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

onto my combat lens and I ran through it quickly. We’d go into aft crew, hang a left at the first junction, and take off into crew hab. Run crew hab for a hundred meters and cut back through the galley to come out with an angle on stores that might change the course of events for Second Squad in a firefight.

“First up. Hauser take Third and stage behind Second. Once we attack from the left, bounding overwatch to move through stores and put fire on them as you close. Watch for friendlies here…” I said, highlighting a ping on our map to show where I thought First and Hauser’s combined element might get close enough to start shooting each other.

“Copy, Platoon Leader.” It was hard to break Hauser of his rigid military coding from his time with the Ultras. It was wired deep and hard into his cyber DNA. I always found the story of his escape, and awakening, amazing. And I knew I could count on him to make sure we got no friendly fire as we noosed the enemy and went for the kill.

Yeah, a C-985 Infiltration Cyborg optimized for terror and urban combat protocols with a heavy warfare chassis wasn’t a thing you wanted to run into out there in the dark when the lines of combat were good and blurred. Especially the Eight Series Heavy Combat models. But having one such cyborg have your back, that was actually a great sense of comfort not to be underestimated.

I liked Hauser, if only because he gave me courage. I’d read that somewhere and I couldn’t remember where. But when I thought of Hauser, who once innocently asked me if he had a soul, I thought of that line and I thought of him.

Somehow the universe made a little more sense after that. Or indicated there was a trail of bread crumbs that might lead to where the answers were hidden. It just took an awakened combat-model cyborg to ask the question.

And the other cool thing about Hauser was he could carry the Pig and a couple of other weapons. Third had two Pig gunners, one being Hauser, and that made them our heavy weapons squad. He turned, almost mechanically, away from me. The motion was not quite natural human movement, and then he led both squads off through Engineering to reach the main entrance to the aft crew sections.

“First on me.”

I gave them the rough sketch of how we were gonna hit the enemy element that had Second pinned in stores as we moved.

They all listened, nodding, making adjustments to their gear. Getting magazines loosened in pouches for easy pulls and reloads. I noticed the Little Girl staring at me. Her face passive. Her eyes judging me. Trying to find out what kind of man I actually was. That was her thing. She stared at you like she was seeing everything you’d ever done, and sifting it. And trust me… you didn’t want to be the wrong kind of man with her. She could do real bad things when she wanted to.

“All right,” said Chief Cook a little too gustily. What the Little Girl was doing with him, and why she didn’t adjudicate him in the “wrong kind of man” category, I had no idea. The gap-toothed warrant officer checked his watch and then pulled his sidearm to chamber a round in the silver-plated 1911 .45 with Grim Reaper Astronaut handle grips. Pearl ivory. Black as night Grim Reaper Astronaut embossed at the center. “Let’s do this, Sergeant Orion. Fun’s about to start. It’s good and get it on time, children.”

Chapter Ten

We hit the enemy inside the permanently grounded Neptune Clipper from the sides, shooting into their flank deep within the ship’s stores. A quick hustle through the near-pristine crew quarters, First constantly remarking on the quiet and unoccupied luxury digs we were passing by, and then we were in position to open up and try to scratch the enemy in a deadly crossfire. The crew quarters of the Neptune Clipper were indeed immaculate, and state-of-the-art compared to the habs on our old bubble-gum-and-baling-wire destroyer turned mercenary troopship. The Spider was a five-hundred-year-old Newmax warship that hadn’t seen better days for most of that time. Rumor was she was a Ceti Alliance destroyer from back during the early years of space flight. After the civil war with Centaur and the establishment of the Monarchy, she’d been sold off as surplus. Modifications had made her, if not fast, then very dangerous in a gunfight. She’d pulled us out of more scrapes through sheer firepower and determination than anything else. And honestly, they didn’t make hull armor that thick anymore on modern warships. She could lay the hate, and she could take it too. And that was one of the reasons we called her home when we were on the ground in some war for pay. The goal was always to get through the whack and make it back to the Spider. But the living quarters aboard the Spider were extremely spartan. Not that it mattered. We had an onboard MMO and the coffins were all slaved into it. A forty-year haul between worlds wasn’t so bad actually. You could live whole lifetimes in there. Or just switch off and go Deep Sleep.

No combat wedge formation as we pushed through the crew sections of the Clipper. Now we were using the standard starship boarding column, checking blind angles and dead passages for the enemy attempting to do exactly what we were about to do to them as we pushed deeper into the belly of the ship. Stacking at intersections and bulkheads and running scans to see if we’d find any unfriendly IEDs, or ship’s security systems running on backup reserve, before they found us. If it had been another merc company we were going to hit, like the now most-likely-defunct Grau Skull, then there would’ve at least been sentries or another fire team coming at our main body to