Strange Company Nick Cole (best classic novels TXT) 📖

What came through the volcano crack in reality looked like something out of a science fiction movie. Half Ultra Marine, half demon. It wore a type of armor, but more advanced than anything I’d ever seen. Shadowy and gray. And though you could tell it had reactive plates, and even some kind of fantastical jump jet like nothing known even for the Ultras, the plates seemed to shift and dance like fields of vampire butterflies in constant swarm. And despite this optical illusion due either to quantum planar shift, a Chief Cook theory when he was deep into his bourbon, or some kind of advanced reflex armor, a Stinkeye decree from on high when he’d smoke too much of his devil lotus, the armor held the shape of a heavily armored Ultra Executioner. But not like anything now. More something we might see in another thousand years of high Monarch culture and massive weapons dev for their guard dogs the Ultras. Not current tech. No way. And impossibly… no how.

But here it was. And it was living kinetic violence defined into impossible reality.

There were two enemy “pincers” of assaulters coming up the wide terminal for us as the sun began to turn blood-red hot afternoon. The crimson light shone through the shattered panes of the walls and skylight ceiling like some unholy cathedral that worshipped demons of death and conquest.

I had to wonder, was it me, was it the quality of light in the day, or had that unholy cathedral just changed the day to one of doom?

Such phenomena had been noted before during the appearances of the girl’s Wild Thing.

There were the two enemy combat teams, moving like the wings of the angel of death up the sides of the terminal, using bounding overwatch covering fire and movement to get close. Coming for us. Small arms and mediums chattered out bullet sprays of death where we were supposed to be. At their center, a mobile heavy machine-gun team was setting up to put an end to us. In less than a minute they’d be in the game.

The death thing from another dimension began to move, and it moved like relentless liquid death. Like heat lightning in human form. Racing forward, directly into one enemy combat team that hadn’t yet reacted to its sudden entrance onto the battlefield, the Wild Thing fired its weapon point-blank. Yeah, it was an assault rifle of some advanced sort, but it sounded like the thudding brrrrrrrt of death from any heavy GAU weapon system. Systems usually mounted on mobile gun platforms or vehicles. Immense and heavy. Deadly and absolutely fatal. Except now in assault weapon format courtesy of the other side of the Crack of Doom. I watched as, moving faster than Hauser the cyborg pumping on full hydraulics to run the fifty-meter, and yeah the First Sergeant even made Hauser do PT if just to humiliate us all, I watched as the Wild Thing moved in and among the first enemy combat team it had selected for near-instant termination via heavy doses of lead poisoning at extremely close range.

It, the Wild Thing, was at the enemy assault center, having bisected their wedge neatly in its first move. That was when it opened fire like some relentless future death machine from an age of post-apocalyptic horror that nightmares were made of. The outgoing fire from its wicked battle rifle, matte-black, two huge drums hanging from the mag well, blurred away from the weapon and just disintegrated the left-hand wedge of the team. Body parts went flying away and corpses that didn’t know they were dead watched in horror as they took hundreds of hits in seconds. From my perspective it looked like they just got vaporized in graphic detail.

File that under top five things I can live without ever seeing again.

“Come on,” said Hauser. “Time to move, Sergeant Orion.”

He was right. But watching the Wild Thing destroy was a horrible entertainment one could not easily pull their eyes away from.

One of the troopers from the surviving half of that combat wedge did a stupid or brave thing. Sometimes the line is unclear when playing adult tag with automatic weapons. But as Chief Cook likes to say, Just because it’s a bad idea doesn’t mean it won’t be a good time. But that guy rushed the Wild Thing and tried to butt-stroke the dark being with his combat rifle. Like that would actually do something.

Bad idea. Low on fun. Would not recommend. Highly.

The Wild Thing pivoted once more, lightning-fast, and unleashed a cone of brrrrrrrrt on the brave-stupid enemy trooper at close range.

The guy. Just. Disintegrated. Piece by piece.

Literally.

Chalk that one up as one of the top five worst things I have ever seen. Put it in front of the last one in order of importance.

The rest of the enemy wedge withered under an intense blur of sweeping fire traversing left to right as the Wild Thing finished devastating that edge of the pincer.

Less than four seconds.

Hauser and I fell back, chasing the Little Girl up the frozen escalator where once the interstellar elite had come and gone over the course of bright and glittery lives. We hadn’t taken ten steps before a combat team was done to near-instant death by the Little Girl’s summoned dark playmate.

Some thought running around in one of my background apps didn’t want to know anything about the reality the Wild Thing came from.

Not at all. Not ever. I had this feeling that if you did, that meant you’d done something really terrible. Messed up really, really badly.

Also. Side note. Your mind swears there’s some kind of thundering music shrieking out from that void place in the universe from whence the nightmare warrior had come to serve the Little Girl. You’d swear to it. Acid metal. Thunder rock. Put me on the cyber-rack and turn it up to eleven and I could hum a few bars if you left me for more than a minute.

Which is technically