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

in. Pretending to be an army as news networks reported they’d “liberated” the capital and were intent on seeking a full return to the Bright Worlds Federation. The best status any world can hope for… that isn’t the home of the Monarchs. Or Earth, as it has always been known. That’s their home. And its status occupies the top of the food chain. Pride of place. The envy of all other worlds.

In the hierarchy of worlds, it starts with Earth, then Bright Worlds a few rungs down on the ladder, then the Frontier, and finally the Undiscovered down below that. Astralon, or Crash as it was known, is a Frontier world. Above the Undiscovered but barely on the ladder.

Apparently, we all once came from Earth. But now you have to be a Monarch to live there. That’s their world. A no-go zone for the rest of us.

And Stinkeye wildly claims, when he’s especially drunk and playing Cheks and he’s lost every hand and telling you horrible stories of the Dark Labs that officially don’t exist, that he’s actually from there. From back on Earth. And that he’s as old as the first colony vessel to reach Centa… some old ship no one ever heard of called Enterprise.

That sounds made up. Stinkeye lies more than he tells the truth. If he ever tells the truth at all.

Monarch warships have names like Medusa, Centaur, Ogre… and such.

If you believe that fairy tale and all, of any normal space rat coming from anywhere near Earth, I have a free trader with a low parsec count on the jump engines that’ll get you all the way out to Lonesome Star.

Trust me. Not.

So, that hot sweaty first morning of operations we drive out into the Heights, the old neighborhoods the second wave of colonists to arrive on Crash set up long ago near the downtown area. What Stinkeye’s little operations order, if you can call it that, refers to as the “operational area.” From the Heights our hidden snipers in the back of the trucks have a good sight picture of the main protest “army” rampaging across the capital mall, which is a large, beautifully landscaped area, over the old first landing site.

We arrive at our phase line, and to see it from here, it’s almost like you’re watching some summer street festival of fun and love down there on the old First Landing Mall. All the kids down there seem to be having a really great time despite the collapsing government and the impending arrival of Monarch forces to support the new government and a restoration to the Bright Worlds Federation. And to their credit, none of them, none of those kids down there playing soldier, are firing their brand-new weapons like so many alien tribal species do upon first receiving such lethal gifts from some off-world outfit looking to curry favor for larger political means. Some corporation that needs the locals to pull a genocide on the other difficult tribes so that surveyed deep core minerals can be extracted by the big strip lifters that will hit that world and do seventy years work in six months. Weapons will clear the areas to be strip-mined one firefight at a time.

Don’t worry. The galaxy’s a big place. There’s room to spare. That’s the line. Officially. That’s what they tell those who take the time and energy to get upset about other people’s problems.

Hey, everyone’s got problems. But that doesn’t mean you need to get involved.

Unless you’re getting paid to.

The kids down there who are our enemies and don’t know it yet, have gotten enough training to keep their fingers off their brand-new triggers, loaded mags in, and rifles slung. But I’m betting no one has a chambered round to deal with the hate that’s about to be laid on them. Fifty-fifty that the safety is off when it’s supposed to be on for at least seventy-five percent of them. The taking of the capital was mostly nonviolent. But they, the Loyalist Youth for Tomorrow, as they are called by themselves, treat it like they just liberated Gonga during the Sindo forty years back. When in fact all they really did was throw a temper tantrum for two months until law and order completely broke down. Of course they had operators from among the Monarchs’ guard dogs to show them how to do it. Now they have guns, and it appears for all intents and purposes they’ve just won some battle though they haven’t fired a single shot in anger. There’s been some revenge, but that’s mainly been the street gangs doing business under cover of the counter-revolution.

They’ve set up a few machine-gun positions at the entrance to the big greensward below. It’s really quite impressive, if you have no clue. Some arty, comm, and maybe a low-grade laser designator for my combat lens and I could ruin this “army” in about three minutes or less.

My inquiries into local history say this area, this First Landing Mall, really is where the first colony drop took place over eight hundred years ago. One of the huge Sisyphus haulers pushing out here at sub-light to drop a load of determined, hard-as-nails, desperate for a shake at something new, world builders. Eight hundred years later and it’s still a frontier world. That’s ninety percent of the problem right there.

I’m in team four riding in the TC position on our technical. I have four guys in each vehicle team. Even as I write this down, I think of the three that won’t be with us within two weeks when the heavy fighting starts between actual trained military units. But that first day, compared to the last six months, is nothing but a picnic as I remember it.

Officially it’ll be called a massacre.

The kids don’t even know we’re operational. That PMCs have been hired to come in and fight for Astralon, which doesn’t want to be called Crash anymore and wants to be free of Monarch influence. They’d freak if