Strange Company Nick Cole (best classic novels TXT) 📖

Then the shock wave hit us and knocked us to the hot tarmac. Grit and debris raced over us and I was looking up at the sun a minute later when I came to my senses and saw the mist, haze, clouds, and smoke of the battle racing away to the edges of my vision as the shock wave above from the four missile strikes continued to expand. Pushing the atmosphere off in every direction.

I sat up and checked the Kid. He was on his knees and hacking. I made sure he wasn’t spitting up blood. That he hadn’t inhaled a flying molten metal fragment or took something right in his own guts. He hadn’t. He’d just had the wind knocked out of him, like me. That was standard for AAVs. I was used to it. He wasn’t. Caught him by surprise.

War is a learn-on-the-job workplace. No matter how much training you do. You don’t know it until you know it.

“Killed… it,” I gasped, trying to catch my own breath. Where the giant walker had been was nothing but burning mech. And to an infantryman, there literally is no better sight.

“C’mon,” I said, stumbling to my feet, my battle rattle feeling not so heavy, but also not so tight. It had been a long day. My helmet had been knocked off. I grabbed it. The chin strap was ripped away. “Gotta drag the speedball back inside,” I shouted hoarsely over the mech’s internal explosions as more rounds cooked off like fireworks into the hot sweaty daylight above.

The squads would need reloads if we were gonna hold until relieved.

Chapter Twenty

We made it back in, dragging the speedball and all the resupply it could contain. We humped it as quickly as we could back up into the main terminal as the next push started from the Loyalist forces now swarming the tarmac and taxiways beyond the terminal. To our rear more than half of the burning starship was fully engulfed. I worried about secondary explosions and reactor core cascades. Things I’d wanted to learn about, but never had. Things were going from worse to end of the world on all points of the compass. Roads not taken were starting to look real appealing.

“Second’s in good shape, Orion,” Chief Cook reported, speaking rapidly to apprise me of changes in Reaper’s situation. “What remains of your squad and Third are plugging holes in what’s left of Fourth. They took it right in the face. So-So’s dead. Lots of wounded. Everyone who can’s carrying a rifle.”

He whistled and polished off a cigarette he’d been inhaling as he tried to tag enemy assets with his targeting binoculars.

I looked through the shattered main terminal windows, wan with dust and smoke. Out there the enemy walker we’d just toasted burned, ammunition cooking off thunderously at odd intervals.

The situation was my platoon had just fought off a major enemy push that had managed to get inside our perimeter for a few hot minutes. Enemy dead were being stripped of their ammo and mutilated for trophies. This always happened when things got grim. It was as though Strange Company, sensing things about to go horribly wrong, wanted to get in their insults while they still could.

I watched Choker, our medic, cut off some hero’s nose and add it to a necklace he wore just above his chest rig. There were about five noses on it. When it came time for Reaper to start calling out “black on mags,” he wanted the enemy to know. Wanted his executioners to know it was him who’d done their friends. Why? I don’t know. But I guess he was hoping the execution might go a bit quicker if they were hot about it and didn’t want to be patient enough to think up something really gruesome. And painful.

The First Sergeant was in my ear.

“Reaper Six Actual,” he said over the company comm. “This is Doghouse.”

“Go for Reaper.”

I was keeping things short as I moved among my survivors and made sure the Kid got everyone’s mags topped off and watched as Punch collected dead hero ammo and redistributed what we could use. Some high-ex woulda been real useful right about now, I thought to myself on a background app my mental hard drive kept running in survival mode.

To defend. Yeah, sure. And to save us some trouble doing ourselves if things got real bad. That too.

I hadn’t had time to get my body parts necklace together. And also, that wasn’t my style. I didn’t mutilate my enemies just because they got paid by some other guys than the ones that hired me to do to them exactly what they were trying to do to me. I was hoping for a little mutual respect or at least professional courtesy.

But many in Strange say I’m naive that way.

“Sar’nt,” thundered the First Sergeant through the static of ECM interference and the howl of the Mule’s twin turbine engines. He was in his combat utility ride, an M876 Sindo-War-surplus Mule and headed somewhere fast. For a brief second, I wondered if this was it. If the company was dissolving right here and now, and Top was just being decent in letting us know what the score was as everyone hightailed it for all points beyond the area of operations.

I was full of dark thoughts like that right about now.

“Captain’s got you a ride outta there, Sergeant Orion. Ya need to get your men and fall back up to the roof o’ the terminal. Establish a defensive perimeter there and mark the LZ for dustoff. ETA fifteen, Sergeant.”

I copied.

“Repeat, son,” yelled the First Sergeant as the electronic countermeasure interference got worse. “Repeat. He will be there. Dustoff hot LZ or no. Be on those birds, Sergeant. Everything’s gone real pear-shaped.”

And then he said something that got lost by the jamming but it sounded like “Be advised… static… entering the battlespace.”

For a brief second my combat lens reconnected with Resistance Strat-Intel. I got a quick updated look at the battlefield from