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

incomplete map. But it was fascinating. The ship, as we already knew, was huge, but it seemed even more so from the inside. There were many strange and interesting things on the map I didn’t have time to study.

“Ever been here before?” I asked the Monarch in a sub-channel over the comm.

“No. Believe it or not I’m learning and developing as much as you are right now, Orion. I gathered data, as much as I could during my incarceration. Then what I could while I was rogue from the Monarchy. Accessing the Library was difficult with my restricted status. But not impossible.”

Okay, so that’s new information. She was in Monarch jail. Oh and there’s such a thing as Monarch jail.

“So what happened? Why are we here?”

We broke out of quarters and entered some kind of giant tube.

“Hang on…” said the Monarch. “Picking up a signal.”

I told everyone to halt and ran back into the darkness. The captain hustled up out of it, flipping around to walk backward as he thumbed more shells into his shotgun. Hauser and Jacks behind him. The Kid just behind the captain.

I tapped the Kid as he passed.

He looked at me and I could see the fear was gone. He was on point. He was Company now. Grim. Determined. And willing to do just about anything to make sure we all got through.

“Doing good?” I asked him.

He smiled. “Good enough, Sar’nt.” Then… “Where ya want me?”

“Go forward and link up with Chief Cook.”

The captain turned toward me in the darkness. Suddenly light went on forward of us in the tube we’d just encountered. Bright white light.

“There’s a lot of them back there, Sergeant,” said the Old Man. “Give ’em enough room and they’d break out. We’re down to half on ammunition. If so, we’ll switch Pigs and leave the cyborg to hold our rear. Copy?”

I didn’t like it. But I did copy.

It wasn’t quiet to our rear. You could hear animal screeching. Howls. More rude drums and those horns echoing off distant and unseen corridors throughout the corpse of a ship. I could only imagine horror-show dark passages with torches and the strange hieroglyphs that told the madhouse stories of the apes. And of course, their propaganda that didn’t bode too well for us hooma.

Comm from the Monarch.

“I have access to systems deeper in. The science team was able to tap in and jury-rig some access. There are a couple of defendable science stations this far forward. The Node is one. My Monarch credentials get recognized instantly. Should we move now, Orion?”

I told her to start out. I waited and then led Team Two toward the big tube. Suppressive fire from Hauser was able to keep the ape-monkey swarms back despite stray incoming that whistled past us and slapped interior hull.

The giant tube that ran through this section was now illuminated. And it was empty. A seamless hatch, molded to the curve of the wall, had been opened inward on the opposite side of the tube. The Kid popped out there, signaling that Team One went that way.

Another thing I hadn’t spotted on the first visual recon of the big tube was now apparent in the brilliant white light. Someone in a spacesuit. Someone giant. At least nine feet tall. He was lying in the center of tube, near the hatch. His upper torso leaning against the rising curve of the tube wall.

I led Team Two forward and into the hatch. Passing the skeleton looking out from the shattered mask of the spacesuit. It was an old spacesuit. Something from the early days of extra-solar exploration. The first systems. Alpha Centauri. All the usual safety seals and breathing gear. But we don’t have nine-foot-tall humans now, and we didn’t have them then.

I only had a moment to glance at it. The skeleton inside the spacesuit behind the smashed faceplate. The horns and drums behind us had switched to down-tube by the time we reached the hatch. The apes and monkeys had decided to come at us from a new direction and the tube was telegraphing their move. The captain went past me, barrel of the shotgun leading the way. Then Hauser who was linking another belt effortlessly to the big Pig he carried. Then Jacks with his ruck full of claymores.

The skeleton… I stopped and stared in amazement at it for the brief second I had before we moved on. It was human-ish. Desiccated. And it had three eyes. Or rather three empty eye sockets staring out at me where there should have been eyes in the long ago of life.

I wondered who it was in that way I do when I pass such corpses. But then remembered mercenaries don’t have to wonder. They just have to stay alive to the next gig. It’s what we do.

It’s the private military contractor version of not my monkeys, not my circus.

Speaking of…

The first of the leaping monkeys, almost running on all fours, came out of the darkness down-tube, racing and madhouse screaming for hooma flesh and blood. Spears and gunshots too.

Time to go.

I ducked into the hatch and was grateful it could be closed and locked down manually. Hauser took over and dogged it tight as we watched the panels running alongside it indicate lockdown mode, electronic locks in place.

The monkeys began to beat on it almost instantly, thundering a hundred paws and claws at once. Enraged at its presence. The sound is something I’ll never forget. The screeching. The hammering. The spine-scratch of claws dragging mindlessly mad along its length.

There was no doubt once I ran out of ammo there wasn’t even the option to fight it out. Those things would tear us to shreds. Then, as Punch signaled me they’d found the last passageway to the Node and we were proceeding in, the red lights that ringed the hatch switched over to yellow. Indicating the locks were being disabled. Then green. A moment later dozens of claws reached in and through the appearing seam, beginning to