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

sandbags for our little fort. Of course, Voodoo was in the mix. But you never know if it’s gonna be Nether, Cook, or one of the other freaks. No one knows how they, Voodoo Platoon, interface with the Old Man and decide what tricks they’re gonna play on the enemy on our behalf. That first op planetside, it was Stinkeye dealing the cards from the bottom of the deck.

Stinkeye does magic. Stinkeye does fear. Maybe he can do other stuff. But maybe because he’s such a miserable old alcoholic, the fear is what he knows and what he can do best drunk. It ain’t really magic. But it might as well be. Whatever Monarch Super-Voodoo science lab cooked his brain and turned the dial to do what they call Psyonix, might as well have called it magic as far as I’m concerned. I’ve seen him pull some crazy tricks.

That was the situation as we started the battle for the starport, on the day we’d meet the Seeker. And after that… well, that’s what this is all about.

Chapter Seven

That was how things on Crash, or Astralon, kicked off. How a disagreement about the future of a world turned into a snipers’ shooting gallery and a total bloodbath, and then a war both sides needed someone else to finish. But hey, that’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it?

Someone picks a fight for two other guys who’ll do the fighting. Same as it ever was.

Now, we were being told, this was how things ended once and for all on Astralon or Crash, as we moved on the starport. Winner take all. Resistance elements in this sector attacking the starport from half the points on the compass. The winner would decide the future once there were enough dead to make it clear who’d actually won. And the Strange Company had certainly stacked their share of bodies in this little conflict. But that was what we did. Now we’d take the port of entry for Astralon, or Crash, or whatever it was being called this week, and then the Resistance would control the re-entry beacons to the system and therefore stellar trade and navigation.

In a galaxy full of all kinds of starflight—jump, hyper, decades-long dumb-thrust hovering just under sub-light, and of course the rumors of other darker weirder things in development, or for private use by the Monarchs only—those navigation systems inherent to every populated star system were still very important. And whoever controlled them got to determine what was important.

Whoever controlled them was definitely the winner at this stage of the conflict.

That’s why the port of entry had remained relatively untouched by the other side. Destroyed, it was utterly useless to everyone. For a long time during the course of the war it had been held by the Loyalists and was used as the main Monarch-paid resupply base for most of their war effort.

Stinkeye had once hissed at me in passing, “Whoever controls the spice, controls the galaxy, Little King.” He was drunk and laughing to himself while I was out checking the night watch one hot summer night. We were about a week away from the big fight at the Hooper Reservoir. “Know what that means, Little King?”

When Stinkeye is really drunk he calls me that. Like it’s an insult, which it is. And I know you’ll think this is strange, but I’m one of the few people Stinkeye talks to when he’s not drunk. Which is something. Sober he’s still crazy, but you get some fascinating tales. So I don’t mind it. Stinkeye is half legend and half unwanted old relative. He commands a certain amount of respect in the company just by virtue of having been around for longer than anyone can remember. He’s been here longer than the Old Man has been commanding. There are logs hundreds of years old that mention him, or someone a lot like him using different tags.

I had no idea what Whoever controls the spice controls the galaxy meant. Half of what Stinkeye mutters is chalked up to nothing more than just drunken nonsense.

“Book back on old Earth,” he slurred. “Read it when I was a kid and there was still such a thing called NASA. Can’t remember the name… Little King, can’t remember it… no more. Can’t remember. But it was a thing that was. And that used to mean something, Little King. It really did.”

He took a long hot pull of the jet fuel he called hooch.

Waved it at me.

I declined. Because of course I wanna live. And that stuff will kill ya unless you’re actually Stinkeye.

“It means, Little King, that when… when… you control the thing that allows transportation between these little islands we call… the stars… well then, boy, it means you control the stars themselves. Trust ol’ Stinkeye. Always trust me, Little King. It’s truth straight from the deep dark well o’ the universe. Cold water, whether you like it or not, eh?”

Depriving our enemies in this war of the base that was the port of entry would be a major, if not final, blow in this six-months-long struggle for the supremacy and control of the main habitable planet in system.

This was for the entire bag of marbles.

For us in the Strange Company, it was like we could see daylight to getting paid off on this dog of a contract. There were problems though, of course. There are always problems. There were rumors running through all the platoons that the Resistance generals weren’t putting mem in our accounts like they were supposed to. And of course, each platoon’s barracks lawyer had it all figured out down to the bit. Stinkeye was the main prophet of this heresy, and the First Sergeant had barked at the chief to “shut his damn drunken mouth about stuff he didn’t know nothin’ about.”

Stinkeye promised he’d peel back the senior-most NCO’s sanity like a banana and show him the true nature of what he muttered was, “da dark side.”

But the rumors about short and no