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

an aircrew might, dropping them well behind enemy lines among a civilian populace to go cause their particular brand of mayhem and harm. Then you tend to see them as just other military tools. Weapon systems. The crew chief wasn’t totally convinced Chief Cook was on the up-and-up. Maybe seventy percent. Cook was going to give him some bogus authentication codes that would have bought us another five meters closer to being covered by only one of the door gunners on the three drops. Five meters closer to the one in the drop we wanted.

But the sergeant stopped like a pro at just the right distance to keep us covered by at least one other gunner on another drop. Like it was SOP and Ultra DNA at the same time.

“Get down!” thundered Hauser, lowering the Pig and greasing the Ultra Marine sergeant at close range with a sudden burst of automatic fire.

While the sergeant was still stumbling backward, his chest armor ruined by smoking holes left from high-power AP 7.62, I faded behind Hauser, clearly not zombified by the bogus cyber collar, and dragged the shotgun off Hauser’s chest rig as incoming fire from the door gunner, depleted uranium incendiary, smacked into our combat cyborg and erupted across the dirt of the garden courtyard. Hauser absorbed the fire as best he could even though this stuff was perfectly good at jacking him up. Rounds came in hot, smashed into his metal frame, and began to melt it.

Without flinching, Hauser returned fire with the Pig and dusted the door gunner at twenty meters.

Chief Cook was doing some kind of awkward combat roll on the ground to get away from the door gunner’s fire. When he came up with his sidearm, lying on his belly in the dust, he screamed and unloaded on the door gunner facing us from the other drop on his flank.

I had no time to see if he got hits.

I was coming around Hauser, watching pieces of his metal frame and synthetic flesh fly away from the dying door gunner’s last burst as I dragged the combat shotgun up, loaded with slugs, and unloaded on the pilot through the glass canopy of the drop we were gonna take.

Surprise, super-soldiers!

The first two slugs smashed safety glass, and the third tore off his jaw, blowing brain matter and blood all over the front windshield. I could see pilot number two pulling his sidearm, but he had no shot on me. I raced for the cargo deck trying to get an angle on him for my last three shells.

He came out onto the cargo deck. But he was slow with the draw and I only needed to shoot him once, blowing him out onto the plaza on the far side of the drop.

Hauser pivoted and unloaded on the drop crew Chief Cook was targeting. Raking the aircrew with his particular brand of highly accurate and efficient fire.

The third aircrew was reacting and failed to see Punch, Jacks, Choker, Hustle and Hoser with the captain dragging the Kid out into the sunlight, while the Monarch picked up targets and engaged with her wicked little submachine gun, come at them from an opposite angle. Leaving the shadows of the data relay comm tower they’d come out of. They moved fast, using carbines and sidearms to sweep past the ship while Jacks tossed in his last explosive. Not a big one. A door charge he’d packed with tape after wrapping lots of fragments he’d found in the science lab. Steel screws he’d found boxes of.

The improvised explosive devastated the aircrew as flying metal fragments tore through armor and skin. Ruining instruments and hydraulics. One of the engines ingested something and exploded a second later, sending more debris across the courtyard. A fire started onboard that drop and by the time we were aboard the one we were taking, Chief Cook sliding into the pilot’s seat and running through the startup sequence, flipping switches and tapping contacts, that one was fully engulfed in black smoke.

“You know how to fly one of these?” I asked as we strapped in. The engines beginning to howl.

“Every Monarch intel operator knows how to jack a vehicle,” bragged Cook in a voice I’d seen him straight-up lie to people in. “Got five whole hours of stick time on one of these babies. Did an op on Venemah. Part of the train-up.”

At the same moment the Ultra teams, or what was left of them, appeared from the main hive of the station, running fast. Behind them were all the monkeys and apes in the world. Raving and racing to drag them down. Animal eyes murderous. Fangs working.

I watched as a sergeant, covering their rear, turned to unload with the squad automatic weapon. A storm of monkeys jumped him and dragged him down. Pulling the weapon out of his gauntlets as they tore at his armor.

Then he detted one of his grenades and blew a cluster of them in every direction. Including himself.

“Hang on to your butts!” shouted the chief as the Monarch slid into the blood-and-bone-matter-caked co-pilot’s seat next to him and started helping to get us ready for lift. “Combat takeoff in effect.”

Then we were airborne and turning away over the top of the station. Engines straining for lift. Orange daylight washing the cargo deck.

Some of the Ultras stopped to fire at us, assessing the situation. Seeing the carnage. Angry they were about to get the short end of the stick for once.

Those Marines got flying-tackled by more swarms of monkeys with guns, spears, and knives. Ripped apart by the larger apes bounding and racing for a piece of the action.

Hustle turned the Little Girl’s face away as we climbed. “Don’t look, honey,” he murmured over the comm.

The sun flashed through the blood-washed windows of the drop’s cockpit as the engines howled and we lifted away and over the desert, picking up our course track. Flying through the black billowing smoke of the forever engines of the Crash. And then