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

smoking and watching the stars and the big concrete colonist-made riverbed that was currently dry.

The Loyalists had control of a dam upcountry and they’d been cutting off the water supply to this sector in prep for our attack.

Its vastness made you feel insignificant, like I said. Like it was some temple where you just contemplated truths, pushing away Stinkeye’s drunken mutterings, and tried to find what the stars knew. Or what they cared about.

Spoiler: They don’t care. They’re just giant balls of burning gas. If anything, they’re amused. But only slightly. Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I spot Betelgeuse thundering across the night dark. Betelgeuse don’t care. Betelgeuse gonna Betelgeuse as they say on a frozen world called Horn.

The starport was hit with a lot of artillery in the first hours of morning light as we waited to commence the assault. We watched from the far lip of the aqueduct we’d moved into the night before, studying the terrain we’d cross in the next few hours. We were assaulting from the northeast section of the giant landing field and our first objective was to take the main terminal in the outer green ring of the port. Which was the outermost ring and where some of the largest ground-capable starships came in to transfer cargo. The big lifters, inter-system cargo, and some of the heavier independent operators docked and offloaded cargo or passengers in better times there. Smaller ships and the main passenger liners came in at the central terminal a few kilometers further in at the blue and gold terminal rings. That was where the underground tube led into the main city.

We watched as ghostly artillery shells began to fall through the hot morning mist out there toward the positions the enemy had chosen to defend, and which had been identified by nightcrawler scout recon spotters in the days leading up to the battle. Of course, the main cargo stacks got hit hard out in the storage areas of the vast sprawl at the port’s edge. We knew the Loyalist troopers would be emplaced with infantry heavy machine gun teams there, and main arty gave a lot of attention to the cargo area and distribution centers. Several explosions rocked that facility as secondaries went up after the high-impact anti-personnel munitions started getting used in effect.

The sounds were crazy as starship loading cranes bent and immense mobile crawlers groaned and twisted and fell into the stacks like distant tiny models of such giant things represented in miniature scale. War shows you how temporary everything is. Strange, almost science-fiction sounds screeched out across the sky as the exploding munitions rattled through the heavy metal cargo containers. Ricochets and sudden ringing notes like ominous noises rumored to be heard in the vast wastes of lonely edge worlds. And even then, in their most remote places where few seldom dared go.

Legend and myth were legion regarding those noises and their sources. Hearing them now made you uneasy about the day ahead. Like they were something unseen and close by that was going to ruin everything. Including your neatly packaged view of the universe you were currently so certain about and carrying around like it was something that could be exchanged at a bank for meaningful credit. And your sanity. Something large and relentless and bigger than you was stomping around at the edges of the universe. I could hear Reaper muttering about that, getting quieter with each titanic strike out there across the fields we’d cross.

A sergeant has to listen to the battle, and his men, at the same time. Knowing his men are only listening to the battle. Trying to get ready for what they might find within it… so that once they’re in it, they might survive it.

The thinking of the enemy defensive planners was to create bunkers out of the cargo containers filled with off-world goods. Our planners had decided high-impact artillery rounds with AP munitions should do the trick to ruin their defense in that sector off on our flank. Maybe it did. But something hit something, as they like to say, and an unexpected series of utterly huge explosions suddenly rocked the distant facility we were most likely going to have to sweep through to reach our assault lane. Gargantuan masses of bent steel flew away, end over end, in every direction across the morning sky as the main admin terminal for the cargo facility blew its lid like some reactor going suddenly and unbelievably redline. And then some.

Chief Cook came up behind us in the unreal quiet that followed, hands in pockets and smiling, as all of us wondered if someone’s gun back in main arty had just hit a local on-site reactor no one knew about.

Would black sand graphite come raining down through the white fog? Dosing us all with lethal levels that would start as sunburns and then melt our flesh off over the next two weeks?

Fun.

“Nah,” said smiling Chief Cook. He’s always smiling. His teeth are spaced far apart, and it gives him an almost skeletal grin that makes you think he’s genuinely happy except that you suspect he isn’t really and it’s all just an act. And that bothers you. He’s thin, medium height, and incredibly tanned. Wiry is what people would call him. He dresses like a Monarch spec ops advisor, pressed jungle patterned-gray fatigues, tight pistol belt with sidearm, bloused boots, and a black beret, because he was one. His specialty before he parted ways with the government was psyops. Now he does it on our behalf and because he does it so well, he’s a CW3 with the freaks in Voodoo. Chief Warrant Officer Three.

Most Strange Company feel very nervous around him. He has this way of making you feel like he knows a lot more than he’s letting on. A lot about stuff that isn’t supposed to be known. And maybe he knows so much he even knows why and how you ended up in the