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

about. Unless they feel death stalking. Still, stellar warrants and bounty hunters trying to collect on those pasts abound in plenty, just as the rumors do. But a Capellan Necktie doesn’t make one a freak in the Strange Company. And bounty hunters, or jealous husbands, who come looking, get everyone in Strange Company’s attention with all the ammo we can provide. Debt settlers get settled. That’s the reason we become brothers. It’s us against the universe. Regardless of whether we’re getting paid.

Even the freaks in Voodoo need that protection. And in fact, they probably need it the most if you believe the conspiracies about the Dark Labs. Freaks spend their lives looking over their shoulders. Watching for hunters sent by the Labs.

We’ve got those. The real freaks are in Voodoo Platoon. Measure twice, cut once, as I warned the Kid. And every “Kid” before him.

But the enemy round that gave Sergeant Hannibal the grin-sneer and reveals him to be the true monster I know him to be for all to see, he got that one on our last gig.

I still count it one of the best days of my life.

For about twelve hours as he got medevacked back to the rear, I was sure Sergeant Hannibal was a dead man and that my life was much improved. Even Chief Cutter confessed he didn’t have high hopes for anything other than a traumatic brain injury for my enemy. Our company physician was busy throwing up before morning sick call when I went to ask him if my luck was gonna hold. He waved me away and continued hurling up last night’s bottles of rum. Five days later Amarcus shows up like a monster that can’t be killed so easily, takes his platoon back out into the bush, and wipes out that village he got wounded near, from off the face of that world.

Burned it to the ground and didn’t leave anyone inside alive. Company got docked fifty thousand mem by the War Crimes Tribunal. Client had to pay it out for us. Then they got shy about the rest of our pay. We convinced them otherwise eventually. Voodoo gave their CEO nightmares and gray hair. In the end we got half of what was owed us.

That was on Mira. Mira was a living nightmare. A. Real. Living. Nightmare. Burning down a village of “officially” neutrals was the least of all the wrong that went down on that particular nightmare of a smoldering little genocide.

It was told to me that Sergeant Hannibal was rumored to have muttered, “’Sides,” to Cheater, one of his toady squad leaders, “ain’t no neutrals in war.” He said that as he watched the whole village that no longer was burn down and bloom like an oil refinery on sudden fire. The just-dead still lying in the long dry keffgrass with their throats cut.

Tonight, between two sergeants who’d murder each other if we could, in the dark near us, the captain, wearing nothing but his standard worn brown leather trench coat with old surplus fatigues underneath, and some carrying harness I’ve never gotten a good look at, comes onto the lev-rail platform. His worn boots dark and muddy. He keeps low and studies our positions for the attack. He’s got his ’nocs out and he’s scanning the whole of the objective and checking to make sure all Strange elements are in place.

If Amarcus and I were going to duke it out right now, and it always feels like a summer storm is about to light up right between us, then the captain’s presence shuts all that nonsense down immediately. It’s company business now. Company time. Even Amarcus Hannibal is afraid of the captain. Because he’s smart. Evil, but smart. It shows by how much he tries to pretend he respects the Old Man as a combat soldier. And hates him at the same time when he thinks the Old Man isn’t looking.

You can’t see that. But you can feel it.

Stinkeye confirmed it one time. “That one,” he said of Amarcus Hannibal. “He wouldn’t know the galaxy’s heart of darkness if he found it. Because it’d just feel like Tuesday to that chile. Know what I mean, Little King?”

He calls me Little King. Says that’s what the name Orion really means back on Earth. Says it’s something called Irish. And spelled different. But spellings changed once we left. And so maybe Stinkeye’s right even though he lies all the time.

Amarcus doesn’t respect anyone. He’s nothing more than a cold-blooded killer looking for his next vic. It’s just a good thing he found the profession of mercenary, because if not, I guarantee you he would’ve become a mob boss, serial killer, or crooked cop on some tiny world or station he’d made all his own. A place that would have been, for all intents and purposes, a kind of hell for those who lived there. And he would have been their King Satan.

Having said all that, all these terrible truths about my fellow Strange Company brother, Amarcus is actually an excellent soldier. And combat leader. He may run his platoon on a pure one-eighty-proof fear that he will kill them all and bury their bodies where no one will ever find them, but he won’t let any of his men get killed easily by anyone dumb enough to call him an enemy. So basically, they worship Sergeant Amarcus Hannibal in Dog Platoon. It’s a cult. A cult of fear. And that’s exactly the way Hannibal wants it.

Of course, half of them are probably wanted for murder themselves on some world somewhere. I ask myself why I’m dumb enough to make Amarcus Hannibal an enemy.

And there’s no answer I’ve ever found that explains it.

I just do.

Chapter Five

We’re sitting there in the mud and the rain of the ruined lev station, waiting for the captain to give the signal to attack tonight’s House Party. We always keep operational objective tags the same. We’re getting rigid in our old ways. What’s next, senility?