Strange Company Nick Cole (best classic novels TXT) 📖

go time. Comm was already coming in from the captain to roll out. We’d be five minutes ahead of that convoy.

Get it on, Strange.

Thirty minutes later we hit the refuel point. I sat there the whole drive wondering what she was gonna add. Super-Science Voodoo Monarch Space Magic? That’s what they do. Watch any spectacuthriller and see one of them mow down hundreds of hapless enemies with rifles that never need to be reloaded. Complex karate moves that never fail. Sliding gunfight kills that seem pretty easy unless all your muscles are wasted from humping rucks and the dozens of injuries Motrin-X don’t do a damn thing for. Oh yeah, and close-quarters weapon takeaways and combat kills all while maintaining an incredible amount of energy and focus despite bullets flying in every direction.

Yeah, it’s all movie tricks. But how much?

Sitting in a speeding, souped-up Mule rocking a nano-cooled fifty as the rain and the night whipped past my dust- and blood-caked face, with a living god slash death machine on your six and knowing you’re about to get it on real bad, makes a man like me think about things I shouldn’t. Lusting after her. How tired I was. And that I needed to stow all that in my mental ruck because Zero-Get-It-On was fast approaching.

And Reaper needed me.

I’d lost enough dudes today. Their faces swam past in the darkness and I shook my head and told them I didn’t have time to say I was sorry for being such an awful leader.

Later. I’d get to that later if later ever came. If it didn’t… well, problem solved for me.

When it got bad six minutes into the refill as we got hit by an Ultra scout sniper team no one thought should be around, she surprised all of us on a lot of levels.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The rain had stopped by the time we reached the main refueling point for most of the vehicles still trying to flee the main capital city. Assault troops, too, had stopped raining down from the massive Monarch battleship looming in the skies above, but drops and larger transports were now starting their landing operations. Explosions and intense firefights fell behind us while strike fighters and bombers began to hit distant targets farther and farther out from the center.

The feeling of a noose cinching around your neck was both distinct. And intentional.

Broadcast stations were sending nothing. Nets were down. We passed the ruins of a burning star liner that had been shot down and had scattered itself all over a wet field out there in the early dark. There didn’t seem to be any survivors. Only flames and wreckage that embodied waste. A waste of life. A waste of a war. Zero gain. No winners. Everyone was a loser. Except the Monarchs. But of course everyone had to have known that all along.

More questions came from this line of thought and I shoved them away with a disgusted gesture. Pushing them out the speeding vehicle and away into the night and the wind. And sometimes the rain.

A superhighway we’d been calling MSR Lifeline was clogged with heavy traffic ahead. In the long months of the war for this world it had been designated for military use only. But now that the war was unofficially over and the Ultras had come to deliver judgment, every vehicle, both civilian and let’s just call them former military, had clogged all lanes and decks. Fights had broken out and the losers lay lifeless alongside the roads. Refugees hustled between the cars on foot, convinced they still had a chance.

Whatever had passed for society on this world was gone. It was everyone for themselves now. Mercy was in short supply now that it was valuable.

Our objective, the fueling point, lay right alongside Lifeline near the eastern edge of the city, in an area that had avoided much of the war due to its supply yards being heavily defended. The objective was a bulk fuel and energy distribution point for heavier traffic. Whoever was keeping it alive sensed their moment to clean up every currency anyone had left on hand to push at them. They probably thought they were making a killing.

They were also playing with their lives. Gambling with really bad odds getting worse by the second.

I’d have told them they were just looking to get killed. But I’d given up telling people how to live their lives a long time ago. I never liked the feeling it left inside me when they didn’t listen to what I had to say. Billed for advice not taken was the phrase I never muttered but thought about just the same all the time in these situations.

Resistance defenders were nowhere to be seen in the last ten minutes of driving as we reached the fuel point objective and I began to get sitrep data from the drone someone in Voodoo was running beneath the low cloud layer. The situation on the objective was grim yet under a loose kind of control. We identified the players and what needed to be done for a quick and hard takeover to control the refuel point. A couple of armed gangs, probably former military from both sides, were shaking down as many of the civvies as they could while everyone waited as virtual prisoners to refuel. They could be handled, and since Amarcus and Dog were gonna be doing that portion, some tough guys who preyed on the weak in this time of crisis were probably gonna find themselves dead. Suddenly. They had no idea what kind of monster was headed straight for them. I did. I could have warned them. But I had my job to do.

Sergeant Hannibal didn’t fool around. Again, whether I liked him or not, he got stuff done. And he was about to draw a duty I didn’t like. Controlling an out-of-control mob while trying to rob them at the same time.

The part that bugged me was that he, Amarcus, didn’t mind it one