by Nick Cole
They, the freaks in Voodoo, are like a drug we can’t shake. One we need real bad at the same time as we hate ourselves and what we once were before them. I think the same goes for them too.
“You shoulda seen us back then, Orion. Forty thousand enemy KIA at Crow’s Hill on Cet Moon. Slaves and tribute taken to cease hostilities,” says the First Sergeant when the night watch is late and we sit having stale coffee, listening to the nothing on the comm late in the dark. Imagining history whispers in the ether.
Main Engineering for the Neptune Clipper was all matte-black rubberized floor and hulking drive reactor in the emergency damage control red-lit darkness. Gray panels and screaming systems were also all in the red. Panels were broadcasting system failures through the big ship’s navigational and drive systems. Huge holographic illuminations in nether-ghost green crossed the floor making sure everyone here was very aware fuel cells portside three through fourteen were compromised and that atmo flight was not possible at this time. A matronly female ship’s automated voice warned us the hull was compromised at several points and emergency damage control parties had not reported in with status checks at this time.
“Reported fires on decks sixteen through twenty,” she said cautiously, as though warning us not to go swimming so soon after eating a tuna sandwich by the side of the lake on a hot summer day that was the opposite of all this. “All personnel are authorized to evacuate this starship as soon as possible.”
It was clear she was concerned, though motherly. And then, almost brightly…
“The All Worlds Corporation, a subsidiary of Neuf-Badtmueller Stellar, apologizes for this inconvenience and thanks you for your continued compliance with emergency personnel.”
Chief Cook tilted his head toward the zip-tied enemy three-man engineering team and gave me a quizzical, almost angry look. Like, C’mon Orion, why aren’t they dead already. I was busy getting ready to take Reaper through the aft crew deck up to sixteen and crack the spinal transport, or just use the tube, to get into the main passenger decks that connected with the hard dock into green ring’s main terminal. Hauser was busy having his way with the onboard system map, making sure we had all bulkheads opened along our route through the starship. Everything along our flanks locked down.
“What’re you gonna do with them?” whispered Chief Cook as he eyed the prisoners. His tone the same as if he wanted to sell me a stolen trans-cycle with a severely illegal modified boost capacitor. The kind capable of 420KMP in less than six seconds. Pressure suit required to ride.
I indicated that Farts would stay and watch ’em.
“Nah…” Cook hissed. He took a small clamshell out and was shooting them up with something from a three-injector hypo a moment later. The first one watched in stunned disbelief and when the other two saw the first one’s eyes abruptly roll back in his skull as the man passed out, or died, who knew… they started to struggle for their lives.
Chief Cook muttered, “Come here… cowards,” like he was wrestling defenseless babies, and he grabbed hold of another one, a lock of hair falling across his sweaty forehead as he worked to shoot them up. He injected both and they were out seconds later. Or at least I hoped they were just out.
“They’re just out, right?” I asked.
“Sure,” Chief Cook said like the liar I knew him to be, wiping sweat from his forehead as the Little Girl watched us. Especially when we played Cheks, that’s when he really lied. “Sure,” he said again, as if to himself only. Trying to convince himself more than anyone, like he was sure he’d gotten the right injector. Straightening the tunic of his fatigues and making sure his pistol belt was aligned once more, he stowed his clamshell back on his pistol belt. There had been other injectors inside. Each color-coded differently. I was sure there were all different kinds of “fun.”
“What do you think I am?” whined Cook as he got himself ready. “Some kind of monster?”
Yeah. I did. But weren’t we all, these days? I used to tell myself lies that some of us, me mostly, weren’t all monsters. But I’d given that up in my time with the Strange Company. We were hired to fight monsters. And if you don’t have a knight in shining armor handy standing around to do just that, fight and kill monsters, then what you’re left with isn’t pretty. What you do is hire other monsters to go fight your monsters in order to get the job done. Because the job has got to get done. Monsters gotta die, and of course, someone’s gotta do it.
And that was where Strange Company came in.
The lie I kept telling myself that week was that some monsters weren’t as bad as other monsters. Right? The lie of good monsters I had been telling myself the week before, had died when I watched us use a flamethrower on an enemy convoy refueling point on the outskirts of the city while we were defending LZ Syro. Listen, it was just Reaper who did that. The First Sergeant said, “Here, Orion, you’ll need this,” as he handed me the old Sindo surplus Ultra Marine banned weapon Biggs had stowed away in the crawler, acquired somewhere in our long haul across the stars. “Rather than shoot it out, you just hit and run with this thing and let the flames do the all the work, young sar’nt.” And when we got there, and I assessed the tactical situation… yeah, it was a lot easier to just start a firefight we had no intention of winning while Choker and I hit one of the fuelers with a jet of flame from a nearby alley. I still don’t have half of one of my eyebrows, and we roasted two enemy companies at the refueling point. At least. So I needed some new architecture for my crumbling philosophies. The Good Monsters Theory hadn’t survived that night.
I was adrift and getting fatally honest with myself about what we were doing. There ain’t any shining knights out in the dark parts of space where we find ourselves today. Out here at the limit of human knowledge, out here along the perimeter, it’s just us monsters. Out here in the dark it’s just us killing each other.
And brother, it’s gettin’ darker all the time.
Second Squad went in first and made it to the Clipper’s aft stores before they got into a firefight with Loyalist troopers sent in to respond to our boarding incursion. I listened to the sitrep coming in from Sergeant Jacks, Second Squad leader. We used Second as we ran First. Straight rifle squads made up of two fire teams, a squad designated marksman, and a medic to support. I ran through the squad in my mind as I tapped comm and went down on one knee, listening to the enemy strength report from Jacks. Ro-Ro, Dip Weasel, Killer Joe, Mass, Too Much, Red, Snorts, Shoots in the SDM position, and Patches as medic were in a clearing the next section.
All good. No “New Guys” and they wouldn’t have a “Kid.” Only I got those in First. Last New Guy they had was Snorts. He’d earned that nickname because he snorted after he ate. As though somehow he’d eaten so fast he inhaled some of his barely chewed food into his nose and needed to get it out by snorting like an elephant in the throes of intense intestinal distress. He’d sit there and snort and ignore, or was oblivious to, all the murder looks he was getting from the rest of his squad after chow. Especially if we had some downtime and everyone crashed out in a patrol circle. If we weren’t on mission, that is. Then he’d just snort and bother everyone. One day the weirdest thing happened. Once we’d tagged him Snorts, and he’d shrugged his shoulders and embraced it, him snorting after chow didn’t bother anyone else anymore. Snorts. That’s what he does, man. It was like that. Once we’d tagged him, classified him, it was then we understood him and after that it was all copacetic.
The minor rules of the universe are arcane and mysterious in the Strange. So it was. So it be.
But Second was in good shape for combat. They’d pinned the enemy with fire from Killer Joe’s Pig. Everyone had concealment and more important, good cover according to the sitrep from Sergeant Jacks. The enemy was stacking at two to one and looking like they were gonna push any second.
“Feels like an augmented squad, Orion!” shouted Jacks over the outgoing blur of high cycle from Killer Joe’s
Pig. He musta been nearby, pinned behind a bulkhead and trying to assess the tactical situation. He’d done boarding ops before he linked up with Strange. He knew behind a thick ceramic-forged bulkhead was the best place to be in a firefight inside a starship.
Killer Joe, the Pig gunner for Second, looked like the kind of rough customer from the block who would have slit your throat just for lunch money to spend on smokes. He looked like that horror-movie monster Cyberstein, but with more scars. And uglier. That’s how he got the nickname. Someone had said he looked like “Joe Killer” from a serial comic book that was big back in the day. Some hitman who works for the Alta Mob on Suaguar and plays both sides against the middle. Eventually we just settled on calling him Killer Joe.
Truth was, his looks were unfortunate. They didn’t match the person. You couldn’t have met a nicer guy. And when we got let loose on some town, it was Killer Joe who was the guy that made sure no one messed with us and that we got home no matter how sloppy we got. Even if home was just a bombed-out warehouse with cardboard for bedding and a helmet for your head. Joe didn’t drink. But he liked to watch others have a good time. That made him laugh and it was then he wasn’t so ugly.
Killer Joe also cleaned us out at pool, which was his thing and which he was an actual absolute serial killer about. Watching Killer Joe play pool was like watching a Monarch ment-savant decode the secrets of quantum distance travel aboard one of the big Spires. State-of-the-art dark magic engine science. Crossing the big distances in an instant. Defying all the written laws because there were unknowns not available to the rest of the heaving slob-mass of stellar humanity surging for the farthest reaches.
Us and our dumb ships trying our “real bestest” to go real fast to get somewhere we could call our own. Even jump drive was lame compared to that stuff the Spires and their navigator ment-savants could do.
“Hause!” I yelled to the cyborg squad leader who ran Third Herd. “Need a way to come at them from the flank while Two pins. What’s the ship’s map say we can do about this?”
The blare of outgoing and incoming fire was making comms almost unintelligible deep within the tight quarters of the lower engineering decks of the starship.
Hauser, with no emotion and utter calm, ran his fingers over the touchscreen and found our map. He airdropped it onto my combat lens and I ran through it quickly. We’d go into aft crew, hang a left at the first junction, and take off into crew hab. Run crew hab for a hundred meters and cut back through the galley to come out with an angle on stores that might change the course of events for Second Squad in a firefight.
“First up. Hauser take Third and stage behind Second. Once we attack from the left, bounding overwatch to move through stores and put fire on them as you close. Watch for friendlies here…” I said, highlighting a ping on our map to show where I thought First and Hauser’s combined element might get close enough to start shooting each other.
“Copy, Platoon Leader.” It was hard to break Hauser of his rigid military coding from his time with the Ultras. It was wired deep and hard into his cyber DNA. I always found the story of his escape, and awakening, amazing. And I knew I could count on him to make sure we got no friendly fire as we noosed the enemy and went for the kill.
Yeah, a C-985 Infiltration Cyborg optimized for terror and urban combat protocols with a heavy warfare chassis wasn’t a thing you wanted to run into out there in the dark when the lines of combat were good and blurred. Especially the Eight Series Heavy Combat models. But having one such cyborg have your back, that was actually a great sense of comfort not to be underestimated.
I liked Hauser, if only because he gave me courage. I’d read that somewhere and I couldn’t remember where. But when I thought of Hauser, who once innocently asked me if he had a soul, I thought of that line and I thought of him.
Somehow the universe made a little more sense after that. Or indicated there was a trail of bread crumbs that might lead to where the answers were hidden. It just took an awakened combat-model cyborg to ask the question.
And the other cool thing about Hauser was he could carry the Pig and a couple of other weapons. Third had two Pig gunners, one being Hauser, and that made them our heavy weapons squad. He turned, almost mechanically, away from me. The motion was not quite natural human movement, and then he led both squads off through Engineering to reach the main entrance to the aft crew sections.
“First on me.”
I gave them the rough sketch of how we were gonna hit the enemy element that had Second pinned in stores as we moved.
They all listened, nodding, making adjustments to their gear. Getting magazines loosened in pouches for easy pulls and reloads. I noticed the Little Girl staring at me. Her face passive. Her eyes judging me. Trying to find out what kind of man I actually was. That was her thing. She stared at you like she was seeing everything you’d ever done, and sifting it. And trust me… you didn’t want to be the wrong kind of man with her. She could do real bad things when she wanted to.
“All right,” said Chief Cook a little too gustily. What the Little Girl was doing with him, and why she didn’t adjudicate him in the “wrong kind of man” category, I had no idea. The gap-toothed warrant officer checked his watch and then pulled his sidearm to chamber a round in the silver-plated 1911 .45 with Grim Reaper Astronaut handle grips. Pearl ivory. Black as night Grim Reaper Astronaut embossed at the center. “Let’s do this, Sergeant Orion. Fun’s about to start. It’s good and get it on time, children.”
Chapter Ten
We hit the enemy inside the permanently grounded Neptune Clipper from the sides, shooting into their flank deep within the ship’s stores. A quick hustle through the near-pristine crew quarters, First constantly remarking on the quiet and unoccupied luxury digs we were passing by, and then we were in position to open up and try to scratch the enemy in a deadly crossfire. The crew quarters of the Neptune Clipper were indeed immaculate, and state-of-the-art compared to the habs on our old bubble-gum-and-baling-wire destroyer turned mercenary troopship. The Spider was a five-hundred-year-old Newmax warship that hadn’t seen better days for most of that time. Rumor was she was a Ceti Alliance destroyer from back during the early years of space flight. After the civil war with Centaur and the establishment of the Monarchy, she’d been sold off as surplus. Modifications had made her, if not fast, then very dangerous in a gunfight. She’d pulled us out of more scrapes through sheer firepower and determination than anything else. And honestly, they didn’t make hull armor that thick anymore on modern warships. She could lay the hate, and she could take it too. And that was one of the reasons we called her home when we were on the ground in some war for pay. The goal was always to get through the whack and make it back to the Spider. But the living quarters aboard the Spider were extremely spartan. Not that it mattered. We had an onboard MMO and the coffins were all slaved into it. A forty-year haul between worlds wasn’t so bad actually. You could live whole lifetimes in there. Or just switch off and go Deep Sleep.
No combat wedge formation as we pushed through the crew sections of the Clipper. Now we were using the standard starship boarding column, checking blind angles and dead passages for the enemy attempting to do exactly what we were about to do to them as we pushed deeper into the belly of the ship. Stacking at intersections and bulkheads and running scans to see if we’d find any unfriendly IEDs, or ship’s security systems running on backup reserve, before they found us. If it had been another merc company we were going to hit, like the now most-likely-defunct Grau Skull, then there would’ve at least been sentries or another fire team coming at our main body to pull the same stunt. You don’t get to hang around being a named private military contractor by being dumb enough not to put at least a few sentries out on your flanks.
But true believers, like the Monarchs’ Loyalist Brigades, they thought war was all stand up and fight. Slogans, chants, and good intentions. And of course, their cause was right. Ask ’em. They
’d been told they were on the right side. Ah, the blind belief that you couldn’t be defeated because you’d believed all the lies about the superior side. And that somehow meant something in the big dice roll of who was gonna win, and who was gone get dead in the next few.
These guys were dumb. The dice were with us. But of course we only ever played with loaded dice as much as possible. Even then sometimes the dice come up snake eyes. Even for the Strange Company. Attend and know Murphy’s Wisdom, as the First Sergeant liked to lecture over one of our recently dead.
Stacked and racked down-passage, we saw them in control of Central Supply Conduit 06, as the ship tagged their location. They were all wearing new “space marine” gear the Monarchs would ship out when the war started to heat up to there being a need for formal military organization. Good stuff. Lots of gadgets, and armor that would stand up to our sidearms if we didn’t shoot them too many times. Technically it was supposed to stand up to rifle grain loads. But of course, PMCs never use standard grain loads. Go high power or go home in a body bag, as Biggs liked to bark during ammo draws. In private military contracting, you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.
But I’ve said that before and excuse me if I say it again. If only just to remind myself what the truth is. Some truths must be repeated if only because it’s fatal to forget them.
We had no intention of using our sidearms, or standard grain loads.
The rule of thumb is this.
Sidearms put a hole in you.
Battle rifles put a hole through you.
And combat shotguns just remove nice big chunks of who you used to be.
There were already several enemy dead on the matte-gray rubberized decking inside Central Supply Conduit 06. In starships like this the crew decks are always utilitarian. Clean, cool, and dark. Which was perfect for boarding ops even if the ship was grounded and burning. Dark and rigged for low-noise impact combined with a good breakdown of the ship’s internal layout made the work easier. Note, I didn’t say easy. Just easier. The other side rolled the dice too, and sometimes they got the snake eyes. Sometimes boxcars.