Strange Company Nick Cole (best classic novels TXT) 📖

way over our heads. Over seventy-five percent of one of my squads had been wiped out in a firefight that had gone from serious to out-of-control in under two minutes. Listening to the casualty reports and the chatter of the comm, broken by high-dosage automatic gunfire and troopers speedballing on adrenaline and fear, I knew Third Squad was wasted. They’d taken a direct hit to the jaw and they were staggering to get their feet underneath them. Even with Hauser the killing machine running the show.

“Pulling back to main baggage claim on level one,” updated Hauser mechanically. Everything going to hell in a handbasket and the combat machine was doing its thing. “Butch is hit. Gunshot wound to the arm. Radius and ulna shattered. CAT applied. Burns across his chest and other arm.”

I advised Choker as we shifted to main baggage claim to support the defense there. Down here on the lower level power was out and only emergency evacuation signs flashed in the ominous dark. Second and Fourth Squads were laying the hate from the main concourse down onto the tarmac below and facing toward the inner rings of the giant starfield. But reports were coming in from the First Sergeant watching the main battle at the Division Tactical Operations Center that the Loaylist raiders in more light attack technicals and some enemy walkers, Assassins, were breaking through now that our main assault had been stalled.

If I need to spell it out for whoever reads this one day, we were being surrounded in the terminal as our friendly lines collapsed.

Four minutes later, Loyalist troopers, supported by flamethrowers, tried main baggage claim. Most of us barely got out of there alive.

I had about a minute and thirty seconds once we linked with what was left of Third to set up a defense in main baggage claim. Hauser’s combat and tac plan algorithms had correctly identified this spot as an excellent hold to protect the main terminal in the levels above our heads where Second and Fourth were engaging from the main terminal and trying to hold the drop pad on the roof.

I had a feeling we were going to need that for our escape I was sure the Old Man was arranging now to pull us out.

The main baggage claim was a wide sprawling area that connected to other smaller baggage claims along this lower level. Much of one wall was absorbed by the standard-at-every-starport customs and immigration offices. The center was absorbed by a series of small baggage “fountains” where passenger luggage appeared from conveyor belts emitting from the floor and then began to circle the “fountain.” The area was dark and abandoned, shadowy in parts, and dotted with enough cover to make for a good defense.

Hauser took the left flank near the customs offices, with half my squad, while I took the right and what remained of the claim area and the various luggage fountains. Interlocking fields of fire were established by little more than knife-hand motions in what direction everyone was to set up using cover.

Butch was bad. Not only was he groaning in pain from the shattered arm, but his carrier was cooked and he had second-degree burns across much of his chest, arm, and one side of his face. Thankfully he’d been able to shuck out of his gear when the hot jets of flaming liquid fuel covered the gunner’s nest they’d tried to set up. He lost the belts and Third lost their other gunner.

Gains had also bought it.

Gains had told me his story once a long time ago. Between missions. He had nothing to be ashamed of. But he wanted it down and I’d obliged and put it in the permanent record. That’s what I do.

We had Nox, the other surviving member of Third, take the wounded assistant gunner to the rear of our lines, which really weren’t the rear. The center. It was really more of a center now that we had incoming from almost every direction and fast movers all out across the runway out there beyond the terminal.

“This ain’t how it ends, boss,” said Punch, coming up beside me in the last fifteen seconds before the enemy walked right into our kill zone. I guess he could read the faraway look in my eyes. The “Here we go.”

The sound of outgoing gunfire upstairs was cacophonic now. Out there beyond the sturdy walls of the terminal I could hear the missile strikes whooshing away from the Assassin mechs approaching our defenses. A distant main gun, ours or theirs, erupted off a tank, and I heard the shell moan and strike something that exploded like a thundercat’s shriek.

Down here in the shadowy and dark baggage claim beneath the main terminal above I nodded and watched the first shadowy outlines of their assault force move into the far end of the massive sprawl of baggage claim. Weapons sweeping, heads on swivels. These guys hadn’t gotten this far by being dumb.

“Hold,” I whispered.

I needed the dudes with flamethrowers to show up so we could do them first. But since these guys were good, they were holding them back with some kind of reserve force. It was easy to see the lead element would pin us and then they’d call in for support for the flamethrowers.

I waited until the last second and then opened up on those inside the kill zone of our interlocking fire. I tapped two and knocked them down and out of sight. No update from my combat lens to tell me if probability and hit tracking had determined I’d gotten kills. Like I said, we don’t run premium gear. It’s prone to come and go based on whims that cannot be calculated.

Punch was engaging across the claim area, dumping fire onto one of their shooters, and when he ducked down, I popped out from the far side of the baggage carousel and nailed the dude as he tried to spot us. The dot on my Bastard’s sight danced, and in the