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

to an NCO. And then the blast ripped the bar to shreds with all the ceremony of a sudden belch. Wall fragment splinters sliced through the air and the concussive effects popped my ears and made me swallow hard.

Over the comm I heard someone in Third screaming about a Cylorian sabertoothed bear. Which, check my subscription to Stellar Geographica, should be nowhere near us on Crash. Or Astralon. But then he added, “Engaging,” and I felt that was probably the best outcome I could hope for under the circumstances. Hopefully he was mistaking the enemy we were facing, and who was trying to kill us, for the apex predator bear local to a world seventy-five light years distant. And hopefully he was ruining his nightmare and its all-too-real stand-ins on behalf of Reaper.

My guess was it was Honcho in Third. He had a thing about bears. He’d been chased by one as a kid. Every world we did a contract on got a hard flora and fauna review from Honcho though no one asked him to. He didn’t mind vipers, monkey-spiders, Subari, or anything that could pump you full of lethal poison and make you wish you were dead for the next thirty-six days. But bears… bears were his white whale. He was absolutely terrified of them.

The First Sergeant had used that term. White whale. I had no idea what it meant. I’d never seen a whale. I’d heard they were a big fish back on Earth. But that they weren’t as large as the gill serpents of Marlay.

One of the huge bats that had been making runs at me, red eyes glaring, swooped in, and I watched in amazement as it raced away into the battle full of shadowy rounds and lightning tracers zipping this way and that. The bat was trailing an inky black wash that was simply fascinating to watch.

“Moving to recover Sergeant Jacks and Corporal Dip Weasel,” intoned Hauser as he strode out into the battle like everyone wasn’t shooting at everyone else. “Detecting near-lethal levels of some kind of hallucinogenic compound, but my systems remain unaffected, Sergeant Orion.”

The inky black inside the wake of the flying bat that had roared at me and then screamed off in another direction like a living ghost being drowned in a cobalt arctic sea… yeah the descriptions are purple, but I’m just putting it down as I remember it going down… and the rest of the surreal data coming through my dry and wide-open M-one eyeballs, a First Sergeant term from the long ago of arcane military units that don’t exist anymore, was still messing with my ability to engage in basic communication. I stuttered eloquently, sure I was issuing a series of meaningful orders to react to threats, get organized, and generally get it on company-style.

In all probability I was probably chattering like a Quick junkie rushing on his run.

“Roger,” I said to no one, sure that I had just gotten comm from my mom to do something important. I made up my mind to kill Chief Cook when the opportunity of a blind alley presented itself.

I was alone with the Little Girl as the battle in the terminal raged all about us. I’d lost time. There was a fight going on out there, but it wasn’t a firefight now. My mind thought otherwise. Later I’d learn that my squads were just murdering the drug-ravaged enemy troopers in the fighting positions they could make sense of how to defend. Fighting off bats and weird stews of memories of their own that were turning into living nightmares made all too real.

“I got this, Orion,” crowed Chief Cook over the comm. He sounded like some religious zealot who’d suddenly received a new revelation after a bad case of food poisoning. “Popping some more Quick and I can stay ahead of it.”

I had the feeling he was going to cackle wildly and scream, Things are gonna be different this time. But he didn’t, and I had no idea why he would want to say that. That was just what my drug-ravaged mind said the script should read.

I had no idea what any of that meant at this moment. I knew only that the sky was going to suck me up into it and I’d be lost forever. And there was a part of me that was fine with that.

The Little Girl, wearing a military gas mask, sat nearby hugging her knees and watching me as we covered where Third Squad had left us useless people. Out there I turned and saw Hauser, walking through the drifting smoke and falling glass in the middle of the fight, scanning and firing short bursts from his Pig at unseen enemies.

Like some man-made angel of death. Some parody of humanity that was more human than we’d ever be.

The battle was a mess. And it was my mess.

First Sergeant was trying… trying to get ahold of me. Comm was chiming, and messages, indecipherable, were appearing in my combat lens. But I was busy somewhere else losing my marbles. The worlds of the universe are all marbles. Little tiny spinning multicolored marbles in the darkness and the broken crystal. And the universe is just a game, I told myself. The universe is just a game of marbles.

Nothing more.

Nothing less, estrangier.

Chapter Fourteen

Yeah. I don’t believe in weird existential stuff. I’m not religious, and of course there are real mysteries out there in the galaxy. Strange stuff that defies explanation like the Reverse Floating Pyramids of Kyberia and the Sky Noise sometimes heard on the outer worlds in the loneliest reaches of those faraway planets. Or the fact that there’s a world, habitable, out in the Gothica system, a dying red dwarf, where people say that not all shadows are just shadows. And that sometimes the shadows talk and whisper things that should never be heard. The secrets of the universe, or at least that’s what the DRK cultists say. But in general, the science I understand, jump and