were being lied to. That a lot of people had gotten killed for nothing except deceptions designed by someone to make someone else rich. Except this was something else. This was stunning and amazing. This was bigger than petty power games even if those games were played by Monarchs. This shook the foundations.

What had Stinkeye said? Shake the pillars of the galaxy stuff?

Was the war on Crash, or Astralon, nothing but a pretense to get this ship under Monarch control finally? Had we fought for nine months for nothing but a lie? I felt the world begin to spin just a little and I had no idea whether that was from the insanity of what I was looking at, or the narratives raging inside my head.

Ah, Sergeant Orion, I whispered to myself. You never fought for anything other than money. And money is the biggest lie of all, ain’t it?

My emotions were getting out of control. I grabbed a piece of my own skin and twisted, causing as much pain as I could. Getting myself centered.

I felt my hand creep toward my sidearm. I felt wild and dangerous regardless of the self-inflicted discipline I was forcing myself to endure. I knew I’d blow her brains out if she’d lied to us.