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

pull the same stunt. You don’t get to hang around being a named private military contractor by being dumb enough not to put at least a few sentries out on your flanks.

But true believers, like the Monarchs’ Loyalist Brigades, they thought war was all stand up and fight. Slogans, chants, and good intentions. And of course, their cause was right. Ask ’em. They’d been told they were on the right side. Ah, the blind belief that you couldn’t be defeated because you’d believed all the lies about the superior side. And that somehow meant something in the big dice roll of who was gonna win, and who was gone get dead in the next few.

These guys were dumb. The dice were with us. But of course we only ever played with loaded dice as much as possible. Even then sometimes the dice come up snake eyes. Even for the Strange Company. Attend and know Murphy’s Wisdom, as the First Sergeant liked to lecture over one of our recently dead.

Stacked and racked down-passage, we saw them in control of Central Supply Conduit 06, as the ship tagged their location. They were all wearing new “space marine” gear the Monarchs would ship out when the war started to heat up to there being a need for formal military organization. Good stuff. Lots of gadgets, and armor that would stand up to our sidearms if we didn’t shoot them too many times. Technically it was supposed to stand up to rifle grain loads. But of course, PMCs never use standard grain loads. Go high power or go home in a body bag, as Biggs liked to bark during ammo draws. In private military contracting, you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.

But I’ve said that before and excuse me if I say it again. If only just to remind myself what the truth is. Some truths must be repeated if only because it’s fatal to forget them.

We had no intention of using our sidearms, or standard grain loads.

The rule of thumb is this.

Sidearms put a hole in you.

Battle rifles put a hole through you.

And combat shotguns just remove nice big chunks of who you used to be.

There were already several enemy dead on the matte-gray rubberized decking inside Central Supply Conduit 06. In starships like this the crew decks are always utilitarian. Clean, cool, and dark. Which was perfect for boarding ops even if the ship was grounded and burning. Dark and rigged for low-noise impact combined with a good breakdown of the ship’s internal layout made the work easier. Note, I didn’t say easy. Just easier. The other side rolled the dice too, and sometimes they got the snake eyes. Sometimes boxcars.

Speaking of which, now that the ship was powered down and ventilation wasn’t operational, I was starting to smell the drift of burning chemicals come along in brief hot drafts from the passages that led off to the port side of the ship. Where the burning fuel cells were spreading through other compartments, defying the vain attempts of the ship’s automatic fire control and suppression systems.

It’s insane to board a burning starship and engage in a firefight. The only thing you should ever do in a burning starship is hit the escape pods and lifeboats and get off. But of course, this was not my first burning starship firefight.

We needed to do these dudes and get up-ship before the lower decks were fully engulfed in fire. Which would happen sooner than later. Getting caught down here in a runaway and out-of-control compartment fire could be real bad. What about the engineers in zip ties, my mind whispered? Oblivious to the fact that I was on the stalk, running four squads, trying to keep the New Guys from dying and teach the Kid how to soldier before he died too.

Time to kill, I said to me. Centering myself and keeping the main thing the main thing. All that other stuff would just have to take care of itself until the other side of this.

Lots on my mind. I raised my slung Bastard and dropped the first trooper in “space marine” gear hoping he was their on-site combat leader. Probably a guerilla vet who’d proved himself and gotten a commission on the side of the “winners” even though he, and they for that matter, hadn’t won. Yet.

It was dark and shadowy down there in the ship’s passages, and even my enhanced vision couldn’t tag where I got my hits for a couple of seconds as the combat feed updated. It wasn’t until the guy was down on the deck and not being helped, boots and legs doing the kickin’ chicken, that one of the heroes who would one day earn the impossible love of the Monarch overlords, or so that guy and possibly all of them thought, came out to help his downed leader, and my HUD, inside my combat lens, updated with assessed damage and wounds.

I got…

Hit. Armor penetration. Upper chest cavity. Possible collapsed lung.

Hit Lower abdomen. Damage unclear. Possible bleed out and excessive damage to the lower intestines.

I’d fired three rounds from my tricked-out Bastard, trying to tag his helmet on the last as he went down. Apparently… I hadn’t. But two hits were good enough to draw another target. That guy, the wounded man on the ground, was having a bad day and getting worse.

Then Hero popped out and I shot him quickly. His helmet cracked, flying apart in two directions as he turned, raising one gloved hand to the back of his skull as if to brush away where I’d tagged him with a six-point-five-millimeter round. People do funny things when they’re dying. I pulled smooth and fast, shooting him again and glad for good hearing protection as I absorbed the recoil of the Bastard in my shoulder. I didn’t have a lot of high-speed gear for my workplace, but I made sure some of my mem went to protecting my ears. All three shots ruined that guy regardless of the