Strange Company Nick Cole (best classic novels TXT) 📖

simian killers raced out onto the walk behind us, swarmed, careened, and surged forward with pure hot murder in their screeching howls.

That was the part that was the worst. The madhouse shrieking they made constantly.

Then the auto-gun sentries, huge tripod snout-barreled death machines, opened up and began to spray hot fire in short braaaaps at the animals trying to tear us to pieces, their low-grade sentry-gun AIs tagging, targeting, and allotting as much lead as needed to bring about ends to hostile behavior. The monkeys disregarded their comrades’ sudden rag-dolling death and kept on coming despite it all.

On the other side of the initial defensive ring, we passed through a heavy-duty reinforced security door. Another install, no doubt from the science and security teams as they unlocked the secrets of the buried ship.

And then the Monarch.

“Good news or bad news, Orion?”

Bad news. Always take the bad news first.

“Those drone guns are gonna give us about six minutes before they run dry. Then they’ll use the heavier apes to come and get us.”

“And the good news?” If there was any.

“I’ve already started the hack on the dig computer that discovered what I need. What we came here to recover. Eight minutes and change and it’ll crack the locks. Ten seconds for me to access the core operating instructions and then we can go.”

“So… that would be bad news too then?”

Two minutes to hold in position, while already running low on ammo, wasn’t going to be any kind of picnic. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Outside beyond the security door the monkeys screeched, died, and kept on coming. It made no sense. It was a madhouse.

No. It wouldn’t be any kind of picnic at all.

But it was the picnic I’d arrived at. And it was all you can eat, brother.

Perfect.

Bring it.

Chapter Forty-five

For six minutes those killer monkeys threw themselves straight into the guns. Mindlessly screeching as they died violently. The guns didn’t stop. They just kept relentlessly burping out ammo in the correct and efficient doses to annihilate each predator. Never stopping. Never hesitating. Never tiring. And I knew when they did, when they ran dry on ammo, that was going to be it.

The captain ran our defense beyond the security door.

There wasn’t much to our location. The Node was nothing more than a field science base set up inside the derelict starship. Gathering and initial recovery was done from here. Field computers processed and scanned recovered tech. Clamshells stood by for transport of all sizes. No superweapons. Just the guns to keep the monkeys back and maybe a security team with some serious firepower when needed. Mines probably. But the science station had been abandoned, or at least it wasn’t in use. And the monkeys and apes seemed to have been dealt with in the past. Had been driven off by the local defenses. Something though, this time, had caused them to push all their chips in.

They were going for it come hell or high water.

If that didn’t make ya nervous I don’t what would. I’d been part of at least two last stands. Both swung my way. This one was worse than the other two and Punch, who’d been on those other two, kept muttering, “Third time’s the charm, Sarge.”

So there’s that.

This ship. The one from ten thousand years in our future. Or rather, the one that had gone there, taken a look around, and then tried to come back and missed its timeline exit by about another ten thousand years, this ship was looking like a tomb right about now. Our tomb.

Who knew? Maybe it had been all along.

Yeah. That was the story I got from the Monarch in the last minutes before the guns ran dry. Six minutes as we topped off our magazines. Layered out what we needed. Took cover or arranged cover. She talked in my ear, telling me what she knew. Confessing was what it felt like because it felt just like what they all do when they come and tell me their stories. For the log. For the official record of the Strange Company.

“The Enterprise,” she began. “I never knew the name of the ship, but now from what I’ve seen here inside their data cloud, and the item we recovered here, I’m convinced that was it. The Enterprise was sent forward in time using a new engine system we’d developed in the labs on Ganymede. Monarch super-science at the time had experimented with small time leaps forward and back. Back is much more difficult, Orion. Days. Weeks. A couple of years at best was the safest we could do reliably. Even that gave us some edge in shaping the future the way we wanted it to go. But with interstellar distances, these brief looks at the future by a starship crew didn’t do much for us in the grand scheme. Events happened we couldn’t control. And control is the basis of Monarch culture. Also, there was one more effect. These explorer ships sometimes came back with compromised data banks. No idea how it happened. But often the basic information we had and knew to be true, came back changed when the ship came back in time to the anchor point. Their data corrupted our data and so containments had to be put in place. I know that’s a lot of information, Orion. But it’s important.

“So. The Monarchy needed to know what would happen to us as we expanded our control and influence over human culture. We were seeing some disturbing images and data that made no sense with regard to our current operations then. It was as though we had ceased to exist at some sudden undetectable point. I knew a ship was being used for an operation we called Project Zephyr. I had no idea it was the Enterprise, specifically. It’s down inside a central hangar several decks in from here. When they went forward in time, they found this larger ship, or the future interacted with them in some way,