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

Chances were, I was gonna get cleaned out of New Guys to resupply the other platoons that had taken losses, and would take losses today. And believe me, I’m fine with that. Each of my soldiers was ready to serve in the other platoons and that was the gold standard for the sergeant who ran Reaper. Sort and select the ones that would go deeper into the mysteries of the Strange Company. Weed and wait for death for those that wouldn’t, or couldn’t, cut it.

Like I said… it’s best to be honest about these things.

Hauser, the Third Squad leader, gave me the thumbs-up that we had everyone and hadn’t left anyone in the smoke. I got us moving with an “All right Reaper. At the double. Move to the engines.”

I blinked in my combat lens field of view and my retina tagged the shadowy area beneath the Clipper’s massive main starship engines where I wanted us to concentrate. Not everyone had combat lens capability, but the squad leaders did and Hauser didn’t need it. He was a cyborg after all. His brain was a giant supercomputer. And a very advanced one at that.

We were on the double and the air was hot and acrid with chemicals and smoke. Choking us and making our lungs burn. You could taste the burning chemicals in your mouth and nose. If I sounded out of breath when I contacted Chief Cook to check his progress, it was due to that. And the fear too. As we crossed that three hundred meters, I was just waiting for a symphony of medium to heavy machine-gun fire to open up and end Reaper as it was known that day.

“Holding in the smoke,” smiled Chief Cook pleasantly over the static of the comm. I could hear the onboard AC whirring heavily in the driver’s cab. There was melodic and almost hypnotic music chanting in the background of our communication. “Once you’ve secured the starship, I’ll bring the whale in and we’ll begin the breach, Sergeant Orion.”

Unbelievably, the defenders had actually sent armed men down to attempt to stop the flames and assist terminal personnel in assessing the damage to the beautiful and fantastic docked starship currently ruined and burning along her port side. I’m sure they were concerned damage to its reactor might be a little problem for everyone within a ten-mile radius.

I saw them, the enemy riflemen, watching the maintenance personnel work and try to minimize the cascading damage. One guy was spraying white billowy foam on the wing tanks and no one was waiting for an impending enemy ground attack. Burning starships had a tendency to draw the eye.

“Do not open fire,” I whispered into my comm, hoping everyone in Reaper had their ears on. I wanted to cross as much of the sweltering runway as we could before a firefight broke out. At one hundred meters the dream of surprise attack intersected with the enemy’s sudden awareness of our presence.

“First,” I called out over the comm, “engage and keep moving forward. Second and Fourth, secure right. Third get ready to assault through. Get it on, Reaper!”

There was at least a small enemy squad there near the massive blast-blackened starship engines watching the maintenance people do practically nothing to stop the spreading and out-of-control flames licking at the central hull. At least a small enemy squad was what I could see as we approached. First brought their primaries up and slowed to a fast walk, continuing forward motion, and began to fire at the enemy troopers. Of course, Boom Boom painted the first dude right off the bat with his rifle. I saw that one take a solid hit, body armor or no body armor, and go spinning away into a luggage cart that was on fire nearby. A gaping hole from Boom Boom’s Tesseract Archer Rifle. The .308 Magnums he fired didn’t care about modern plate armor. Now flaming luggage was falling all over that dead guy.

Wisely, Hoser and his AG kept moving, keeping pace with the wedge, and scanning for what we in Reaper liked to call “The Other Guys.” The ones you never see until you open fire. The gunner would suppress while everyone else did the singles in the initial target group.

It’s a personal thing for me. There’s always another shooter nearby, and best to train that way. Even if you’re engaging an enemy group, all carrying, most likely there’s someone you don’t see. Bad guys always travel in pairs. Even if those pairs are groups.

The New Guys, and Choker and Punch, along with the Kid, did the rest of the enemy squad, who were caught flatfooted and watching maintenance guys who themselves weren’t too keen about the safety of the situation as they tried to figure out if everyone was about to get nuked by a sudden core melt from the starship’s onboard reactor.

Everyone who’s not engineering on a starship has an inherent fear of the onboard reactor. Bad things can happen and the fear is neither superstitious nor unwarranted.

Second and Third fanned to their tagged positions to get under the starboard wing and react to any ground forces coming out of the terminal docking bays. Covered by the wing they should be safe, I told myself.

Fourth came up on First and I told Punch to tell the maintenance techs to scatter and get lost. They were more than happy to.

Choker finished a couple of the downed enemy troopers with double taps to the skull and remarked on the poor shooting of the new guys in not getting kills in the first pass. “Make sure dead guys are really dead, guys!” he shouted pedantically, considering the middle of a battle to be a teachable moment as he stood there on the hot burning tarmac beneath a starship’s main engines. He’s right though. Fights teach you in ways training never can. You just have to live long enough to learn the lesson they’re trying to drive into your thick skull. Choker’s only