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

I’d do it. I’d use it to kill him so I could stay alive one minute longer.

But we were both pros. And we both knew it.

You have to be honest about these things.

“Guess you’ll have to come in here and find out, Orion,” said Steadly in the silence that followed.

And so we did.

Chapter Six

The attack on the Astralon port of stellar entry was two days later than the two weeks I’d expected it to happen by. And what was supposed to have been an oh-dark-murder didn’t kick off until the sun was mid-morning high and no one was in the mood to cross open ground to get their kill on.

The Resistance generals, again the actual legitimate authority of the world known as Crash on the official stellar charts, had dithered over a massive artillery strike on our behalf, finally releasing the big guns to fire at dawn. Great. I love artillery. Let the gun bunnies do all the work. Instead they did some work and then we were ordered forward into the day at the edge of the kilometers-wide starport of entry. The whole line was. This was the big one we’d all been waiting for.

The Resistance generals were going for all the marbles. I mean, they weren’t here. They weren’t actually going for it. It would be us going for all those marbles across all that wide concrete ring, artillery-savaged starships still on the ground, docking and boarding terminals on fire and burning. But that’s why we get paid the big bucks. Right?

Eight months of fighting on this world had boiled down to today. Whoever owned the starport owned traffic in and out of Crash and the rest of the system. Crash, like many of the rim worlds out here along the frontier, just needed a win to throw in with the actual rebellion against the Monarchs.

Something that wasn’t officially happening, according to the networks.

Maybe it’s time for some big-picture stuff. Since I’m slicing this account out of the main logs, and who knows what will happen to it, if all I can do is get it onto a cargo light hauler doing less than sub-light for the next forty years before it can get to the company’s lawyers and someone useful, then maybe I need to explain the whole galactic situation. Chances are it’s changed by the time someone reads this account.

Listen, you have to be realistic about these things. The galaxy’s a big place and stellar travel is an iffy proposition on a good day for most of the ships making the long dark haul between worlds.

Sorry to infodump. When I got this job, the job of the keeper of the official company log from Jojo No-Toes, before he got medical’d out on Surrant… Listen, there’s only so many limbs you can lose and still fight on without cybernetics, and the company hasn’t had cybernetic augments mem in ages. At least five contracts. But when I got this job, I said I’d do my best. So here it is. Here’s my best to get it all down on how we got involved with the Seeker.

A real live actual Monarch.

Listen, you didn’t catch us at our best. You should have seen us back in the day. Or so the old company logs seem to indicate about the mercenary outfit known as the Strange Company.

We ended up on Crash because it was just another contract. We have no dog in this fight between the rim worlds and the Monarchs. We’ve fought on both sides in a dozen different brushfire conflicts since the Sindo. That was the last big conflagration to sweep the galactic scene.

It’s just work. We try not to get caught up in the reasons for it. Therein lies belief, and as has been illustrated, belief will get you killed, right?

Crash, or Astralon as it likes to call itself, is the same story you’ll find on every one of those other worlds that are now either smoking piles of irradiated ruin, because a Monarch Avenger-class Battle Spire showed up and did it to death twenty-six different ways including G-beam strikes operating in the six gigawatt range per beam strike… or are under total Monarch control with a new outlook on life courtesy of orbital re-education rings, cyber-racks, and the locals always reminding one another it was “a good thing” the Ultras showed up. Like culties chanting out the orders that must be repeated and repeated if one is ever to earn some kind of reward in this life.

There are worlds forever ruined by a Battle Spire crew. Forever. Skeletal cities. Blackened landscape. Mutated freaks crawling the ravaged wasteland looking for a morsel to eat and maybe a dirty irradiated puddle to drink from. Starving masses ruled by the warlords left behind who managed to hold on to the military-grade weapons that survived the conflict.

No one goes to those worlds ever again.

Crash, or Astralon, isn’t there yet. It’s still in what I like to call DeathCon Three. Three is where you get to have a war because you think you’re actually gonna get free of the Monarchs’ tight grasp on human expansion and end up like some modern-day Juan of Mars. That you’ll fight a battle, or a series of battles, and carve out a nation-state among the stars that the Monarchs, enigmatic though they may be, will have to live with. If they could do it in the home system, then hey… why not out here along the dark rim and so far away.

Except that’s all a big lie. Juan and his Ranger buddies died badly a hundred years after they got their taste of temporary freedom. And every minor potentate, or newly formed Independence Committee, on all these rim worlds out here thinks they can do it differently than old Juan did. So, they train up their militaries and maybe the local generals with combat service to the Monarchs, and convince them that yes, given enough supply from the haulers moving between worlds they can break away