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

What was the problem, I asked him.

“Oh, that.” He snickered, and I was sure he was going to go for that embolism again. His face turning red. Him bending over his swollen girth. “It has a tendency to target friendlies.”

“Tendency?” I said.

“Above seventy percent of the time.” And then he died laughing as he walked back to the CP, when the attack had been stopped and the rest of the night was promising to be a long and tense unquiet.

I hate everyone in Voodoo.

But more about that later.

Chapter Four

On some date no one will ever care much about, somewhere out along the leading edge of the Stretch, two mercenary companies went to war on one another one dark and rainy night after the defense of LZ Syro—the bank where Junkboy bought it—and the resumption of offensive combat ops by the Resistance. Us. We were back on the move, peace talks dead though some said they were just stalled. Enough mem must have arrived planetside to keep the war going for a few more weeks. Someone somewhere still thought they had a chance to flip the tables. And we were going for it. All this happened during the wide-ranging, and very much lost cause, battle for a world called Crash. Or Astralon depending on who you asked.

The Stretch is a string of stars out along the farthest edge of human expansion. Crash, or Astralon, resides in a bright little cluster of frontier worlds. You could almost call it a micro-capital.

Crash was a very mean little war. That year’s mean little war in a long list of small, dirty wars getting longer, and meaner, all the time. One of many, as some like to say. One of many for many, many years since the Monarchs had gotten interested in the galaxy again.

Like I said, no one would ever care much about the date, much less the war. And certainly no one cared about the junkyard dogfight that broke out between Strange Company and Grau Skull Resolutions on a world some long-dead scout had gotten the honor of designating as Crash on the universal stellar charts for all time to come.

Getting one on the USC is something if you’re a scout. It’s like getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Like if you’re interested in that sort of thing it makes you a big deal. Kinda.

Who knows, maybe he, that long-ago scout, wasn’t dead. Maybe the Monarchs had paid him off in longevity and all the mem he could do way back after this world had been found and colonized. Or maybe that scout was in extended coffin sleep, hyper-headed somewhere no one had gone yet. Looking to hack another world for the maps way out beyond the ever-expanding frontier. Name another planet that would one day become a colony and maybe get big enough to go to war on. Get a note in the histories if he, that scout, was on the right side of things. More stats in the Scout Hall of Fame even though I don’t think there actually is one.

The Monarchs like to keep a tight control on history. It allows them to keep a tight control on everything else. Tell the official story and you can tell any story you want. Especially the one where you’re always on the right side. Where you’re always the hero. That’s how the Monarchs like to run the show. And it is their show to run.

But out here on this dark and soggy night, as the drops brought us in a few klicks into this week’s No One’s Land and the gunships pulled back to protect the transports with standoffs while the dropships blew mud in every direction and howled off and away into the darkness, it was just us. Strange Company was here for the hit. And of course, the poor scumbags who’d signed the dotted line on a contract to be our enemies over at the Skull this time. They were the victim tonight.

They just didn’t know it yet.

Grau Skull Resolutions. Like they were, note the usage of past tense, some high-speed security conglomerate with offices on Bright Star and Rigel. Made mercs run by suits wearing the best of suits and sporting cybermodel escorts with six trillion follows. Doing high-tech security contracts with state-of-the-art death merchandise for the slugs in Grau Skull to actually go forth and do said mayhem.

If you’ve got to be in the PMC biz, being a suit running the contracts ain’t a bad life. It’s all show and dough with none of the hardships like violent death, disease, and more violent death.

They weren’t all that. Grau Skull was just like us when you got right down to it. Mean and desperate. Crash, or Astralon, had reduced us all down to our original binary. We were back to being what we really were after six months of fighting. Just code and no fancy plug-ins. Getting paid to do some pretty shady stuff in this mean little dogfight for all the marbles out here on Crash. Or Astralon. A war no one knew about, or even cared much about, back on glittery Bright Star. This was over on the Eastern Corridor Front after Syro LZ. We were part of the big push for the capital now that the Resistance had gotten financed by a new infusion of mem. Crash City was the goal. The wide vast sprawl of brutalist apartment blocks that went on for featureless kilometer after kilometer. Built back during the techsplosion at the turn of some century. Back when this world looked like it was going to turn itself into something respectable, and the Monarchs were thinking about setting up vacation estates to oversee their holdings. Back when the frontier was here and not fifty parsecs farther out toward the dark and crazy of the rim. Where it gets all weird and scout service ships go missing all the time if you believe the fakes. Back