Strange Company Nick Cole (best classic novels TXT) 📖

and the flames had crawled through an open hatch and into the engineering access points which were close to the guest decks. Meanwhile more explosions rocked the starboard sections of the beautiful Clipper, and though the ship was built to hold up to internals received either by space hazards or even pirate attack—something that had gotten a lot more common of late the farther out you got—when the deck underneath our boots rocked all of Reaper halted, each of us holding our breath and waiting to be suddenly annihilated by a cascade blast that tore the ship into a hundred thousand flying pieces streaking away in every direction right there at the base of the fantastic terminal we were supposed to breach and secure.

Y’know… just another Tuesday for Reaper.

“That one sounded bad,” said Firsty in the silence as the hull rumbled and buckled all around us. We called him “Firsty” because he wanted to stay in Reaper and First Squad even though both Dogs and Ghosts wanted him. So we let him.

That’s rare. No one’s that dumb. Oh yeah… except me. I’m that dumb.

“Yeah,” replied Hoser, hefting his Pig to adjust it to cover our current tactical position. “But they don’t pay us the big bucks for nothin’, man.” The pneumatics in the Pig’s cyber-assist were slowly going bad. But there was no mem, and no place, to replace or repair them. When supplies and equipment came forward from the Resistance generals it didn’t necessarily include the fancy stuff like a pneumatic-assist cyber-exoskeleton for the medium squad suppression weapon. A lot of times it was just more new guys to throw at the Resistance and the occasional case of scotch for the generals to peruse the KIAs over.

Private military contracting makes a certain kind of sense. Sometimes. A lot of the time it’s just human nature at its worst. So why not new kids to throw into the meat grinder and a case of scotch to keep doing it? That either makes sense, or it doesn’t. Spoiler. It does. Both ways. You have to be honest about these things.

Hustle, the assistant gunner, spaced his belts of 7.62, ready to feed the Pig if things got hot. Or hotter than they were already getting at that moment. The smoke was getting heavy inside the ship now and of course I’d decided to leave the platoon’s chemical masks behind because Chief Cook had told me the retro-agents would handle what we’d likely be facing.

“What the hell was that?” someone mumbled as we waited for the ship to settle after its most recent explosion.

Yeah, I was getting that too. What the questioner was wondering. Things felt surreal, and at the corner of your vision you would see occasional shadows moving. Bats. They looked… bat-like for the brief seconds you could catch them in your vision directly. Were these those same bats Chief Cook had mentioned? Warned me about. Don’t make eye contact with them, Orion. Apparently that was just a side effect of what we needed to protect us from what we were walking into. Mild hallucinations that were getting stronger by the second. A gassed environment full of deadly psychotropics was what we were walking into, but the question in my fever-brain was… what we were walking in with… or on… was it more dangerous than what was being used against our enemies?

“Once both enter your system…” Cook had whisper-muttered to me a few decks back. “Both substances should reach an equilibrium that gives you the advantage over what they’ll, the enemy that is, Sergeant Orion, will be experiencing. Trust me… they’re gonna lose their minds. You’ll only lose half of yours. So that’s an advantage as far as I see it.”

“Oh yeah,” I hissed at Cook as I waved away one of the bats that had suddenly tried to swoop in at my face and then realized I was waving at something that wasn’t there. I was, in fact, waving at nothing. I felt the tendrils of insanity trying to pry the lid off my actual sanity and jump in the used aboveground pool that is my mind. And strangely, the thought of that made me want to laugh out loud. Giddily. I’ve never laughed giddily. Never ever. Never in my life. And now I had an intense desire to. It was bubbling up within me and I had serious doubts I could contain it. It felt wild and insane. But I’ve felt that way on other gunfights before this one.

That. I was feeling that. And a strange desire to burn a whole mag. All my mags. All on full auto. Shooting whatever. I just wanted to shoot stuff on rock and roll. That would feel pretty good, man. Unexplainably. Good.

I never did though. Engage on full auto. Never ever.

Waste of ammo and bad shooting to go full auto in almost every situation except a few. Why they’d even put that option on modern weapons for pros was a mystery to me. Who knew? But that’s what people wanted. Even pros.

Well, I almost never went full auto. But right now… I really, really wanted to. I insanely wanted to. It was like an itch I absolutely had to scratch. I had to tell myself not to play with the selector switch. Not to flip to full rock and roll and get it on.

But, “Oh yeah,” I said to Cook when he told me his half-baked explanation of why drugging my entire platoon with something akin to an LSD trip was going to somehow make everything “work out” in the middle of an op. “What kind of advantage is that, exactly, you blithering psychopath?” I hissed at him in the near-darkness as we trailed the squads. “You just drugged everyone to the gills. I don’t know who the hell I’m more afraid of—an enemy hopped up on drugs and waiting for us with all kinds of automatic weapons, or my own guys who are also hopped up on some same but slightly