Strange Company

by Nick Cole

  The skeleton… I stopped and stared in amazement at it for the brief second I had before we moved on. It was human-ish. Desiccated. And it had three eyes. Or rather three empty eye sockets staring out at me where there should have been eyes in the long ago of life.

  I wondered who it was in that way I do when I pass such corpses. But then remembered mercenaries don’t have to wonder. They just have to stay alive to the next gig. It’s what we do.

  It’s the private military contractor version of not my monkeys, not my circus.

  Speaking of…

  The first of the leaping monkeys, almost running on all fours, came out of the darkness down-tube, racing and madhouse screaming for hooma flesh and blood. Spears and gunshots too.

  Time to go.

  I ducked into the hatch and was grateful it could be closed and locked down manually. Hauser took over and dogged it tight as we watched the panels running alongside it indicate lockdown mode, electronic locks in place.

  The monkeys began to beat on it almost instantly, thundering a hundred paws and claws at once. Enraged at its presence. The sound is something I’ll never forget. The screeching. The hammering. The spine-scratch of claws dragging mindlessly mad along its length.

  There was no doubt once I ran out of ammo there wasn’t even the option to fight it out. Those things would tear us to shreds. Then, as Punch signaled me they’d found the last passageway to the Node and we were proceeding in, the red lights that ringed the hatch switched over to yellow. Indicating the locks were being disabled. Then green. A moment later dozens of claws reached in and through the appearing seam, beginning to tear and heave at the hatch to move faster.

  “They’re just animals!” shouted Jacks. “How are animals gonna disable complex systems?”

  I had no idea.

  “Pull back now!” ordered the captain.

  None of us needed to be told twice. We’d made it fifty meters down the electronics-filled maintenance passage when the hatch came open and a tidal wave of killer monkeys flooded in and came screeching and gnashing for us. Swarming along every surface. Deck. Walls. Ceiling.

  There’s no way we’re getting out of this, that background app in my mind kept screaming as I told it to shut up and get moving. Sometimes you just keep fighting even when it looks like you’re gonna lose.

  That’s what conflict is.

  Everyone wants a fight to go the way they first plan it all out in their fantasies. In the spectacuthriller the mind sees them being the hero of. But those are just fantasies. Plan meets reality on crack is usually how these things turn out.

  Sometimes you’re not even sure you know you won. You just keep swinging even though you’re tired enough to stop and take whatever beating is getting handed out. Not sure if you’re gonna win and pretty sure you’ve lost. You just keep doing it. Keep swinging. Keep fighting. Stabbing even if you’ve been done fatally.

  The captain’s shotgun boomed, echoing across the passage and comm. Then again. Again. And again. He was holding the line.

  All of this competing with short staccato bursts from the Pig as we fell back, burned brass, and gave ground as little as we could afford. I knew Hauser would do whatever it took. Everyone wanted him to lay down his life, except they didn’t think of it like that. Just spend all the runtime he had on our behalf. And he’d do it. He considered us the only friends and family a combat cyborg could have.

  How’d he put it? His life was stopped at one second to end of runtime. If he chose, he could activate that internal clock and det on our behalf. A small and very dirty nuclear yield. He’d buy what time he could for his friends.

  He even thought he was lucky to have someone like me, someone who knew what he could do in a pinch to save my butt, as a friend.

  I felt like the opposite of a friend as the thought crossed my survival mind. I swapped mags and turned and burned a couple of targets, like that would do something against the sea of madness swarming our rear. This was what hopeless looked like.

  “Jacks!” I shouted because I had no time to do anything else. “Heads up! Left flank!”

  We’d reached a four-way. Down-ship, a second element of murder monkeys was coming straight up a wide passage that looked like some kind of ancient comm and stellargraphy section. Huge map-glass installations and ruined plot tables pulled from their foundations and tossed over carelessly. The monkeys came through this on every side of the passage. Including the ceiling. They were cutting us off.

  We were about to get crushed from two sides.

  “Heads down!” shouted Jacks as he pulled his ruck off his back and deployed it out in front of us.

  I knew this play. I’d seen it before. Things had reached Desperate before. I dove on the Kid who hadn’t and was standing there, rifle up and ready to engage even though everything looked absolutely hopeless.

  He hadn’t been around long enough to realize how bad things had gotten. The luxury of youth.

  I tackled the Kid as my squad leader wirelessly detted anti-personnel mines all over the passage the new monkey attack was trying. The blast was deafening even with hearing protection. Tungsten-steel balls scattered, exploding violently in every direction. According to specs, the claymores were smart explosives with signature recognition. They were supposed to detonate away from friendlies.

  Supposed to is the operative phrase.

  Plus, we’d gotten the smart mines from a weapons bazaar and I was pretty sure Chungo, our Voodoo indirect specialist, had picked them up. He’d let us cross a lot of broken glass for a cheap arms deal. But even that is Company SOP. So, you never knew.

  I felt the wind get knocked out of me from multiple blasts and hoped I was gonna get to my feet without a serious wound. Or even a minor one.

  Just wasn’t room. Sorry, reality, my hands are currently real full. I’d like to pass, pay a small fine, or just ask the dealer for mercy on this one. I seriously can’t afford to be hit if I’m gonna get everyone out of here.

  I pushed off the Kid and dragged him up as the smoke cleared. I didn’t feel hit.

  But mines do strange things.

  “Injured, sound off!” I bellowed in the smoky confusion. Ship’s emergency red lighting had suddenly switched on to react to the damage. Probably on some kind of backup battery still hardwired into the old systems. I got everyone. The captain had taken a metal ball straight through his hand but there wasn’t a lot of blood loss. We had about thirty seconds to assess and move. The anti-personnel explosions had ruined the second monkey element, but we still had the originals flooding up our back trail. Hauser had stayed upright, returning fire through the explosion. More synthetic flesh ripped away from the almost human side of his body. He taken shrap from the blast and gone on relentlessly killing.

  “Time to move!” I roared. If only just for motivation.

  On the run, we picked up Team One’s back trail and raced up the last corridor for the Node that was our target. Ahead, our feet pounding down the slotted walk where piping and wiring ran beneath, I saw shield barriers and modern auto-gun sentries that had been installed recently. Lighting rigs faced outward.

  The science team’s defenses.

  I was guessing their security forces had set these up to keep the apes and monkeys back from the areas of the ship they’d reclaimed.

  The Kid was there, waving for us to hustle through. We made it as more of the simian killers raced out onto the walk behind us, swarmed, careened, and surged forward with pure hot murder in their screeching howls.

  That was the part that was the worst. The madhouse shrieking they made constantly.

  Then the auto-gun sentries, huge tripod snout-barreled death machines, opened up and began to spray hot fire in short braaaaps at the animals trying to tear us to pieces, their low-grade sentry-gun AIs tagging, targeting, and allotting as much lead as needed to bring about ends to hostile behavior. The monk
eys disregarded their comrades’ sudden rag-dolling death and kept on coming despite it all.

  On the other side of the initial defensive ring, we passed through a heavy-duty reinforced security door. Another install, no doubt from the science and security teams as they unlocked the secrets of the buried ship.

  And then the Monarch.

  “Good news or bad news, Orion?”

  Bad news. Always take the bad news first.

  “Those drone guns are gonna give us about six minutes before they run dry. Then they’ll use the heavier apes to come and get us.”

  “And the good news?” If there was any.

  “I’ve already started the hack on the dig computer that discovered what I need. What we came here to recover. Eight minutes and change and it’ll crack the locks. Ten seconds for me to access the core operating instructions and then we can go.”

  “So… that would be bad news too then?”

  Two minutes to hold in position, while already running low on ammo, wasn’t going to be any kind of picnic. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

  Outside beyond the security door the monkeys screeched, died, and kept on coming. It made no sense. It was a madhouse.

  No. It wouldn’t be any kind of picnic at all.

  But it was the picnic I’d arrived at. And it was all you can eat, brother.

  Perfect.

  Bring it.

  Chapter Forty-five

  For six minutes those killer monkeys threw themselves straight into the guns. Mindlessly screeching as they died violently. The guns didn’t stop. They just kept relentlessly burping out ammo in the correct and efficient doses to annihilate each predator. Never stopping. Never hesitating. Never tiring. And I knew when they did, when they ran dry on ammo, that was going to be it.

  The captain ran our defense beyond the security door.

  There wasn’t much to our location. The Node was nothing more than a field science base set up inside the derelict starship. Gathering and initial recovery was done from here. Field computers processed and scanned recovered tech. Clamshells stood by for transport of all sizes. No superweapons. Just the guns to keep the monkeys back and maybe a security team with some serious firepower when needed. Mines probably. But the science station had been abandoned, or at least it wasn’t in use. And the monkeys and apes seemed to have been dealt with in the past. Had been driven off by the local defenses. Something though, this time, had caused them to push all their chips in.

  They were going for it come hell or high water.

  If that didn’t make ya nervous I don’t what would. I’d been part of at least two last stands. Both swung my way. This one was worse than the other two and Punch, who’d been on those other two, kept muttering, “Third time’s the charm, Sarge.”

  So there’s that.

  This ship. The one from ten thousand years in our future. Or rather, the one that had gone there, taken a look around, and then tried to come back and missed its timeline exit by about another ten thousand years, this ship was looking like a tomb right about now. Our tomb.

  Who knew? Maybe it had been all along.

  Yeah. That was the story I got from the Monarch in the last minutes before the guns ran dry. Six minutes as we topped off our magazines. Layered out what we needed. Took cover or arranged cover. She talked in my ear, telling me what she knew. Confessing was what it felt like because it felt just like what they all do when they come and tell me their stories. For the log. For the official record of the Strange Company.

  “The Enterprise,” she began. “I never knew the name of the ship, but now from what I’ve seen here inside their data cloud, and the item we recovered here, I’m convinced that was it. The Enterprise was sent forward in time using a new engine system we’d developed in the labs on Ganymede. Monarch super-science at the time had experimented with small time leaps forward and back. Back is much more difficult, Orion. Days. Weeks. A couple of years at best was the safest we could do reliably. Even that gave us some edge in shaping the future the way we wanted it to go. But with interstellar distances, these brief looks at the future by a starship crew didn’t do much for us in the grand scheme. Events happened we couldn’t control. And control is the basis of Monarch culture. Also, there was one more effect. These explorer ships sometimes came back with compromised data banks. No idea how it happened. But often the basic information we had and knew to be true, came back changed when the ship came back in time to the anchor point. Their data corrupted our data and so containments had to be put in place. I know that’s a lot of information, Orion. But it’s important.

  “So. The Monarchy needed to know what would happen to us as we expanded our control and influence over human culture. We were seeing some disturbing images and data that made no sense with regard to our current operations then. It was as though we had ceased to exist at some sudden undetectable point. I knew a ship was being used for an operation we called Project Zephyr. I had no idea it was the Enterprise, specifically. It’s down inside a central hangar several decks in from here. When they went forward in time, they found this larger ship, or the future interacted with them in some way, or something, and the Enterprise tried to come home with a much bigger and better starship surrounding it. This ship. The maximum of what they thought they could pull off. Technically, according to the official Monarch science data, it never returned. But it did. I suspected it had. I thought there was a chance the Crash was actually the Project Zephyr starship.”

  She paused.

  The auto-guns spooled up to critical levels out beyond the security door our own guns were trained on. Smoke drifted through cracks around the installation of the tight security door. Then gun one went down.

  “Thirty seconds on gun two,” the Seeker announced over comm. Apparently her operating systems could take control of local devices and hardware. She was in communication with the guns. Monarchs can do that stuff, or so I’ve been told.

  She looked back at me. We were crouched on the right flank. The Kid was near us. I checked my elements. Everyone was set up for interlocking fire with the two Pigs on both flanks.

  We’d do what we could.

  “That’s all you can do?” I whispered to myself as I made eye contact with Hauser. He smiled grimly and gave me a thumbs-up.

  “What?” she asked, snatched away from her narrative. I could tell she was talking as much to hear it as to put the pieces together. Or maybe she knew our chances weren’t good, and she was downloading on me. A virus? An SOS?

  It was hard to tell which.

  “Nothing,” I said. “This is it now. Tell me. I don’t care about lost starships or whatever Monarch games the better half wants to play. I just need to get Reaper through this. Tell me what’s so important about what we came here for. What you’re here to get if we survive the next two minutes.”

  “Fifteen seconds,” said Hauser, whose onboard clock had managed to sync the calc to weapons dry on both guns.

  At ten he began to count down our doom.

  “Freedom,” she said breathlessly. Nervous. Worried. But steel and fire in her resolve. She was a Monarch after all. The best of us, that was what the constant media whispered in our ears, day and night. Our heroes. Our benevolent providers. Our avengers. “Real freedom for everyone who wants it.”

  But she definitely could have been Strange Company. She was dumb enough not to quit when the night was dark and the odds were real bad.

  “The operating file for the device is still deep inside the ship’s secure memory banks. The deep storage systems that were designed to regulate against the unintended effect of time travel.”

  We were under five.

  “The pure data. Uncorrupted.”

  I stabilized my Bastard and set up my sight picture to dispense death. Front sight forward now, Orion.

  The last gun ran dry and instantly the monkeys were beating at the doors
with tools. And something larger, large, something very large in fact, was coming up the walkway we’d used to access the Node. It sounded titanic compared to the monkey-lings scrabbling to break in here.

  “And what is it?” I said. My voice calm. The storm imminent. “What is this device that does freedom for all of us?”

  “It’s the last chance at that freedom. It’ll destroy the entire mem-currency system the Monarchs control everyone with. It’s the weapon that ends the Monarchs two thousand years from now. Gave rise to the Simia who rule the future. Those things out there are the Simia. They came back with the ship as far as I can tell. From the future. Ten thousand years from now. I’m trawling the science logs as fast as I can. This was all site-restricted to the Monarchs with the highest of clearances. In the future of the galaxy, the Simia, they rule absolutely. What’s left of us are the animals. No Monarchs. No humanity. Just animals hunted to extinction. The crew of the Enterprise recovered the data and the device that destroyed Monarch culture from the Doomsday Vault on Cygni Nine. It’s a Monarch updating time capsule where even we don’t play with the truth. It’s where we hide all the secrets, including the truth. We protect it with all our lies.”

  The giant thing outside began to rip the door from its hinges. Whatever it was, it was coming through soon.

  “And if it destroyed the Monarchs. Humanity… then why do you want it now?”

  “Because, Orion…” The door began to groan as it was pulled from its frame. Rending metal screeched. Massive hinges screamed. “Freedom is our only hope to prevent what happens. That weapon, the Deletion Drive, it will, in time, collapse the Monarchs’ rule and allow humanity a chance to get ready to meet the Simia with some shot at winning this time. Releasing the device now, two thousand years ahead of schedule… gives us a chance, Sergeant. We need that chance. Because the Monarchs… they would rather try other means. Means that allow them to remain in control. Even if the chances aren’t good. Even if it means the eradication of humanity.”