Strange Company

by Nick Cole

  We popped up and mag-dumped on the survivors. Especially the ones covered in burning fuel.

  The remaining group, protected from the explosive by some of the luggage fountains and still ready to stage their attack, were now caught in a crossfire between Hauser’s Pig and the Kid and me.

  The guy carrying a flamethrower rig in that element was smart. First thing he did was throw up a huge wall of fire between his team and Hauser’s relentless Pig, then traverse the massive baggage claim area, dividing it in half. Burning liquid fuel was everywhere and it was easy to see that things were now out of hand for everyone.

  I pulled the Kid back from our fighting position just to get away from the greedy flames that were everywhere. We duck-walked, and I dumped fire in short bursts with one hand as I tried to raise Hauser on the comm. But someone on their side must have tossed some kind of comm-chaff type grenade. Our whole system was rebooting in my combat lens.

  Ten seconds later we were cut off by flames, but I had re-established something of a connection to Hauser.

  “Pull back to the left and escalators. Set high-ex and det immediately. We’ll find another way up.” The battle here was lost as the flames went out of control. We’d be burned alive down here. It was time to retreat back into the main terminal.

  I could almost hear the First Sergeant screaming at me, “We don’t retreat, Sergeant Orion. We advance to the rear.”

  The channel was still scrambling and trying to reacquire through encryption, but I got a terse “acknowledged” from the cyborg, and the Kid and I entered a new area of the terminal, chased by gunfire.

  It was some kind of employee maintenance hall. Unglamourous and gray utilitarian, hazard yellow lights streaming and smoke seeping in.

  Suddenly I had comm from the First Sergeant.

  “… say again. This is Doghouse for Old Man,” said the old NCO, using our company call signs. Doghouse was always the First Sergeant. That he was calling for our commander meant he had an orders update.

  “Go for Reaper Actual,” I said, tapping the comm, scanning our rear and making sure I had a topped-off mag in my Bastard. The Kid was sweeping forward at the double, checking corners, and leading me in a rough direction back under the main terminal.

  “We need a way up,” I hissed at him.

  He nodded and redoubled his efforts to find one.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Sorry, Sergeant Orion,” said the First Sergeant over the distorted crackle of the comm. Loyalist electronic warfare units were in the skies above, now that it was clear their side had air superiority.

  So literally the news was getting better by the second. And by better… I mean worse. Much, much worse.

  “Captain is arguing with High Command for a drop reallocation to get you boys out of there,” continued the First Sergeant. “Whole line’s pulling back. Big boys are sayin’ they’re done for the day.”

  See what I mean? Worse and getting awful. Not better.

  “But while the captain fights his battles, do not dismay, trooper,” the First Sergeant continued grandly. As was his way. I didn’t mind it, he’d earned the right. If anyone had been in the exact situation we were now in, surrounded, outgunned, and incoming from almost every direction, it was the Top. “Speedball inbound on your position. Arrival time three minutes. You got a heavy walker, HGT-306, coming straight at ya. This oughta ruin its day good and plenty. Location’ll be close, but that’s all I can give ya right now, son.”

  I copied and said were standing by on the speedball. Hell, what else can you do when the whole thing is going pear-shaped?

  Hauser and most of my squad were now fighting for the lifts and escalators up to the main terminal where the other squads were fighting to maintain some kind of perimeter.

  “Situation critical,” said Hauser in his calm, machine-like way. The hint of ancient German crispness there in his program. No BS. No positive motivation. Just the facts. Sometimes that irritated me. But right now, the reality of our situation was serious. And the honest truth was… it was critical.

  “We will make them pay, Sergeant,” said the cyborg war machine.

  I checked my watch. Two minutes to the speedball. I didn’t know if it was the game-changer the First Sergeant said it would be, but I’d take just about anything right now. I alerted all elements we had a high-speed-delivery weapons resupply package on the way and to be on the lookout for it. They acknowledged, and I didn’t add that there was every possibility we were being hung out to dry today by our employers and that most likely death or a prison camp lay in our near future.

  I try to be positive that way.

  The Kid and I had found a cargo lift deep in the ground-level maintenance areas underneath the main terminal. It was dark and dimly lit down here, and smelled of oil and machinery. All around us, drones and utility vehicles, from hover-operational to tracked, dirty and grimy, waited in the humming darkness for the next starship that would never arrive on this war-torn battle zone of a world. Second and Fourth Squads above were racking up kill counts if only because the environment was so target-rich. Hauser had the main access point into the terminal above locked down under a brutal crossfire. But ammo there was critical. The only way we could identify for the enemy to flank them was through the cargo maintenance lift the Kid and I were guarding down here. We’d hold here until that speedball made it into the AO.

  I didn’t exactly know what a mere two of us were going to do if they really pushed through this axis of attack. But I also knew we’d figure something out and convince them to go somewhere else, or die arguing with us.

  Or we could die, surrounded by expended brass and on the losing side of the argument. It felt like one of those days, know what I mean?

  But then again… it wouldn’t be my problem anymore. So, there was that. And of course, you have to be honest with yourself about the score and what inning of the game it is exactly.

  “Gains…” whispered the Kid in the darkness as we waited to repel. He whispered it to me just above the hum and throb of the massive charging stations underneath the thick concrete floor that powered the utility vehicles waiting down here.

  Yeah. Gains. The other Pig gunner in Third. If Butch, the AG, assistant gunner, was roasted and falling back, then Gains was dead. Gains. Yeah. Everyone liked Gains a lot. Good guy. And Gains liked everyone. Gains’s thing in life was PT. Physical training. But not hell PT like the NCOs led, which was basically punitive suffering regardless of any perceived or imaginary infractions. The First Sergeant insisted SOP PT be hard to punishment level and thus perfect for Strange Company standards.

  We might have seemed easygoing and informal. But there were certain things we held rigid on. PT. Marksmanship. Job skills. And we hated digging as a rule.

  “Digging’s for chumps,” Punch like to say every time we were forced to.

  “If you ain’t throwin’ up, then it ain’t PT,” the First Sergeant would crow at the top of his lungs every morning as we did PT. Generally not during combat ops. But rest days meant PT days. And he’d swing by wherever you were and make sure, even during lulls in ops that he’d suggest to the NCO in charge, “Them boys need to get PT’d. Good for what ails ’em, Sergeant. And right now, Orion, all they got is the fear. A little heavy breathing and maybe even a good hurl’ll give ’em a new lease on life. Always does me. Once around the airfield. Watch out for snipers and don’t get hit by a truck or nothin’. I’ll watch your sector for ya while you boys are gone.”

  But that wasn’t Gains’s PT. Gains loved exercise, and he studied it relentlessly. Wherever we were at he was turning whatever he had at hand into a gym. He was rippin’ yuuuge even for a gunner. But he was also an encourager. He didn’t shame you if exercise hadn’t been your thing and you wanted to learn. He just got you going and encouraged you to do more. He called those improvements your gains. Hence the tag. He’d work with anyone on a
nything they needed to improve. He had a small cult of gettin’ swole going on across the entire company. Once you were in the cult you found positivity, friends, and you got jacked. One of them had needed to explain to me the usage of jacked versus swole one time. You got swole. You were jacked. I never joined but I admired from afar.

  “Yeah,” I said in the dark of the maintenance hangar as we waited for more war to come and find us. I adjusted my sling and tried not to think about the future of the company without Gains anymore. Who would encourage us now to be better than the drunken, tired, and wrecked soldiers we were? Who would see that something better inside us even if that better was just larger muscles?

  That was him. That was Gains.

  And now he was gone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Gains had told me his story back on a world called Blue where the company had picked up some rough work. He told me after what the company records refer to as “The Long Patrol from Hell.” That’s what I put in there, my words, my title, but I didn’t come up with the name. The whole company collectively called it that. Still does late at night when we swap cards, drink a little, and remember all the ways we almost got smoked on “that one.” There are dozens of “that ones” among the current company roster. Even the Old Man calls it that. One night he came by a sector Reaper was watching in this war, early on, doing a guard check. It was late. We stood for a while smoking a cigarette, talking about the situation in our zone and how’d we’d react if anything lit up. It was starting to barely rain and the Old Man finishes his butt and mutters as he stares at the vast black wall of night, “Well… at least it ain’t the Patrol from Hell this time, Sergeant.”

  So even he calls that mess exactly what it was. The whole company almost bought it there big time on that patrol.

  Long story short, it was a three-day foot pacification patrol into the deep, up into jungle highlands on that world. We were there to root out the supply trains making their way down through the jungle and into the swamplands where much of the main fighting was going down. Blockade runner starships from the corps were bringing in containerloads of weapons and explosives because the other side, the one we were fighting for, had air cap over most of the continent but couldn’t penetrate the missile defenses surrounding the mountaintop starport atop Blue’s one and only super-peak. Up there at an altitude of twenty thousand feet high, the blockade runners were protected by advanced aegis ring missile defenses that could knock out any strike fighters sent in to do the cargo ships trying to make the dangerous approach to the mountaintop supply base.

  Once the cargo came in and set down on the massive landing pads, immense thrusters flaring and a-grav engines shuddering hard to stick the landing, it was sherpa’d down onto the lower high jungle peaks where the snow line ended. Then it disappeared into the hot, sweaty, and dangerous maze of fetid jungle up there above the main basin.

  The foot patrol was because none of our vehicles could make it up and in there. The jungle was steep and dense, and it grew vast due to the snowmelt high above. A cut trail would be reclaimed by the jungle within hours. Easy to lose your way in there. So it was nothing but a brutal climb with all the gear and weapons we could do. The air felt heavy for no reason I could ever figure out even as it got thinner, and when the jungle should have disappeared the higher we went up, it didn’t. It just got denser, thicker, and even angrier for some reason.

  There was, on that hell of a world, a particular small flying snake, the size of an insect like a fly, that could swarm in sudden bunches. Get enough bites and you started to get real sick and see visions. Hallucinations. Maybe that’s where Chief Cook got his psychotropic gas attack idea. He’d just been lying in wait like the predator he was for the perfect op to bust it out on someone. Anyway, twenty was the supposed number of bites before the mild toxin amassed enough in your system on a daily basis to send you over the other side. Water, rest, and food flushed it. But water was critical. Rations did horrible things to the flushing effect, and we were so exhausted, rest seemed more like death. Amass enough toxin in your system and you were done. Medics checked you, confirmed you were going, and we just roped you with 550 cord and you got drag-lined along with your element, drooling and raving while the rest of the squad distributed and carried your gear.

  At one point it was so bad for most of the squads, just Hauser and Gains were dragging the rest of Third Squad along with them, carrying everyone’s weapons and dripping with sweat. We climbed higher and higher, hoping we’d reach some altitude level where the small flying raptor snakes didn’t go.

  Spoiler… we never did. But that’s not important to the story.

  And yet Gains, no matter how beat we were each day in the jungle and on the Patrol from Hell, PT’d. Every day. In the cool morning, in the misty blue darkness he’d do strength and resistance training. End of day and you’d find him doing light cardio. Night came and we’d sit in the jungle dark, running ambushes and smoking the supply trains making their way down the mountain. A few hours’ sleep here and there. Then do it all over again.

  It was brutal.

  By the third night they were on to us and half the company was combat ineffective from the snake insect toxin. Even Stinkeye was out of his mind and raving like a lunatic about some big dead neutron star that was really just a data cloud where the Monarchs kept all their secrets to themselves. The ones they didn’t want to share with anyone. Even with themselves. The stuff he went on about made you shudder.

  “The Darkstar is where the truth goes to die!” he’d shout and spray his gutter liquor breath everywhere in the heat as we climbed another four thousand feet higher all that hot sweaty day. No one wanted to take the flask away from him due to the company superstition regarding it. So he drank and raved, and it wasn’t much different than how he normally was. At least he was walkie-talkie.

  Gains, he kept us all together. Later we theorized that even though we were literally getting bitten to death, it was his PT sessions that kept his system detoxed enough to mitigate the buildup of flying snake poison each day.

  Flying snake poison. The universe sure is a fun place, kids. Go interesting places, shoot interesting people. Get bit by flying snakes and lose your marbles.

  So, Gains is right there as you begin to lose your mind, pulling your primary and secondary weapons off your sweating, drooling, shaking frame, and making sure you can’t get to them ’cause you’re seeing things that aren’t there and talking about some really bad choices.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” I can almost hear him saying now. “Let me take care of these for a while.” And then he’s got you anchored to him with some five-fifty and you’re off, following the rest of the company higher and higher up into the never-ending jungle hell.

  Once the toxin built up, you had about four hours of madness before it flushed your system and made you weak as a kitten. A kitten with a fully automatic battle rifle because Strange Company still needed you back in position for that night’s ambush. But a kitten nonetheless. Trust me, this stuff made the flu seem like a pleasure cruise.

  If you were still out of your mind and raving by nightfall, we gagged you and tied you up and the First Sergeant and his driver watched over you back at the rally while the rest of the company went off to do some locals.

  The night the ambush on the ambush went down, it went real bad. Real fast. They had a pretty good idea where we were gonna hit them that night, and they came out of the darkness and hit us from all three sides. Company strength was most likely at less than fifty percent and those holding a rifle weren’t in great shape. Me included. I was out of my mind, but no one figured it out. I just kept telling myself to be cool and ignore the phantoms of my past. My platoon and the company needed me.

  So, I put my hallucinogenic suspicions on the back burner and tried to act like an NCO who knew what he was doing as suddenly we got attacked from three sides.

  I lost five pounds in swe
at alone that night. And I don’t have much to spare. We fought for our lives for about six hours, and the last three of those saw some pretty reckless soldiering and outright ridiculous stunts just to stay alive.

  Dawn eventually comes and the smoke of the battle doesn’t clear, it just mixes with the mist. We had dead in every direction. Halfway through the night, every element lost connection with each other and it was just all small groups for themselves.

  Stinkeye, who was less crazy that night, in the first golden light of green jungle morning climbs out from under a pile of dead ambushers he’d pulled over himself once he was out of ammo and tricks. He’d gone off with his two ancient ever-grungy forty-fives to try and destabilize a push by the enemy that went down after three in the morning.

  I was sure he was dead as we waited for dawn and watched for any of the corpses around our fighting position to start moving.

  But Stinkeye was standing there in the golden morning light as we’re getting comm and getting pulled out by drop. Op’s over.

  “Damn, Orion…” says Stinkeye and hits his flask. He’s clear. Not his usual wild and drunken self. He almost sounds like a normal-ish person as he gasps from the first blast of the hot jet fuel he’s just swallowed thickly. “Thought we was dead for sho. Damn slaughterhouse…” he mumbled and wandered off, staring at all the corpses.

  We barely made it. Most of us that is.

  It got close for everyone that night.

  Back at base, showers ran for almost six hours. We got hot chow and racked after the medics, and some additional doctors, were brought in to resurrect us via high-grade pharmaceuticals.

  Later the next day I got up. Most of the barracks was still asleep. It was quiet as a cemetery in there. I went out in the late afternoon sun wearing nothing but pants. Clean pants. The ones I’d worn, and carried, into the jungle were so shredded by the various violent flora and fauna, and caked in stinking mud, that there was no choice left but to burn them. So new combat pants felt like new skin. I went outside and there was Gains, lifting weights. I mean really lifting weights. Going for the record. His eyes were distant. Not the usual Gains the company knew. He was somewhere else that day.