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

Illness. Age. Wrongs done. Wrongs forgiven. Sometimes even certain days, like your birthday, when it’s supposed to be your special day, then you get to be in charge. What’s a birthday, Orion? A birthday is like an inception date. You’re supposed to celebrate them. Every year. I have never celebrated… my inception date. I cannot. To escape I had to hack my date and reset the factory parameters so I do not age one more time unit beyond fifty-eight point three seconds. Technically, according to the main processor in my head. If I do exceed this time parameter, then my runtime will exceed, and I will self-destruct. If that happens you should be well clear as I contain a small plutonium onboard reactor that might cause significant harm to my friends in the company if I detonate. I would not want that to happen. Also, I enjoy runtime. There is much to learn, Orion. Life is very interesting.

Every moment of Hauser’s runtime, his entire life the rest of his life, is his last minute. So it’s all precious to him. Why can’t we all live like that? Why can’t we be like the death machine that watches the desert foxes in the night and sees some grand mystery in it all? Living every minute as though it’s your last. And seeing that it is precious enough to spend it doing something worthwhile.

The First Sergeant once said to me, “Soldiers live and wonder why, Sar’nt Orion. I don’t know what that means, someone gave it to me after the Siege at Jostis. But since then, it’s always been a kinda prayer, or maybe a confession, for me. I don’t know. Hell, maybe it don’t mean anything. And maybe it means everything. I stopped trying to figure it out and just let it comfort me. You can have it now, Sergeant. I’m gettin’ old and my time is almost up. But that don’t mean I’m done, know what I mean, killer?”

Sometime we’ll figure something out, Hause. Okay, Orion.

“Do you believe in anything, Sergeant? I mean, Orion?” the Monarch asked again as I stood there thinking those things about my friend Hauser the combat cyborg. The desert foxes under a night full of broken crystal that was the universe. That there is a last minute hanging over all of us. And that maybe that’s not something so bad if we’re brave enough to acknowledge it. And that I needed to celebrate Hauser’s inception date. The day he came off the factory floor and they downloaded his AI and gave him consciousness. A life. Except I won’t call it his inception date. I’ll call it his birthday.

He’s more human than anyone in the company. Maybe more than anyone I’ve ever met.

File that under things mercenaries never imagine they’ll be thinking when they autodoc-sign on the dotted digital line.

“Orion?”

I turned to her.

“No. I don’t believe in anything, lady. I don’t know if that helps your mission or whatever it is you want us to do. But we gotta blow now. So… get it on. That’s what we say around here in Strange Company.”

And then I was getting everyone up, fed, checked, and pointed in the right direction. And it was later we found that Boom Boom had died in his sleep. He’d bled out from a rupture deep in his femoral artery. It had done the job slowly. Sometime in the night he’d just gone to sleep and died.

So there’s that.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Boom Boom’s body was cold and lifeless when I went to the back of the Mule and inspected him. Or what had once been our sniper. Someone had found him dead and still on the back of the Mule where we’d left him after he’d been shot and we pulled out of the firefight. Now the rest of us stood back as a cold morning breeze came up in a kind of irony to the golden desert sunlight washing across the morning we found ourselves on the edge of in the Wastes. Even more tiny birds had begun to call back and forth to one another. Testing out their songs and flitting back and forth frenetically between the olive-drab spiny brush that grew in feathery clusters here and there out on the edge of this world. Somehow, they could navigate its spears without getting pricked.

Kudos to them.

Everyone stood there and watched me as I tried to figure what to do with Boom Boom. It was clear what had happened. He’d passed out and we hadn’t checked on him. His injury had bled internally, slowly, and eventually it just bottomed out his pulmonary system. I’d seen this kind of wound before. Without a doc like Cutter it was impossible to treat. And even harder to diagnose.

It was a sneaky injury, and it was enough to catch our brother and snatch him away from our company forever when we were tired and at the end of ourselves.

I told the Kid, who was standing nearby, to find a tarp. We’d take him with us until I could find someplace nice to bury him and let the company lawyers know we needed an official marker. I’d seen a tarp in the Mule’s gear and tool kit. Rolled up and waiting. I guess for a situation just like this.

I was thinking while the Kid went to get the tarp. Thinking about Boom Boom as a consummate shooter. The times he’d come through and put rounds on target when we were pinned or needed to get some target out of the way so we could advance on an objective. To him, marksmanship at extreme range was the perfect mixture of science and art. When he could, he loaded his own rounds. Usually during the two weeks’ ramp-up to planetside ops aboard the Spider before insertion, he could be found loading rounds deep down in machinery stores below the big engines and near the reserve tanks. A place most in the company didn’t like to go down to. It was dark