“He okay?” I asked the former Second Squad leader.
“Got his bell rung for sure,” replied Jacks, still watching the rocks and the last of the retreating savage apes. “One of ’em jumped in and got ahold of him. Started banging him around on the rocks.” Then he stepped close and said, “Kid pulled his knife and went after it like a real psycho just to get it off him. Stuck it right in the brain and it ran off with his blade still sticking out of its skull. I shot it just to get the knife back.”
Jacks took the recovered combat tanto out of his carrier where he’d stuck it, wiped the blood off on his pant leg, and handed it back to the Kid.
“Here ya go, Psycho Killer. Try and hold on to it next time.”
Then Jacks looked up at me. “Hey, anyone ever tagged Psycho Killer in the unit? That’s a good one for him. Better’n mine.”
I didn’t think anyone ever had.
“We’ll have to keep that in mind,” I said. “He’s still the Kid for now. But that’s a good one, Jacks.”
“Man, he earned it,” he said as he got ready to move. “Gotta have some real stones to attack one of those things with just a knife when it’s trying to pulp and throttle you at the same time. Those things are pure nightmare, Sarge. Worse than that stuff Chief Cook gassed us with. Hope we don’t run into anymore, that’s for sure.”
But I had a feeling we would.
Chapter Forty-One
We were on the move down-canyon again. Hustling as best we could while trying to move with some sense of awareness about what we were running into. Cautious urgency I’ll call it.
“Not far now,” said the Monarch over squad comm. “Two more clicks forward, and we’ll reach the entrance.”
I’d gotten the Kid up and moving again. He looked shook, that was for sure. It was clear that was probably as close to death as he’d gotten in his time with the company. And honestly, as I looked at the dead things and their fangs and splayed claws all over the battlefield no one would remember, I couldn’t blame him. Jacks had been right. These were pure nightmare. Most of them wore a crude leather vest. A belt. And actual finished tools on their belts. The kind of tools you’d find on a starship. Hydro spanners and bulkhead locks. Hull plate ratchets. But they were all battered and beaten. And bloodstained. Like they’d been used as weapons more than tools.
“You okay?” I asked as I put the Kid’s tanto back in its carrier and stuck his rifle in his hands like a good NCO should when a man can’t remember that the primary job of an infantryman is to work the rifle.
He mumbled something. Which was good. He was coming back. He could speak.
“You’re alive,” I told him, looking him in the eyes to make the connection and reset his mental hard drive. “That’s the important part. Okay, now you gotta get back in this, Kid. I can’t send you to the rear ’cause we ain’t got one to send ya to. I need every rifle up for all of us to get through this one alive. And we’re gonna. So… good to go? We need you right now.”
Sometimes being a sergeant feels like being a used vehicle salesman. You can’t always bark orders and rumble. Sometimes you gotta get ’em to take the payments and EZ credit. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Sometimes you gotta sell.
“C’mon, Kid. Clock’s burning. Six hours to make our ride off-planet. Lot to do. Are you in it to win it? Or do we gotta drag you?”
As I sat there waiting for him to mumble or nod that he was good to go, I realized something. Things might actually be going our way. This was the first fight in a long stretch in which I didn’t come out the other side with a dead friend staring at me.
So… I had that going for me. No one had gotten killed yet.
You’re optimistically sensing momentum, idiot, the pessimistic side of me whispered in my ear. I told it to shut up. I’d gotten twenty minutes of sleep this morning, plus a cup of coffee, and my studs had just fought off a savage army of gnashing death that would certainly go down in the Strange Company logs as one of the most bizarre firefights we’d ever been in. I had every reason to be hopeful.
Don’t rain on my parade.
Yeah, it had gotten close. A few of us had gotten knocked around. It was a good thing Hauser was a combat cyborg who could turn off pain centers, or really didn’t even have any, because a real man would have been screaming in agony from the wounds he’d received. Begging for death or Narcanene.
So maybe things were turning around, which is the only thing you can say when you just fought off a nightmare army of monkey soldiers. With guns. Monkeys with guns.
They’re apes, I reminded myself. And then I remembered I had seen monkeys on some starships in the past. Ferrying between worlds. Semi-intelligent hybrids who worked the lower decks, engineering and the nuclear stacks on some of the bigger transport ships with old and dangerous engines that weren’t rated safe for human operation. Wiggles, too. Hybrid human pigs that did worse jobs than the monkeys. Monkeys, according to the Monarch, were related to apes.
If you ever think you got it bad just go watch the monkeys and the wiggles work. Their life is a living radiated hell. Even if it is short.
Two clicks further on and we came to the entrance to the chasm the ancient starship had created when it drove its vast
