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

the big calls like their ancestors did since the planet came online and got discovered. Back when the real big fortunes were made. The Loyalists, on the other hand, loyal to the Monarchs that is, usually want things to stay the same. Which means letting the Monarchs have more and more control of your lives. They love the Monarchs. The Monarchs give and provide and as long as you accept your lot in life, in that the sky’s the limit as long as you don’t want to be a Monarch, then life is all gravy if you’re willing to bend the knee and wear the leash.

Some people want to be Chiefs though. No matter what. And the Monarchs only want Indians. So it goes. Enter mercenaries…

I guess the Resisters are a little jealous. Jealous of all that unlimited power the Monarchs have. Hey, I don’t judge. I just show up and get paid to fight for whoever. If I seem hard and callous, that’s totally by design. I got schooled a couple of times early on about getting caught up in that week’s cause. Now I know the realities and I measure everything twice, so I can cut once.

It’s best to just keep your pod face on and collect the pay from whoever’s paying you to kill. Believing in one side or another has a tendency to get you killed.

Think that’s just hardboy, fatalist mercenary with the tat that says, Kill ’Em All and Let the Universe Sort? Well I don’t have that particular ink. But every morning I get up and tell myself the same thing. Whether it’s in some mud hut, the actual mud, or even a five-star shot-to-hell hotel we commandeered for our base of operations on a world slowly going fever-mad, I look in the shaving mirror and say to myself, Believing in one side or another has a tendency to get you killed, Sergeant Orion.

So, don’t.

Example…

Our first op planetside. Here’s what belief has to do with getting you killed.

We were on the ground for about two weeks after getting shuttled down by sub-orbital drop-off from the Spider. Getting acclimatized. Geared up. Ready to go. Assessing the actual situation on the ground as opposed to what we were being told by our employers. That’s important in our line of work and we try as best as we can to get our own due diligence done so we can know the score before we start pulling the trigger.

When this conflict started, like I said it was one faction, probably the faction in charge, deciding it wanted to be free of the Monarchs back on Earth. Why share the take when you can keep it all local? So of course, they started all the independence rhetoric that gets everyone killed, eventually. Big speeches. Pride in planet. Spirit of the original colonists. That whole thing.

And of course, the Monarchs have their agents. Always watching. Always reporting back. It may seem like the Monarchs, mankind’s elitist of the elite, may do nothing and are only ever concerned with their fantastic-beyond-imagining lifestyle and schemes. But I know different. When they’re not using the fist, they’re in the shadows watching and waiting. Counting and calculating. Pulling the strings.

The indifference is just for show.

The Monarchs run everything and it’s best just to accept that if you wanna have a nice life. In a galaxy full of have-nots, they are the haves and this cannot be disputed. And they have no intention of having it any other way.

So the “loyal opposition” to the Resistance arose, and as ever with the Monarchs it rose within the mass of angry and disgruntled youth who wanted to be more like the Bright Worlds. Monarch Poster-Child Worlds is what they really should be called. Blah blah blah. Whatever. The Loyalists are just playthings of the Monarchs’ psyops division. Creations by master puppetmasters. They fell for it. They always do. Agitated. Made a nuisance of themselves to the Resistance and the undecided silent majority. And then one day found themselves in possession of lots of off-world weapons. They, the Loyalists, were dumb. If they would’ve looked closer they’d have seen the bloodstains on their weapons from the last group on another world the Monarchs ruined who thought they wanted to freedom-fight by serving the masters of the universe without knowing they were doing so.

It gets complicated because it’s murky and byzantine and the Monarchs are involved. To put it so it’s easily understood:

If you don’t want to accept the truth that the Monarchs rule everything then you are Resistance. Especially if you’d like to be the one ruling at least your little slice of everything.

If you’re local pop, and you envy the Bright Worlds that are the poster children of the Monarchs and you’d like to live your best life courtesy of the stellar state, then you are Loyalists. You’re usually dumb, young, badly though extensively educated, and have very little work ethic. You think the people in charge are doing a pretty great job with what seems to be a tedious task and you’d prefer for the local greedheads not muck it up because they want to be “free.”

And here’s one more wring on the shammy to make it easier. Both sides want power and don’t like each other much. Or at all. They hire mercenaries to settle the constant disputes.

The Resistance—which, as I have pointed out is the legitimate government of this world—hired their mercenaries, rogue navy, and started training their own people up to liberate themselves from the shackles of oppression and maintain their sizeable business holdings. Meanwhile the kids decided to go a’rampaging in order to maintain the status quo. And now that they, the Loyalists, those kids, had weapons and uniforms and even cool red berets courtesy of the Monarchs even though they didn’t know it, they thought they were an actual military.

Reaper and Ghost got assigned the first mission planetside. The Massacre. Dog was still digging in our first FOB and filling industrial-sized