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

different drug recipe, also carrying automatic weapons, and experiencing severe perception problems regarding current events. How long before someone mistakes someone else for a bat and starts blasting? Huh, Chief?”

Chief Cook cleared his throat and tapped into the platoon comm. He held up his index finger. Then he cleared his throat again and said, very officially like he was some kind of authoritative professional instead of the crazed lunatic he actually was. “Uh… attention everyone. Don’t shoot the bats. Any bats… you might see. They’re not real. Don’t shoot them. Also…” He paused. “Don’t make eye contact with them.”

Then he turned back to me, a drug-addled leer on his face, and whispered, “That should help. Also, I’m technically a sociopath. There’s a difference, Orion.”

By the time we’d reached the expansive recreation and living decks of the starship, the smoke was too thick and several of the guest suites were on fire now. I couldn’t tell if it was the anxiety of the drug or the reality of the situation that we might get cooked alive inside a starship if we made one wrong turn and got stuck belowdecks that affected me worse.

“We can move into the subdeck above,” said Hauser over the comm as if reading my mind. Maintenance accessways, or subdecks between decks, can be tight, but those areas are hardened with more advanced fire control systems to protect the ship’s flight operations equipment. “There’s a way through.”

I weighed the cyborg’s suggestion and tried to block out everything in my mind and eyes that wasn’t true. Later Punch would tell me that everyone thought I had it pretty together, considering. Each and every one of them thought they were losing their marbles, but no one wanted to say anything.

We moved into the subdeck above our heads and just below the ship’s flight operations control deck, a space on any starship that was generally off-limits to anyone other than flight crew, and only used to run the ship’s processors and redundant control systems. Hauser found the hidden access hatch in the ceiling of the deck and entered a universal maintenance tech password that generally worked for anyone in the know, and the rest of us watched as the panel dropped open with a soft pneumatic hiss. Yellow strobe lights crossed the midnight-blue darkness up there in the subdeck as once again the ship’s AI encouraged us to abandon the vessel or face possibly severe injury.

One by one we made it into the dark up there, the first up establishing a security perimeter, the rest stacking with their squads behind dark and cold quantum processors that should have been alive and humming on soft bass notes as numbers for jump solutions were constantly updated. Like ascetic monks chanting space-time in cloistered remote mountain abbeys. Engineers who usually needed to come into this section on starships spent most of their time on their bellies or backs. They used a hover support called a slide to move around and reach the equipment they needed to work on and maintain. For heavily armed soldiers there was only enough room to hunch or duck-walk our way through the tight spaces of the subdeck and all its processors.

“This is gonna be a trip,” one of the New Guys in Reaper First muttered as he climbed up past me into the darkness.

I shot my most pissed-off glare at Chief Cook. Trying to indict him and spawn the slightest guilt, and hopefully remorse, for what he’d done to my men. Of course he was immune and just shrugged as he squeezed by, muttering, “Sociopath, Orion. Guilt doesn’t work on me. It’s a feature, not a bug.”

I knew for a fact he wasn’t a sociopath. He just wanted to be one because he felt that made the dirty work easier. Never cleaner. But just easier. And I couldn’t fault him for that. Doing nasty things to people required a certain moral flexibility if you were going to make a career out of it.

I checked in on the Kid who’d been sticking nearby. Unofficially he’d become my assistant.

“Ya good?” I asked as Farts struggled up the ladder with his shot leg. The painkillers were starting to wear off.

The Kid looked at me and tapped his tactical rig, then gave me a thumbs-up. That was Company sign for the universal Good to Go of all soldiers.

Farts told me he was doing fine but his leg hurt. I told him to shut up and keep moving.

Six minutes later I had two dead and three wounded.

Farts was the first to die.

Chapter Twelve

The firefight broke out in the dark of the Neptune Clipper’s subdeck for navigational redundancy processors. We got no indication before it went down that it was an ambush we’d just walked into. Somehow someone on the other side had read the ship’s schematics and damage control board and figured we’d try the subdeck to get forward. It was clear as the first few rounds whipped past my head and smashed into hard plastic and state-of-the-art compressed diamond drives that the enemy knew we were trying to use the Clipper to cover our breach into the main terminal.

It was a horrible, and brief, firefight. That’s generally how it goes. Short means brutal. Lotsa ruined corpses.

Just before the shooting started I’d sent Third forward to secure the route into the deck above us that was at the end of the processing sectors. Second was on rear. Fourth on the right. First made its way with Punch leading and me trying to keep it together as Chief Cook’s tab started to come on strong.

It was at that point that I was getting comm from the First Sergeant back running ops for the main element. The main attack wasn’t going so well. The enemy had put together some adequate hunter-killer anti-tank teams and nailed the Resistance spearhead to our west, stopping them cold along the green terminal ring at Space Traffic Control, a huge looming needle-point tower that ran all traffic assigned to the outer