Strange Company Nick Cole (best classic novels TXT) 📖

acquired somewhere in our long haul across the stars. “Rather than shoot it out, you just hit and run with this thing and let the flames do the all the work, young sar’nt.” And when we got there, and I assessed the tactical situation… yeah, it was a lot easier to just start a firefight we had no intention of winning while Choker and I hit one of the fuelers with a jet of flame from a nearby alley. I still don’t have half of one of my eyebrows, and we roasted two enemy companies at the refueling point. At least. So I needed some new architecture for my crumbling philosophies. The Good Monsters Theory hadn’t survived that night.

I was adrift and getting fatally honest with myself about what we were doing. There ain’t any shining knights out in the dark parts of space where we find ourselves today. Out here at the limit of human knowledge, out here along the perimeter, it’s just us monsters. Out here in the dark it’s just us killing each other.

And brother, it’s gettin’ darker all the time.

Second Squad went in first and made it to the Clipper’s aft stores before they got into a firefight with Loyalist troopers sent in to respond to our boarding incursion. I listened to the sitrep coming in from Sergeant Jacks, Second Squad leader. We used Second as we ran First. Straight rifle squads made up of two fire teams, a squad designated marksman, and a medic to support. I ran through the squad in my mind as I tapped comm and went down on one knee, listening to the enemy strength report from Jacks. Ro-Ro, Dip Weasel, Killer Joe, Mass, Too Much, Red, Snorts, Shoots in the SDM position, and Patches as medic were in a clearing the next section.

All good. No “New Guys” and they wouldn’t have a “Kid.” Only I got those in First. Last New Guy they had was Snorts. He’d earned that nickname because he snorted after he ate. As though somehow he’d eaten so fast he inhaled some of his barely chewed food into his nose and needed to get it out by snorting like an elephant in the throes of intense intestinal distress. He’d sit there and snort and ignore, or was oblivious to, all the murder looks he was getting from the rest of his squad after chow. Especially if we had some downtime and everyone crashed out in a patrol circle. If we weren’t on mission, that is. Then he’d just snort and bother everyone. One day the weirdest thing happened. Once we’d tagged him Snorts, and he’d shrugged his shoulders and embraced it, him snorting after chow didn’t bother anyone else anymore. Snorts. That’s what he does, man. It was like that. Once we’d tagged him, classified him, it was then we understood him and after that it was all copacetic.

The minor rules of the universe are arcane and mysterious in the Strange. So it was. So it be.

But Second was in good shape for combat. They’d pinned the enemy with fire from Killer Joe’s Pig. Everyone had concealment and more important, good cover according to the sitrep from Sergeant Jacks. The enemy was stacking at two to one and looking like they were gonna push any second.

“Feels like an augmented squad, Orion!” shouted Jacks over the outgoing blur of high cycle from Killer Joe’s Pig. He musta been nearby, pinned behind a bulkhead and trying to assess the tactical situation. He’d done boarding ops before he linked up with Strange. He knew behind a thick ceramic-forged bulkhead was the best place to be in a firefight inside a starship.

Killer Joe, the Pig gunner for Second, looked like the kind of rough customer from the block who would have slit your throat just for lunch money to spend on smokes. He looked like that horror-movie monster Cyberstein, but with more scars. And uglier. That’s how he got the nickname. Someone had said he looked like “Joe Killer” from a serial comic book that was big back in the day. Some hitman who works for the Alta Mob on Suaguar and plays both sides against the middle. Eventually we just settled on calling him Killer Joe.

Truth was, his looks were unfortunate. They didn’t match the person. You couldn’t have met a nicer guy. And when we got let loose on some town, it was Killer Joe who was the guy that made sure no one messed with us and that we got home no matter how sloppy we got. Even if home was just a bombed-out warehouse with cardboard for bedding and a helmet for your head. Joe didn’t drink. But he liked to watch others have a good time. That made him laugh and it was then he wasn’t so ugly.

Killer Joe also cleaned us out at pool, which was his thing and which he was an actual absolute serial killer about. Watching Killer Joe play pool was like watching a Monarch ment-savant decode the secrets of quantum distance travel aboard one of the big Spires. State-of-the-art dark magic engine science. Crossing the big distances in an instant. Defying all the written laws because there were unknowns not available to the rest of the heaving slob-mass of stellar humanity surging for the farthest reaches.

Us and our dumb ships trying our “real bestest” to go real fast to get somewhere we could call our own. Even jump drive was lame compared to that stuff the Spires and their navigator ment-savants could do.

“Hause!” I yelled to the cyborg squad leader who ran Third Herd. “Need a way to come at them from the flank while Two pins. What’s the ship’s map say we can do about this?”

The blare of outgoing and incoming fire was making comms almost unintelligible deep within the tight quarters of the lower engineering decks of the starship.

Hauser, with no emotion and utter calm, ran his fingers over the touchscreen and found our map. He airdropped it