The old little man nodded soberly, waving one scarred finger back and forth at the speaker as he stared at his bad hand.
“I ain’t dat, little soldier,” he replied, drunkenly slurring his words. His eyes bleary. His head weaving. “But I seen it once. And it wasn’t a thing I wanna see ’gain, tell you so.”
We ate the breakfast burritos and drove to the kill that hot sweaty morning the war started. Hot and getting hotter. Looking like laborers wearing work coats over our tactical rigs. Rifles down and out of sight.
Maybe, sometimes I think, that’s what got them killed. Those three brothers of Strange Company who didn’t make it a couple of weeks into this show we call the War on Crash. It was too easy at first, and it felt like the whole world was just gonna flip because Stinkeye said boo that day. But I coulda told them, our three dead of Strange Company, and there would be others, that it’s always the same. You start every contract with momentum like you’re really gonna do something… and then end up running for your life, swearing you’ll never merc again and that you’re gonna quit the company as soon as we reach the first decent major port world.
But you never do. You never quit. You just buy it one day and your time in the rotation of the galactic lens is done. Your hash settled. Grave marked.
As a sergeant I could have told them that. The three dead who were riding in the technical on Stinkeye’s mission to “make some trouble” that day. As their sergeant I should’ve told them that. Warned them about what was inevitably coming.
And they wouldn’t have listened. They never do.
No one thinks they’re really going to die.
I once spent a weekend with a Falmorian party girl. She sang softly as we lay there in the dark. Exhausted and watching the fan on the ceiling turn. Counting the hours until the game was over. It was a song about not having regrets. In French. She sang it in French, and I thought that was so odd because the native Falmorian are part eel, which is why everyone wants a party girl from that world. At least once in their life. Falmoria was an early colony world for the French after they left Earth.
“What do you think,” she buzzed, and stroked my chest with her long and slender hand. Electricity coursed through my body like some drug that made you sleepy and happy all at the same time.
“About what?” I asked her, dreaming of better things than what I’d seen out there in the dark along the frontier worlds.
“About zee song,” she purred softly, her deep voice like electric velvet. “Iz it true?”
She was cobalt-colored. Her eyes big and luminous in the dark. Watching me. Her curves like liquid darkness.
“Can you have no regrets, my estrangier? In zis life? Are zhere none?”
She called me that. Estrangier. Stranger. I never asked why. Just guessed it was because she knew who I worked for. Just another mercenary with the Strange Company. But since then I’ve wondered if it was for another reason.
“It’s a nice sentiment,” I murmured to her and the twirling ceiling fan above us. Falling into sleep for a little while. Falling into a better universe not this one. “But it ain’t true…”
I don’t know if I said But I wish it was. Or I dreamed that I did. I still don’t know now, when I think back to that night with her.
Private military contracting is the best casino in the galaxy. You always win, until you lose. Then you lose big time. You lose everything in fact. So, who cares. Because your life got lost along the way too.
If you’re going to lose… think about it, then really lose. Lose… everything.
We lost three within two weeks. But on that first day of operations we were a whole company just starting out on a new contract on a new world that thought it was ready to try the Big War Show. Hardrop, Crisp, and Twopeat would get killed in the future beyond that day. But not that day as we drive through the streets of the Heights, ready to do war. None of ’em told me their stories before they went. I guess they weren’t expecting to die on the days they actually did die on.
Death is ironically surprising like that when you’re a private military contractor. Every day you’re expecting to die. Buy it in some hellhole going from bad to worse not just by the second, but by the bullet, and the air is thick with them in that unexpected moment, and then the day you do you’re completely surprised it actually happened to you.
Trust me. I’ve seen the look when guys first get hit. Fatally. It’s completely unexpected. But what did we think would happen? Then you do your best to wrap your mind around it. Or at least that’s what I think.
All four technicals fanned out that morning to different streets with vantage points over the mall in the bowl of the capital below. We’d parted ways with Stinkeye on the way in. We pulled up to the curb as kids in their new gear and carrying shiny new weapons and protest signs streamed past us. Heading to the party. Heading to the mall. Stinkeye, our Voodoo asset
