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

tall dead grass catching fire from the nearby explosions, while we were out there in it. That could happen if that storage facility kept burning like it was and exploding like it was doing. Then we’d be at the landing apron, a wide half-kilometer circular highway that encompassed the entire green terminal ring where the big ships set down. And it would be quite a view for the defenders watching from the smaller terminals and the docks we would be approaching.

So, let’s just call that the kill zone. There was no way to cross that without taking a lot of incoming. Hence Reaper was getting the job.

As you can see… I was worried about those areas. Not so much about the fighting until the terminal, but a lot of open ground to get shot at in.

Which, let me tell you, is actually no fun. I was now thinking better of carrying a ruck full of supply ammo. I’d need to move fast. But then again the new guys, especially that Kid, had a tendency to burn mags. Being dry inside the terminal wasn’t going to do anything for anyone, except the enemy.

I looked at Chief Cook and wondered what he was doing down here, down with Reaper. The freaks from Voodoo rarely get involved in CQB. Off to the right I could see Dog ready and waiting to go forward. Like they wanted to. What a bunch of… they actually liked this. I kinda wouldn’t have minded just throwing up. Except I had nothing to throw up. I told myself to eat a protein bar so I could throw it up before the attack. Each of Amarcus’s people had their entire ruck stuffed with all the weapons and ammo they could do. They were going in heavy. Amarcus had them carrying all the AT he could get his hands on. I knew secretly he had this fear of getting hit by fast-attack armored cavalry. An infantryman’s worst nightmare if you were on open ground and on foot and got caught in a sudden raid.

The AT weapons were for that. Though he’d use them on entrenched defenders if he needed to. “Fire in the hole” was Dog’s most commonly used phrase. Or as Duster, one of the EOD guys over in Dog told me once, “Why try when you got explosives, Orion.”

“What’re you doing here?” I barked at Chief Cook. My voice sounded dry, like I was spitting clipped words. I sounded bitter and irritated. I never slept well before a battle. If only because there was no time. And any time you had was another minute to get ready for whatever it was you were gonna face the next day. Whatever it was that was gonna try and kill you in that day.

“Came down to give you a little good news, Sergeant Orion,” said the warrant officer crisply.

I doubted it would be good news.

I picked up my ruck and put it on. I wasn’t making most of Reaper carry one. It was going to be a long hot day with a lot of crawling. Under fire I wanted them to move fast. Not tired. The supply crawler could bring our gear up later. I’d carry as much spare ammo as I could. For everyone. I’ve learned that fear of getting shot will get me moving fast enough if I need to. No matter how loaded down I am. Incoming has a tendency to motivate.

“And what’s that good news?” Like anyone in Strange I was expecting the “good news” to actually be bad news. Chief Cook was smiling, his teeth white and big and gapped. Theatrically he raised his giant steel watch, probably very expensive, and noted the time. Then he executed a perfect left face and studied the distant terminal that was our objective.

“See that Clipper berthed below the big thirty-nine on the OBJ, Orion?”

I did. There was a beautiful Clipper-class starship berthed alongside the main terminal. Our objective.

Yeah. It was a standard Star Clipper. Long command neck and hammerhead bridge, wide-disc graceful main hab, huge engines and thrusters erupting from the engineering stack at the aft section of the vessel. But every line spoke of distant tropical worlds untouched by us. Natives and enterprise. Adventure. Maybe even lost alien ruins undiscovered and guarding some of the secrets of the universe. Every kid’s fantasy of such places. We’d all grown up on Stewart Young of the Starship Horizon streams.

“That was,” said Cook, continuing to study his watch, “the Neptune Clipper, just in from the Sweet Worlds. Commissioned six years ago at the Martian shipyards in the actual vicinity of Earth. Owned by the Pan-Stellar Starways line. Captain—”

“Was…?” I asked, interrupting him to note the obvious use of incorrect tense. You know like soldiers do and all?

His eyes went wide as though he’d suddenly been jolted by some random wandering bolt of electricity. He looked up from his watch and then very theatrically turned around, like some teenage boy playing tricks and miming dumb at the same time. That was the thing about Chief Cook. His age was indeterminate. Some days I would have sworn he had to be younger than me. Like some kid who’d just gotten out of university and needed to pay off his loans with a little military service. And then there were other times you’d come upon him in the dead of a late-night op, catching him unawares with his mind intently working some problem in the thin ghostly light of a battlemap, seeing some horror he never spoke of, and then, it was at those times that he looked older. Much older than me. And I look pretty wrecked, in my opinion, for a guy just turned thirty-six standard years. Technically, I’d been rode hard.

Coffin-sleep flight time has made me much older, also technically. But really, I’ve only had thirty-six years of actual non-cryo waking life. Still, I look every kilometer of it, and some.

The Falmorian party girl thought I was handsome though. “You are