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

Everyone in all four of my squads knows what to do next. It’s breach and clear and CQB to the inner courtyard and central well of the massive building we’ve tagged tonight’s objective House Party.

The plan is on automatic now. My main job is I’ve gotta fight First Squad. And I’ve got to make sure they, and I, come out of this alive. For selfish, and unselfish, reasons.

My two breachers go to work on the entrance we’ve been assigned to hit. Building schematics, pulled from Crash City’s building and planning commission’s ruined server, indicate this was once a large apartment back in the day. Water charges are placed along an iron door made from scrap someone welded onto the frame that isn’t so stable anymore. Second breacher comes in and swings a sonic ram, and the door is down.

Funnel time.

Of course, I lead the way.

The night-vision lenses along the surfaces of my tired eyes switch over to low light and we’re in and ready to kill everyone. Room was unguarded. Grau thought a welded door was “good enough.” They thought wrong, and it’ll cost them tonight. We clear the room fast and proceed to the main access corridor beyond the inner door. I go right, and So-So, First Squad leader and gunner, swings left and opens up immediately on three Grau Skullers caught in the hall and responding to the multiple breaches across this level. The Stuka 42 So-So carries for a light machine gun blurs and just ruins them. A tornado of invisible fire races from the barrel of his weapon just as I turn left and shoot one of their leaders talking on his comm, hand up to his throat mic and probably sitrepping a bad situation getting worse. For them. I shoot him three times. Twice in the body and then once in the head as he slides down the wall. He gets it in the face as blood spatter paints the wall leading away from his wall-sliding corpse.

I should have shot him in the face first. That’s always a bad call, but I should’ve done it if just to shut down the comm he had with high-ups. Usually you want center mass and then you Mozambique the head for the kill. In the funnel and working, breathing hard and trying to get all that under control, and run my squad, and platoon, I was doing the best I could. I’d expected the killing to start in the last room. And somehow my mind must’ve dialed back a second. So when I fired, I nailed him center mass just to be safe. I wanted him down and dead now. I dotted his body twice and then blew off his face underneath his combat helmet. Then he was dead.

And so was the sitrep.

When I turned back to So-So smoke drifted through the hall where the sudden gunfight had broken our way. The 42 has ruined the three Grau Skull responders. Flashbangs are going off in other locations as is more gunfire across the first floor of the structure. Maybe I recognize it’s mostly our weapons.

Maybe I’m just hoping it is.

A huge explosion goes off in Dog’s lanes and rocks the building’s foundations underneath our boots. Over the comm I hear the captain order Ghost to enter and shift for the roof as we blast our way through ground level. All my squads are in and up. Next line of defenses is to take the rooms on the far side of the corridor. Doors get kicked and we enter shooting. No resistance survives. Still some gunfire here and there. Once again, the breachers come forward and place our biggest charges along the inner well walls of the central core. Blasting these will give us access to the interior of the building where we expect their command and supply to be located. A once-opulent—according to online brochures we found from fifty years ago—shopping arcade where the latest goods and highest-quality services could be had by the dwellers in this state-of-the-art living adventure, awaits us. We theorize that Grau’s command and control are located here.

Crush the head and the serpent dies. After that it’s just cleanup.

The brilliance of the captain’s plan is that we hit them from a direction they hadn’t oriented most of their defenses toward. The dropship put us in behind their line and we’d hit at an angle that wasn’t considered the front door. Now we were inside and they were having to shift their defenses to respond to our sudden incursion.

We backed out of the room that abutted the inner well and detonated the heavy charges placed on the inner wall. Again the building rocked, creaked, and groaned, and Jingo swore as he linked up with us.

“She’s gonna come down on us, Orion!” he shouted, looking at the crumbling roof in the dark and shadowy room of the once-opulent “living adventure.” I could hear the fear in his voice. I waved him back and moved my assaulters into position. Guns up and stacked, I had my count on personnel. No one was down or even hit. I saw the Kid in the back. His eyes were wide, but he was in the game. Smoke and dust drifted from the room where the explosives had just gone off, and yeah, bits of ceiling rained down on us out here in the corridor. I could hear gunfire coming from the courtyard well. Dog was engaged.

“Move.”

We entered, So-So picking up the left once more with his team, me on the right, selecting targets and shooting them down.

The next three minutes were solid gunfight.

We took some casualties. But we’d made sure everyone at least had ceramic plates on their chest carriers. No fatalities for us. Instead we gave out a lot more than we got. No one was sure if we got their command at first when a hurricane of lead got exchanged in a crossfire between us and a group fortified behind a long dry elaborate water feature made