As if on cue the rain stops and the mist rises. Lots of it after a long minute, floating up from the mud and ruin of No One’s Land out there. The hundred meters we need to cross.
“Guy gives me the creeps…” whispers Jingo, and we both know who he’s talking about. Nether. “But it is cool and all, Orion. It’s cool what that freak can do.”
Nether’s played this game before. It ain’t just mist rising out there between us and them. It’s a kind of dense electromagnetic fog. But it ain’t that either. What it really is… is a tear in the universe. That’s what bothers people about one of our asymmetrical specialists from the ever-weird Voodoo Platoon. Of the three main ones that can do weird stuff in Voodoo, stuff that gives a down-and-out mercenary company an advantage over most normal opponents in combat operations, it’s what the weird unexplainable Nether can do that disturbs them in ways they can’t understand, but know nonetheless. Not like The Little Girl and her friend. They like her. Her friend though will getcha killed. Seriously. But Nether, they just think he’s creepy because of the way he looks. A freak ruined by Monarch super-science in some unknown Dark Lab out on some comet somewhere that’s been officially deleted from the stellar charts. You run into them, super-voodoo science freaks, rarely along the rim. If they exist, they work for the Monarchs exclusively. And by work for I mean are basically paid and kept slaves. If they aren’t working for the Monarchs, well then, they’re in hiding from the Monarchs. Nether hides with us, as does Stinkeye and the Little Girl. Maybe. No one has figured out her story. She just showed up one day, and stayed. Chief Cook, who knows?
But Nether, he’s one of us too. Even though he bothers everyone on some deeply disturbing level they can’t quite put their assault-gloved finger on. He’s one of us and he performs his tricks on our behalf. And we are grateful, never mind bothered. His voodoo has made the difference on occasion. If the dead we’ve made could talk, they would tell you so.
I look around as the fog turns to swirling mist and the last of the sporadic rain stops. I don’t see Nether. But I know he’s somewhere out there in the darkness making all this happen for us. And it’s getting thick, the fog that isn’t fog, the tear in the universe that’s something else. It’s getting so thick and dense that I couldn’t see him anyway even if he were right nearby.
“Go. Go now,” says the captain over comms. Like he always does when it’s time to get it on.
I don’t need to say anything. The three squad leaders who run my platoon have everyone in enough shape to know it’s time to get it on. Standing, hunched in the silence, we move forward as roughly one. I check in audibly and hear that everyone’s battle rattle is mostly secure. Which is a real plus one for me. Our gear is worn, beat to hell, and cobbled together from a lot of pickups and personal choices. Getting it at least silent for an attack on a fixed position has been a goal of mine for quite some time. It is accomplished tonight and I am at least happy about that.
My element is little more than a ragged line of what look to be homeless vagrants moving hungrily toward some night kitchen on the edge of a vast planetside shipyard where low freighters offload.
Of course, Dog is moving in small wedges like apex predators hunting in packs. Ready to tacti-cool and execute with extreme prejudice and all that high-speed jazz Sergeant Hannibal runs them on. I feel sorry for everyone in Grau, on the left flank of our attack, who’s about to meet Amarcus’s boys. There will be no mercy there. Amarcus wouldn’t tolerate it. Mercy is weakness and he’s beaten it out of them. Dog wasn’t always that way. But Sergeant Stix, Dog’s old platoon sergeant, died badly on Mira, and Hannibal got the platoon after that. Against everyone’s objections.
We cross open ground and Grau Skull’s gunners do not open up and murder us all to death. I keep waiting for them to, but they don’t, and the suspense almost kills me. I’m sure at any moment the unreal silence one finds inside the tear in the universe that masquerades as Nether’s fog, because that’s all the mind’s willing to accept it as, will be broken by short bursts of staccato enemy gunfire from medium and light machine guns exchanging murder with one another. I remember Grau always had an abundance of Z450s they got surplus from the Sindo Wars. Old. But incredibly reliable. Ultra death squads used them effectively back when they were state-of-the-art. High-cycle with nano-conductor-cooled barrels that could burn all day and night and not need a barrel change. The death squads would leave every battle a killing field full of ruined corpses mangled by high output with those beasts.
One long burst right about now and we’d all be dead in our worn-out boots. That’s what a good platoon sergeant thinks about as his men cross open ground toward a sweaty madhouse of soon-to-be CQB. All the easy ways everyone can die there.
Both platoons cross and reach the target building, hugging wall to stack for entry… and then the gunfire starts. Short bursts as Dog catches sentries by surprise. Closing suddenly out of the thick fog and firing at ten meters or less. And then Dog, and my own, professionally murder our old buddies at their guard posts.
It’s on now.
Get it on. It’s what we mean in the Strange Company when we
