by Nick Cole
I watched him going down the line, doing his work, telling the dead what they needed to hear.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
We rolled out two hours later. As usual, with an invading force closing the noose and breathing down our collective necks, the candle burning, the clock ticking, all the tense metaphors you can do, we sat in our new rides, waiting to be told which wire to cut. The green or the blue.
That too was a metaphor.
Apparently, we were still getting satellite drone data showing Ultra positions and the general state of play regarding the invading force. If things had looked bad as the game changed, once the picture came into focus, they were just downright awful. The entire Resistance line had been smashed from one end to the other. Now friendly units were either on the run and had lost all cohesive integrity, or they were surrendering en masse and hoping for some kind of mercy.
These were usually units that had no experience with the Monarchs, and especially the Ultras, and therefore didn’t understand that the term mercy was as foreign to them as the sun might be to a deep shark on the icy world of Graymist. We watched one unit get taken into custody and five minutes after they’d piled their weapons, they were lined up and shot. Also en masse.
Ultra Marines are ruthless killers. And they’re pretty efficient about it. I’m sure there’s a whole SOP for mass murder of every type somewhere in their training manuals. That and much worse.
The Old Man fed that live feed out to the squads so everyone could get a good look at what their fate would, not might, be if they did indeed decide to try that particular escape route from the unfolding endgame of this lost conflict. If just so Strange Company knew, and just so we didn’t have to recruit too much along the way or wherever we got our next chance. Remember, the company is always recruiting. We don’t stand on any kind of ceremony. Even while we waited in the lead vehicle, we watched a line of sappers, combat engineers from Astralon herself, guys that woke up this morning and thought they had a real live chance of being on the in-charge side by the end of the day, retreating. Really it was fleeing just as fast as they could hump. The First Sergeant who was pulled up alongside Reaper in the lead vehicles where we were waiting for the order to move out, shouted to the retreating sappers as they passed.
“Hey, kid! What unit you with?”
“Three-six-five,” says the guy tiredly.
First Sergeant back to me whispering, “We could always use more of them guys in case what’s-his-face gets blown up.”
“Jacks,” I clarified.
“Yeah, him. Good with the H-E but you never know. Explosives are fun but they’re real unforgiving if you know what I mean, Sergeant Orion.”
I did.
“Heard you guys got into it real bad a couple of hours back,” said the First Sergeant, turning back to the sappers on the move. “How’s that sergeant who ran supply for you boys? We traded him some rations a while back.”
“Prolly dead,” said the sapper, who’d paused to stand there and shift back and forth in his worn combat boots while answering Top’s questions. “Before the unit comm went down an Ultra hit team got the TOC hard and fast. Whole command section got wasted. Gotta hump, First Sergeant, sorry. Heard there was a drop that could take us to a bulk hauler up-orbit carrying refugees. It’s our best chance now. Gotta—”
“Ever thought about merc’n?” asked the First Sergeant like some used speeder salesman talking about a low down and high finance with E-Z credit. No payments for a year.
Guy shook his head and hustled on. He’d been warned by someone who knew better. Or he was just tired, had had enough war, and was hoping some hauler might get him “home” in sixty or so years. The bulk of all-star travel, and especially the haulers, is sub-light. Meaning it’s a long hop between worlds and home might not be there anymore. Especially if they paved over your neighborhood and put up a starport.
The First Sergeant went on that way for most of the line. Three guys joined though. Right there on the spot and the First Sergeant took ’em back to the supply crawler to see what they needed in the ways of gear and as much company indoc as he could shove into ’em.
“I’ll keep ’em with Voodoo, Sergeant Orion,” he shouted as he drove ’em off in a spray of mud and rain. “You got a lot goin’ on tonight. Don’t need new kids to add to the chaos.”
I drank the cold coffee I’d brewed up in my smart canteen that had stopped acting so smart about halfway through this war. It’s a drug and I needed drugs to keep doing my job.
I was feeling, even as the rain began to patter and I just sat there in my poncho trying to get ready to get it on, that there would be a lot more get it on tonight and I needed to be ready.
You know how it is.
I knew we were supposed to be moving soon, but I still hadn’t linked up with Reaper’s latest squad acquisition, the Monarch known as the Seeker.
Which was too much to even contemplate in the early evening rain and gloom with nothing but cold coffee and a smoke. Nox was now my driver. He was scrolling through his smart device and trying to get onto any net. They were all collapsing or dead. One was showing the standard Ultra battle flag, crimson and black with a silver Spartan’s helmet undulating. The words “Surrender and Prepare for Judgment” glared out from the tiny device.
“Well that’s just…” But I was too tired to finish and so I just inhaled the last of my smoke.
When she showed, it was both whelming and underwhelming. The Seeker.
As has been stated in this account she was like some otherworldly creature that walked among mere mortal men. She was tall and beautiful. Graceful and definitely used to being in charge. The huge green eyes, large, almost like a Katari’s, stared into you and glittered with intelligence beyond your imagining. It was hard, staring into them, remembering that somewhere back along the evolutionary tree both of you shared some kind of common DNA. You almost laughed at yourself for being a rube that would think such a stupid thing. Really you just wanted to stand there and drool and promise you’d kill anything for her.
Rumors swore that Monarchs had advanced pheromone control. But some women are just beautiful enough to cut a chump for regardless of chemicals. So, there’s that.
Her cheeks were sculpted. Hair a lustrous, almost arterial bleeding red. Curves in all the right places if you know what I mean. A face that could launch a thousand Battle Spires. If there were that many.
And I sure hope there aren’t.
“Sergeant Orion,” she began crisply. There was a passive use of some kind of tone that she was better than me as we stood there in the developing mud listening to the Ultra Marine gunfire get closer and closer. Street fighting was only blocks away now. House to house. It was time to move.
And she was better than me. She was a Monarch. Near immortal. Elite. Each of them owned their own world. They had seen and walked on ancient Earth. We worshipped them even if we didn’t admit it.
And I was just some soldier with my fair share of scars and bad tattoos. And that thought settled me right there. Drove off her chemicals. I blew smoke in her face and swallowed the last of my cold coffee from my not-so-smart canteen.
“That’s me.”
No comm from the captain yet. Were they recruiting more grunts looking for any port in a storm?
Yeah, no active use of superiority, but it was clear she was better than me. Which, like I said, ain’t saying much. But she was also better than everyone else. So much better, she didn’t need to make sure you knew it.
“We’ll be working together,” she began, “on this portion of the mission until we reach our first objective. I’ll ride behind you in this vehicle and advise you. You are in command of your section, and if you have orders for me, I’ll take them. I’m here to help, Sergeant.”
Well, that knocked a little wind out of my hardcore-tough-bro-soldier act for a moment. Truth? That’s other guys
. I’m more of the beaten NCO who sighs and looks off toward wherever as you tell him the next problem he’s got to jump all over before everything catches fire and we explode in every direction.
She dumped her gear onto the cargo deck of the Mule and stepped in, long legs in tight Combat Skin, a type of nano-fatigue I thought was only for sci-fi end-of-the-universe movies. I’d heard it was rated to stand up to small-arms fire and stabbing wounds. It also did a bunch of other tricks I’d never find out about.
But on her it looked like she was camouflaged half-naked where her chest rig and battle belt didn’t cover.
But hey, no one knows anything as they say, I told myself as I ached with every move she made. Today I thought we were about to see the end of this contract in some kind of power position, and here we are running for our lives.
So be it.
I climbed in and it was 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 bit. He seemed born for this post-apocalyptic unquestionable warlord total power grab. It was natural him. And that’s what scared me to death about Amarcus Hannibal. That’s what made me keep the karambit ready at all times for the one chance I’d have to use it on him. We’d tangled a few times. I knew the next would be for keeps.
It felt like a promise.
Sheer chaos the closer you got to the refueling point. Shootings and worse. Scattered goods and even burning vehicles. I could only imagine the dawning horror most of these people were now experiencing. If they were here in the main capital, they were Loyalist-friendly, or at least Loyalist-adjacent. They’d been fed a steady diet of propaganda about how they were going to win and then the “healing and reconciliation” with both sides would begin once the Astralonian Resistance had been put down from wanting their selfish self-rule and celebrating nebulous terms like Freedom and Liberty.
Now they were getting a dose of what they’d intended to do to those on the other side. Because of course all the “healing and reconciliation” would go just the one way. It always does. It’s just a nice way of letting one side know they have no other choice but to accept the terms of surrender. The losing side bending the knee and exposing the neck while the winners rake the prizes and goods with that smug sense of self-satisfaction as they rule from the near-top of the heap. The Monarchs were the undisputed top of the pile of course. But near the top was just good enough for every non-Monarch citizen of the universe.
Near the top was a dream of many.
This was standard propaganda straight from the Monarchs. Once you were on the winning side it was
Easy Street. Believe me, there was an upside to planetary revolt. Once the Monarchs settled things, those who’d figured the right side were gonna be in for some serious prizes. Big Prizes, as they say.
Propaganda worked because it told you what you wanted to believe. That was the secret.
Like the spectacuthrillers that showed evil, our employers on this one, being defeated. With extreme prejudice of course. Constant news-entertainment feeds filled minds and hearts with outright lies about the state of the war. They were always winning, even when they lost. Always smarter, even when they got caught flat-footed in stupid corruption. Always honest, even when some report indicated they weren’t.
There was no evil that couldn’t be walked back, massaged, and even justified to those who wanted to believe it bad enough to stop thinking for themselves. The ends do justify the means. Especially if there’s no one left to complain.
“If ya step back and look at all the individual pieces, Orion,” crowed Chief Cook as he swaggered around teaching some imaginary psyops lecture to everyone, “you’ll see it in all its grand mind-control glory. You see exactly where they’re going with it. But they know that. On some level they know they’re being controlled. So what do we do? Well, here’s what we used to do, is keep ’em destabilized by giving ’em new sensational stories every four days. Moving them this way and that but always in a certain direction we want them to go. A conclusion we want them to reach. A fever we want them to arrive at and be suffering from. For instance, take the plague on Demmeron Six. Great. Blame it on the opposition. Ratchet up the fear with hazmat postures. Make the little kiddies wear masks, hell, nothin’ sadder than seein’ some little tyke playing with a mask on. Really gets you in the feelz and makes you wanna punch someone in the face. Then, oh my what’s this, we blame the whole thing on the guy who’s actually trying to point out that the Monarchs’ bioweapons teams released a virus to hit the elderly and wipe out as many of them as they can. The guy who’s trying to help. He’s the one that caused it all by his lack of skill in handling the crisis we created. Why do this? Twofold. One, you get rid of the dole-drain to Life Assurance direct from the Monarch coffers, and two, you wipe out the wisdom database most of those oldsters have in which they could advise the young’uns about what they’re doing to fight for freedom. Those oldsters have life skills, plus twenty-five percent of them are combat vets from the Sindo. So win-win is how they always see it. And you get to blame the opposite side by never taking responsibility for anything and keeping everyone in a state of constant crisis. Let the world go into resentment and dissension and then do a little proxy war. Next thing you know, you got Ultras takin’ names and kickin’ people in the teeth. Battle Spire… check. Then the bank ship rolls in and you suck the world dry of hard convertible mem.”