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

This is not, repeat not, the bright age of the company’s history. You should’ve seen us back when we were really something. Now we’re getting old, tired, and maybe even a bit rusty. Or maybe just the last three months on the losing side of this conflict has me feeling that way about us. About me. About the universe in general.

It was getting hard to tell which.

I looked up and down the line of my platoon in the dark blue of the night and ruin. Drifting mist where once there had been rain. Squads and teams, grimly staring forward into the rainy darkness we will soon assault through. Watching the ruin of the No One’s Land we’d cross, a hundred meters of relatively open ground, to break and enter into the hulking monolith at the center. Grau Skull had cleared what they could to create this open ground. A kill zone to kill us within.

Chances were… some of us would die out there. Or at least get hit in the process. But like I said no one had come and confessed all their sins to me lately, so maybe it was just me and me alone that felt uneasy about the battlefield tonight. Maybe everyone else felt just the right amount of Strange Company get it on. Which, for the Strange Company, was just a little bit too much extreme violence. That was the best way to feel our unit greeting and reply. A little too much. Enough to feel just invincible. Too much, and you got crazy. Too little, and you felt weak and vulnerable against what the universe and others with guns were going to do to you. Like the dice were against you somehow.

Just enough and you had an advantage. Like you were just crazy enough to get up to some real trouble. Like… you were the living embodiment of the fact that the enemy had no idea what was coming for them. They were the fishing junk… and you were the typhoon. That’s the best way to put it.

I felt the funnel coming on. Dialing in on the ultra-violence I’d need in the next few minutes. Managing that and the ability to think, lead, shoot, move, and communicate through the next few.

Still we waited for the captain to give the signal to attack. He usually just whispered it in the ether of our comms. His dry and smoky voice always tired and a mix of irritation and impatience, go figure that. “Go. Go now.” That’s how he’d give the order to attack. That’s how he always gave the order to attack. As if saying, Go and take some lives now. That’s how he always gave it.

That’s how we always did it.

I was rehearsing all that in the moments before the attack because I needed to get into that headspace and I needed to gin up the motivation to do to others what I’d been paid to do. I was approaching Bang, and when the order was given I didn’t want to be left of it. The right side of the ladder of fun and violence was Get it on. Right of Bang and both parties were in it whether anyone liked it or not. Best to be there first.

And I needed to be there now.

He’ll say this and then we’ll do that, I was telling myself. Then Hauser slid into the line silently, near me. Moving from space to space among the squads. Hauser’s next in command of Reapers if I get it. Puncher stays where he is. They don’t need Hauser much and he basically just plays utility for the other three squads while running Third as his own.

“Do you know what we’re waiting for?”

That’s such a Hauser question. His voice isn’t totally flat and monotone like the old first-generation hunter-killers. There’s almost a quiet calm they added into his speech patterns that I find comforting. His model got that upgrade and gave him the hint of a German accent. He told me that one time, when he was reviewing his protocols. Then he told me what German was and spoke some of it. It seemed like a harsh and angry language and I’d never heard anything like it in all my travels. Strange that they gave it to him, the hints of the accent, to make him more relatable to the humans they planned on him working with.

But the question is so Hauser. What are we waiting for? No impatience. Just a sincere desire to know. Trying to figure out humanity, and the vagaries of war, at the same time. He’s an Eight Series combat-model cyborg with a four-year life span that got hacked after he ran away from whatever hell the corporations had him locked away in. He doesn’t understand that the captain may be waiting for some moment only the human can sense out there in the night. Trying to balance the plan against the smell of the darkness and what he finds in it. Watching the shadows of the brutalist block of authoritarian mixed-use space we’re about to get involved in. Wondering about snipers and gunners that could be waiting in there, for us. Waiting for the perfect moment to try and cross as much open ground as possible in order to avoid as many early casualties as possible.

War is art.

You gotta feel it.

I reject the science. Even though there is some of that in it too. And magic also. It’s best just to call it an art. It can be measured. But then again, it can’t. And that’s where the science fails. Magic. Hell, sometimes it seems nothin’ but.

“He’s waitin’ on Nether,” says Jingo, who’s come up to add his two mem, since he’ll be attacking with us and interfacing with the scouts for designated fire should we identify targets going into the structure on our way in.

“Oh,” says Hauser the Cyborg in melancholic monotone. Like I said, his voice, and towering stature, calm me. Hauser doesn’t not like Nether.