A Chapter from Strange Company 3

Just a taste to wet your whistle...If you're new subscribe to my stack and get some more chapters, fiction, and a weekly podcast I do. Much appreciated.

As promised… here’s a little taste before we get to launch day. There’s nothing here that we’ll ruin the story, it’s not even the first chapter. Just a recap and that may help some of you. Thank you so much for supporting this story. I truly hope it entertains you.

And as they say in the Strange… Get it On. One more time.

Company Log

The Black Ship fled across the galaxy… and the Strange Company pursued.

In those postapocalyptic days after the fall of the Monarch Empire at Marsantyium, and after the Old Man of the Company, the Captain, had been charged by the Monarch Kong with the final hunting down of, and destruction, of the last known Monarch ship, DarkStar, the Black Ship, a rag tag fleet of humanity’s last surviving warships gathered in orbit above Marsantyium, assembling to hunt down and destroy the last of the fleeing Monarchs. The former rulers of Human-controlled space who’d fled off toward the most distant frontiers in their strange ship…

Six months we lingered on the red sands of dying once-again Mars, shading in the fading green jungles of the last habitable world of the home system.

Humanity’s birthplace.

We refitted the Spider on the sand dunes of a world that had once been called Mars. The ancient terraforming of that lost world, begun as humanity had once optimistically leapt outward into the darkness of space, was now failing once again as the red sands of that world broke up and reclaimed the lush tropical jungles and ancient red marble cities the Monarchs had constructed to reflect their now-lost glory. Towers, temples, sunken cities and crumbling palaces were mere looted pantheons the fleeing Monarchs had left behind when it had all gone pear-shaped for them.

In the late red afternoons we wandered among these lost and lonely ruins, wondering at what had been.

Dead ultramarines rotted in their pillboxes, littered by spent brass being swallowed by the spreading red sands that had always been there beneath all that hard-fought terraforming. Along the crumbling streets we walked in quiet silence, and beneath the skeletal shadow of the last of the great Battlespires… the remains of the Red Dragon. Crashed there for the ultras to make their final stand against the aggrieved they’d enslaved there for the Monarchs.

We were… the aggrieved. The company and a dozen other alien races. And the Kong… whatever they were.

The slain ultramarines rotted where they had died at their guns, and the chimps came and stripped off them what they found useful and left the rest for the hot winds and the scouring, swallowing red sands of fading Mars.

Such is the way of warriors. Always has been. Always ever will be.

I ruminated on these things working a smoke and a cup of coffee as the work continued, and the readiness to finish the job we’d been tasked with… approached.

I had a bad feeling about this one.

Watching all that death, destruction, and ruin felt as old as time itself. Dead warriors stripped of everything they’d collected on the way to their deaths. None of it mattering anymore as the camp followers came and took what they wanted, leaving nothing but rotting flesh and bleaching bones to give some clue as to what exactly had happened here. And no clue as to who the fallen warrior had been who died at his gun, with murder in his heart, and eternity calling, promising him some note among the logs.

Old as time itself. Like I said.

We have to be honest about these things.

The Ultras’ final battle had not been so much a defense as a spit in the galactic eye of everyone else. Their Death Cult had finally achieved its “Dark Salvation in Combat and War,” their words not mine, and then they’d slaughtered their own tyrannical rulers when they could get their hands on them, and anyone else who dared come at them.

We dared. And they died.

It is as simple as that and don’t let anyone ever tell you anything other than that about war and combat.

To the last bullet, they’d died. Knives out and teeth bared. Eternity calling.

Then, there were no more Ultramarines and there was only the Company and the Kong.

And the ragtag fleet that had begun to assemble for the pursuit. And the revenge.

And… the looting.

We have to be honest about these things.

For the Company, damage repair and damage control was underway aboard the war-battered Spider. She was our warship and now that she could spin up and jump, we could transport to contracts on distant worlds where we would kill aliens and sometimes ourselves, for pay.

The winds of autumn on that dying red-sand world grew cruel, and cold, like they’d been in the thousands of years before the Monarchs had made some heaven among the stars just for themselves, and their debaucheries.

Now it was just ruins and red sand spreading and growing like some end of days plague.

They’d lost their humanity. The Monarchs. Become aliens really. But that’s another story soon buried among the sinking sands. No longer important to the galactic sprawl as humans, and aliens, spread, slowly, outward and away from where we’d come from. Where we started at the first of it all.

I was there at the end. I recorded the last of them.

For whatever that’s worth.

“Who knows dem things like time and da counts a such, Little King,” muttered Stinkeye at me, the company wizard and Chief Warrant officer of Voodoo Platoon doing his drunken shaman act that afternoon. “Dey Monarchs made time dey’ plaything with dere’ lies dey’ told jes’ to stand on top us all and run da’ table for dem’ damned cursed selfs. They know now, Little King. They know now. They know the Heart a’ Darkness. But hey…”

The old soldier wizard hit his dented canteen, his sacred totem, and exhaled gustily a hot breath of his special gutter liquor.

It reeked of vinegar and vengeance.

“Da Past don’t matter anymore, Little King. An’ maybe… it never did. Da future… dat’s been important da whole time n’ you shoulda know’d dat better den anyone. Little King. Know why?”

I don’t you ol’ drunk, I don’t say and just try to ignore him.

It only encourages him. When you play. Like throwing coins at some bad hissing tragedian on the worst of streets just because you feel sorry for them and instead they only go in harder on their ancient meaningless words and ham-fisted acting.

Reading your impatience and pity wrong. Taking it for enthusiasm and encouragement. Somehow justifying their sad purpose.

“Because, boy, it’s been entangled wit’ ya for a long, long time though ya never knowed it all ‘long. Soldier. Mercenary. But now ya will know, Little King. Now, you will know when we comes to Typhon out dere’ spinnin’ in da big deep dark all by its self. Now we all will know… cuz we got a date out there in dem’ Faraways ahead… and I doubts da’ company come back from dis’ one. A whole lotta us gonna die out dere’. Maybe alls, Little King. Maybe alls dis’ time.”

Then the drunken old soldier looked out toward the stars glistening in the Martian night sky just beginning to appear over the distant dark ruins along the horizon. The Chimp hulks were gathering up there, orbiting overhead in great disastrous and ramshackle clusters because they had a galaxy to rule over now. And do so by fang and claw, and the decree of their mighty Kong.

The Simia.

But their silent message was clear to our forming little rag-tag-last-of-humanity fleet that would soon hunt the last Monarch ship down. The Black Ship. Then fight them to the death, theirs or ours… the message of the Simia was very clear. Now.

We in charge now, hoomans. All yur base belong to us as the old Chimp proverb goes.

Whatever that means.

“Maybe dat’s for da best, Little King…” said the drunk Voodoo Chief as he sighed and seemed to know what I was thinking. “Stinkeye gots hisself a feeling dere’ ain’t gonna be much ta’ come back to dis way. An’ anyway once dis all done up and seen ta’ proper… I been alive a long time, Little King. Maybe too long… dis’ time.”

Then Stinkeye wandered off, grumbling and making threats to the universe, pulling at the old and dented totem flask the company calculated its fortunes by. And he was just like the rest of us, each in our own way. Whether we realized it or not yet.

Hoping things would be different and not the hot mess they must inevitably become.

Things will be different this time, right Stink?

That was the last night in the home system, the birthplace of all humanity that had flung itself out to the stars. Not that it mattered anymore. Not that it had mattered in a thousand years. Fabled Earth had been blown to bits long ago by the Monarchs for reasons we’d never know. A dying nearby world that had once been dead was all that was left of everything we once were, when at first… we began our long slow crawl out into the stars.

Now, it was dying again.

But that did not matter to the Company. Few of us had ever been to Earth.

Instead… we had other things on our collective minds as a company of private military contractors started long ago by a man named John Strange.

We had a settling of accounts on our hearts and minds though it was not openly spoken of. And it was as though the assassination of the Monarch known as the Seeker had given the company a taste for revenge now. And we were looking for more along the trail of the Black Ship and where that led to.

Wherever that would be.

Not just war for pay. But revenge now.

A note here…

To the next Keeper of the Log, however long I have left, that felt not just a little dangerous. Wild and dangerous in fact. Like somehow… someway, we’d lost, or were losing, our way.

Not just war for pay. But revenge now.

As a mercenary company…

We fought for pay. Not revenge. Generally. Unless we’d been wronged. And… we had in-deed, been wronged. And so the Company had iced her.

The Seeker.

Chief Cook, the PSYOPS warrant for the company, on any given day might hiss at me, “There is no way for the company, Sergeant Orion. Never had one. We’re just making it up now. It’s all chaos and death after this. Nothing but. And we…” emphasis on the we… “get paid to make it happen. On demand. Now there’s talk of revenge and where’s the profit in that I’m asking. Ain’t no profit in revenge. Never was. This plan I’m hearing about ain’t the Company. Ain’t us, Oh-rion. We’re losing our way.”

Then on the next day he’d crow about, “Trusting the Plan, Orion. Trust the plan. It’s all swinging our way, Orion. Trust the plan.”

Then he’d wink, giggle or snicker, and slink off to cause more of his particular brand of mayhem and mischief.

There were others who’d argued we weren’t in the business of revenge. That we had no business going after the Monarchs on that Black Ship like some ghost ship that was like an ill-omen of bad luck and blight so never says its name.

The DarkStar.

We were mercenaries. Private Military Contractors. We had a ship. A ton of new weapons. Tech and hoard we’d managed to steal from the Chimp Sack of the Monarch Capital as it burned.

We were, as some say, in tall cotton. Charlie Potatoes. Bucks up now.

Revenge was personal and had nothing to do with killing for pay. So what business was it of ours to chase the Monarchs round and round Perdition’s Flame in order to pay off some debt the Simia Kong had assessed us. There were other micro-empires out on the edges of the slowly expanding galactic frontier. Rumors and legends.

Surely they needed someone dead. We could go there and provide that service.

Enter the Company, stage left. This is a service we provide. On demand. Who do you want murked?

Point and destroy. That is what we do.

But the Old Man, the Captain of the Company, was our leader and his case for dusting the Monarch Darkstar was that we could never operate in human space, or what had once been human space, ever again, if we did not satisfy the Chimp Kong and make sure the last of the Monarchs were good and smoked out there wherever we managed to run them to ground.

Then we could do business. War business. As proper mercenaries.

And that was our business.

He was our leader. The Old Man determined the direction of the company until there was a new Old Man. So say the rules of our founder John Strange.

So, we heaved into orbit up from the winds and sands of Mars, attended the council of the Star Khans of the Technate as they called themselves, and threw in our hat to the pursuit, capture, and slaughter of our once-gods. The Star Khans, or the Technate, call it what you want like Crash or Astralon, had been a thorn in the Monarchs’ side for much of the Insurrection War. It was they who’d brought their old and battered ships to the Fleet and allied with the Simia. It was they who took charge of the planning, the tracking, and the traps they intended to waylay the massive Monarch starship with so we could engage her in battle at broadsides. Then units like the Company could board her and kill the last of the Monarchs on their own bloody decks.

And, because the Keeper of the Log is a lowly ruck hobo and the keeper of this account of the days of the Company in the Aftermath of the Fall of the Monarchs, I must tell you my take on the matter of the hunting fleet of the Star Khans. Or the Technate… call it whatever you will. Not everyone, and in fact, again this is just my opinion, but not everyone was as of a single mind as the Company was to find and destroy the DarkStar.

Finding… yes.

Destroying… eh… not so fast there, space marine.

In the “Great Council of the Star Khans” and if that sounds a little… dramatic… let me, Sergeant Orion, explain the galacto-politics of how all this came to be… without being too boring.

So just two lines about all this pompous war LARPing on the matter of the Star Khans.

They were little more than “Big Wigs” on backwater worlds who’d survived the war with the Monarchs. Insiders who’d fallen out of Bright World favor, corporate raiders who wanted to survive the fall. All of them having in common that the Monarchs had betrayed them in some deal along the way, they had formed a loose, yet powerful alliance, in the vacuum of the former tyrants, and called themselves Khans to represent their power blocks.

They seemed to think the Chimps, who were really in charge, were just a passing fancy. Like a helpful invasion of locusts who’d wiped out your enemies’ farms and weakened them for destruction. Surely, they almost seemed to think, the Chimps will just move on now and we can be the Chief Humans.

And… humble ruck hobo opinion here…

Trust us, we won’t become the Monarchs. We’re the good guys. We’re the new Boss.

Was what they seemed to be saying without saying it.

Trust us, this time. We got this.

Things’ll be different.

What’s that old saying…

Same as the old boss.

So this ol’ ruck hobo some call Sarn’t Orion, could practically smell it and I think the Old Man could too.

But…

Our position was fragile. So we joined their alliance, their fleet, if only so we could stand in front of the Chimp Kong one day and state that we had, indeed, fulfilled our orders your grand monkey highness, and smote the Monarchs unto death.

Or whatever they refer to him as inside the great and dirty monkey tent cities they like to set up on whatever world they’ve pillaged lately.

Deed done as requested and we would be allowed transit and opportunity within their area of control. Our old… Empire.

Human space. As it was once known.

“Life comes at ya fast and all,” says Punch.

Even now there was infighting, treachery, and intrigues among the scumbag Star Kahns. And it was into this mix that the Company had thrown their lot, because, as the First Sergeant related it to me later, “Sarn’t Orion, I very highly doubt I, or any one of us, will be coming back from this voyage out to the Faraways. Them worlds are hell and gone beyond the limits of human exploration and if half of what I’ve heard about that area on the star charts is true… Hells of Suth we’ll be lucky to survive orbital insertion much less storm one of the most secure, and advanced, vessels ever known to man. The DarkStar. The very name gives me the chills, young Sarn’t. Who in the Hells of Suth names a ship something awful like that. Penelope’s Dream, Calliope of Novas, Nostalgia for Infinity… stuff like that… but it is the opinion of the Captain, and myself too, Sarn’t Orion, that it’s gonna be one helluva a fight out there for sure. And we wouldn’t want to miss that, now would we, Sarn’t Orion?”

The senior-most NCO of the company sat down and sighed, looking off into the darkness where he’d managed to track me down in stores deep within the belly of The Spider while she was under refit and rearm. The old warrior found me smoking in the darkness, drinking black coffee. Brooding on all these things and the stories told me.

And also the ones I have marked down…

Like I do.

Listening to some old music I liked, once, long ago, when I was someone else I’ve been missing more and more lately. Missing those days and wondering how things might have been… different. Remembering loading ammo with a company brother long dead now.

I think of the company dead often lately. There’re a lot of them.

Player who led Dog after Hannibal.

The Kid who got killed at the landing gear holding the dust off after the bank heist.

Junkboy who got clean and sober and got his head blown off at the bank on Astralon just as the kid came in for the indoc brief.

And others…

Crisp

TwoPeat.

Two Fingers and…

Sergeant Sticks KIA on Mira.

And the other guy we called Klutz who got it at Tabibi Airfield in the early days of Astralon. Crash. Whatever.

They come and stand around me in the darkness of my cage.

“Listen, Orion…” continued the First Sergeant after a galaxy-weary sigh as he sat down on one of my weapons crates. “… out of a hundred swinging boots… nine are real killers. Ten ain’t fit to be there at all. And the rest a’ them eighty are just targets for the enemy to shoot at while you’re getting ready to kill ‘em dead, Sarn’t Orion. That’s my application on why we’re throwin’ in with this Grand Fleet of these Khans. They got pretty dreams… we just need to get close to get it done so we can get back to official company business. My guess… gonna lose a lotta ships on final approach to target-boarding. Op like that is gonna be hell to pay to get a foothold on the enemy ship and there ain’t no pretty lie I can tell about that. Now two ways. It’s gonna be downright gruesome. Ask me how I know sometime. Anyway… them Khans, their fleets, their PMCs, that’s gonna be our eighty we gonna meatshield behind to get in close for the killin’ work. We get a breach solution, crack that hull, then the company can do its thing and get it on right and proper with whatever the Monarchs got stashed in there to save themselves from us. It’ll be real deal, close quarters battle, in them compartments and passages, Sarn’t. Dangerous like you ain’t never seen before, I suspect. Maybe we split the spine, destroy the engines if we can even identify them, set demo, but I suspect we are just gonna murder our way deck-to-deck through that cursed ship in order to get it done one by one on them cussed bastards.”

He was silent for a long moment seeing it all play out in his mind.

Then he looked at me with a flat stare.

“And, there ain’t gonna be a lot left of us the other side of this one. But that’s the Company, Sergeant. Get it on never mind the odds. We ain’t ever shirked a fight. We ain’t never asked for no quarter in one, and we ain’t given none either.”

I was pretty sure we had. Me mainly.

But the First Sergeant was waxing melancholy and recruiting a lot on the sands so his view of the Company and its history was… how shall I put it… a little more pristine than mine.

Than reality, in fact. But I say that for the purpose and authenticity of the logs.

People don’t become mercenaries because they know the reality.

That’s later.

Then they know.

But they’re addicted to the juice of combat, life and death, by then, so they’re stuck.

Ask me how I know.

But the First Sergeant is the First Sergeant and I don’t feel like getting busted down to New Guy right now going in on this one.

I wanna be in charge of the hot mess, right?

The First Sergeant reached over and took a drink of my coffee. In the one overhanging light I keep on down here, he looked tired, and lost. And old.

He was getting old. We all were.

And that made me wonder how I looked.

I don’t spend too much time in front of mirrors these days. I don’t like the answers.

“That’s all we can do, Sarn’t Orion,” he grunted as he finished my cup. “Get in there and mix it up and maybe a few of us come out the other side of this and the company of John Strange goes on, deeper and deeper and farther and farther out there into the unknown of the galaxy. One world at a time. One fight after the next. Them players calling themselves the Khans, they’re just goin’ to see if they can recover all that fabled Monarch tech, or whatever, out there. That’s why they want the Black Ship. Use it to get ahead. Us? We’re goin’ because that’s what we do. Kill. That’s what the Strange does, Sarn’t. Kill. Our honor is on the line. We’ll go, break their stuff, and then… kill. That’s what we do. Then we get paid. Hopefully. Official company business and anything else is just dressin’ it up.”

He stared at something on the floor, but I could tell he was somewhere else, some-when else, for a long moment.

“We got to kill them bastards, Orion. Got to kill that damned ship too. If we… if humanity’s gonna have a chance, we gotta end the Monarch tyrant-thing out there. Otherwise… they’ll do it again. Someone will.”

Silence.

I felt like I needed to say something. That he needed… an ally. Someone who understood the mission like he did without out all the… rest of it. Whatever that is.

Tell me if you know.

“I’m with you First Sergeant. I believe…” I mumbled to him in the quiet between us.

But I didn’t know what I believed.

He looked at me as though only now realizing I was there in my weapons cage with him, listening to his thoughts, his spiel, his vision of the myth of us, the Strange. Drinking coffee and smoking in the dark. Trying to be left alone.

Just like me.

He looked around, as though seeing where he was for the first time.

“Y’know, Sarn’t… it’s real nice what you got down here in the dark and the quiet, Orion,” the First Sergeant whispered softly. “Real nice,” he murmured.

I nodded and refilled his cup.

“Good,” he sighed as he got up to leave, swallowing the whole hot brew in one go. “You’re a good NCO, Orion. Just makin’ sure I believe me too, Sarn’t. That’s all. Sometimes ya gotta say it just to hear it. You’ll know, Sarn’t, someday. You’ll know. One day you’ll be First Sergeant and it’ll be your job to make sure everyone’s a real lifetaker and a heartbreaker, that the grass gets cut and every one of us knows what it’s all about every day. The fun part is you get to ruin their day. But that’s a secret and don’t tell no one I told ya that.”

They know already First Sergeant.

“Now… I gotta go tune up that ol’ flamethrower ‘cause I ain’t takin’ no chances on that Monarch ship no way, Sarn’t. Combustible oxygen my butt. Only way to be sure they’re dead is to burn ‘em bulkhead to bulkhead. Know what I mean, Sarn’t Orion? Flame on. Just like back in the Batts.”

He got ready to leave.

“They still doing that Hotsoup thing aren’t they, Sarn’t?” he muttered.

I rubbed my forehead tiredly. They were.

“It’s like a cult now, First Sergeant.”

He shrugged and adjusted his pistol belt. He was always strapped. Even during transit. But he was ex-Saturnian Ranger Batts. And they saw some hairy stuff out there in the deep dark during the Frontier Wars long ago.

So… best to be ready. Never could tell when some slavering xeno was gonna come crawling out of the lower decks at ya all fangs and acid saliva.

“Everything’s a cult, Orion. Always was,” he grumbled. “But… that’s how warriors… men… are. They get some wacky thing in their hard drives and it becomes a thing to them to remind themselves they’re still alive. Like a totem. A… war cry… if you will, something to scream at death when it’s coming for ya, knives out and smoking barrel. Like… screaming into the void just to let it know you were there, and you didn’t blink when it came for ya in the end. Sorta like that, I guess, Sarn’t. Don’t know, young Sergeant. More and more every day… I just don’t know anymore, Sergeant Orion. I just… don’t know. Anymore.”

Then he was gone, off into the darkness to spread his message of the Company’s lore and honor to the new recruits and us veterans of all the bad contracts past that ever were. Just to make sure we knew why we were doing it when we set those hull entry charges on some airlock aboard the DarkStar. That everyone was on the same sheet of music about getting it done when it came time.

Get it On time.

We were going to find the last of the Monarchs. And then kill them. All.

Then we would be free.

Or at least, whoever survived would be free. And then the Company could go on. Somehow.

In those days humanity watched from her shattered worlds and war-torn decaying orbital cities, watched the Last Great Fleet form itself up in order to hunt down the monsters who’d once ruled us all.

Some for profit.

Some for revenge.

The Company for honor. The irony that we were mercenaries was lost on everyone. Everyone but me.

For the record.

The Black Ship fled across the galaxy… and the Strange Company… pursued.