I checked our column as we closed with the objective. Only the light tread of our boots making any sound over the crush and broken rock all across this canyon. A canyon ruined by a falling starship. The Old Man and the Monarch were just behind me by about five meters. Then Chief Cook and the Little Girl. The gun team of Hoser and Hustle came up next. Heads on swivels and looking for something to light up.
“Could use a cigar right about now,” Hoser had grunted a few clicks back. No one answered. Patrol SOP was no smokes. Combat, smoke as much as you want if you got the time. But I’d found it was best to keep your hands working every weapon you had and not lighting a cigarette like you were cooler than Juan of Mars.
That didn’t mean you couldn’t want one though.
Nothing in the SOP about that.
“Know what you mean,” said Punch after a minute. “Feels like oh-get-it-on-thirty.” Then he looked at me. “I can feel it, Sarge. It’s comin’. Bet on it for sure.”
That was about two minutes before we spotted the first ape.
I nodded that I felt it too and swallowed hard. Mumbling one of those prayers you pray even when you don’t believe. I was tired of getting my people killed. I’d like to prevent that going forward. That was my prayer. The prayer of all good NCOs. Even the ones who don’t believe in anything.
I turned and caught the Monarch shifting away from her sector and making eye contact with me. Like she’d read my thoughts. On believing.
I looked away fast. Checking our intervals and not needing to tell anyone to tighten up.
Hauser and Jacks came along next with the Kid forming a second team to the rear. Team Two. I’d broken what was left of Reaper, once a forty-man platoon, into two rough teams. I’d use Team Two to either support us in an assault, or as a QRF to take advantage of anything we ran into with a flanking attack.
Then we spotted the first one.
Right now, watching the creepy ape-thing move like liquid and lightning high up on the rocks of the narrow canyon walls we were threading—it was near invisible due to its shifting color and the light—I felt like pulling both teams in tighter. I had a real bad feeling about this. But then again, I don’t need anyone to tell me I always do.
The Monarch had explained to all of us what an ape was. A large simian native to Earth. They could be incredibly powerful and ferocious. Some of the bigger ones could pull your arms right out of your sockets. Others rip the flesh right off your face. They were tribal and known to use rudimentary tools. There were a number of “ape” type species to be found throughout the discovered universe, but unless you were heavy into xenozoology and understood animal genus families, you wouldn’t know about Earth’s apes. Unless you’d been raised on Earth. And no one you ever met had, unless you met a Monarch, which no normal person ever did.
Unless you were Strange Company and one just joined your company in the middle of a planetary Ultra invasion. Which didn’t happen every day. Or ever, statistically speaking.
“The crugo on Tauri are related…” she continued as she listed off a few galactic species. I’d heard of one or two. And I had seen a crugo once in a zoo. They looked more like large bats than apes. But apparently, they were related.
“Flying monkeys is da least strange thing you gonna see inside o’ the wreck, Little King,” Stinkeye warned me later after the “ape” portion of the briefing. “If that ship is what I think it is…” hissed the drunk Voodoo chief as he got close to me and whispered what he didn’t want anyone else in the company to hear, “then you gonna see some real pillar o’ da universe stuff in there. I done given dat rubberhead Chief Cook something to help yaz in dere if tings get rough enough to do yaz. An’ if I don’t see you on da other side o’ this one, Little King, then it ’cause of da stupid. Either it et yaz up… or it et me. But it’s out there. So best to hose everything and make sure it’s real good and dead twice over.”
Then he stuck one long index finger under his watery eye and pulled it down. Which is Stinkeye for take me serious on this one.
After that he was gone. Weaving off to join the crawler as it pulled away into the dusty early-morning darkness with the team that was going to hit the bank. His chest rig flopping in the night wind. His totem flask the only weapon he carried.
I was shocked. But I didn’t know what more by. The fact that Stinkeye said he might know something about one of the universe’s great mysteries, The Crash, which he’d told nothing about to anyone the entire time we’d been planetside… or the fact that he’d actually given Chief Cook, his mortal and sworn enemy, something to help us survive. And by default, help Chief Cook survive.
Maybe it was poison, and he was cool with collateral damage just to get the job done and declare himself the winner in their never-ending battle of Voodoo chiefs.
The universe is a very strange place. Best not to ask too many questions. Front sight forward and you’ll do mostly fine. Get it on time was coming in the space of the day that was just hours away. I could feel it then as we worked through the night to get ourselves ready to hit our objectives. Whichever way it went in the morning and through the long day everything was promising it would be, however it went down, I’d made up my mind I was going to
