Strange Company 2: Voodoo Warfare, page 1
Contents
Log Keeper’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Epilogue
Strange Company Two
Voodoo Warfare
By
Nick Cole
Strange Company
Copyright © 2022 by Nick Cole
All rights reserved.
Published by WarGate Nova
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
Edited by David Gatewood
Cover Art: Trent Kaniuga
Cover Design: M.S. Corley
Formatting: Kevin G. Summers
Website: NickColeBooks.com
Log Keeper’s Note
Aftermath
In those dark years of the long crossing between the world we’d cut loose of the bad contract on, and the repair facility on Hardrock, the Strange Company slept and the galaxy caught fire as we dreamed for twenty-five years of sublight.
The old order of the Monarchs, mighty yet petty gods determined to burn worlds and take humanity with them down into the deep dark graves of empire, began its final collapse. Worlds fell into shadowy chaos, overrun by the cackle of automatic weapons carried by the Simia Legions, while ring stations at Oberon and Circe burned like fiery jewels as the defense networks crumbled and ragtag collections of go-ships jumped into the darkness beyond the limits of human navigation to escape the madness of invasion and civil war.
The Ultras sent their Battle Spires into great conflicts at twenty-to-one odds, while rogue hunter-killer cyborgs carved out a nation among the stars for their own, eradicating life and silencing humanity across vast grain worlds now gone silent in the twilight. Debris fields of broken starships, Simia hulks and Monarch warships, lay twisting and drifting in the orbits of dead worlds as famine began to ravage human-controlled space.
The supercarriers were defeated at Andromeda Station. The powerful G-beams of Cerberus Gate could not hold the line, and the Rapid Jump Network for the spiral arm was gone in a single fireball moment, casting the outer frontier into permanent midnight and mute isolation for decades to come, if not forever.
It was a final game for all the marbles, or what marbles called worlds remained in the bonfire burning, consuming known space. A battle of three sides where strange alliances were made, and broken, as the table changed moment to moment in the grand game of Cheks playing out across the stars. New conquerors and would-be saviors shuffled their decks, seeking a card to play for the win, not above a cheat, a prayer, or a promise of a better tomorrow never delivered.
Into this madness and maelstrom rode the Strange Company, sleeping in an old destroyer they called the Spider. Determined to have their say, if even just now, at the end of all things…
Chapter One
During the long journey from the catastrophe of Crash, Astralon, call it what you will, we dreamt dreams of adventure, and pleasure, and for some, even now… conquest. And of course… a final settling up.
But those dreams were secret dreams for just one.
For the rest of the Strange, it was anything to take their sleeping minds, those that had survived the last war, off the events on that deleted world and bad contract the company had gotten itself involved in. But not everyone dreamed a ship’s-AI MMO dreams of other, better lives than the ones we lived. Reality Dreams, lived inside vast fantastic virtual worlds the Spider’s artificial intelligence—M.O.M., or MOM as we called her. The adventures and pleasures she could dream up for us to while away the darkness of cryosleep for the long crossing of the great nether gulfs of nothingness between Crash, or Astralon, call it what you will, and the bet we were hoping would pay off on that other rock out near the edge of human expansion.
And yes… some dreamt of revenge. Payback. Call it what you will. Painting it all black. All of it. All the wrongs and not just the ones that had been done to the company lately. The Monarchs and many others had run up debts that needed settling as far as the Old Man was concerned and some who kept fire around his inner circle. They, those late-night smokers in the forward day room, they dreamed those paint-it-black dreams as they are called among the company when revenge and payback are on someone’s mind.
That’s the thing about the Spider’s forward day room just behind the docking stack. It’s an old officers’ lounge. It looks both forward and back. Where we have been, and where we’re going. It’s a dark place despite the view, and honestly, I steer clear of it. There’s a serious pucker factor there I need a break from after nine months of war on Crash and a bare escape with our lives, tons of useless mem, and the dead we left behind.
But I’d be lying if contracts like that, and the bad deal and worthless mem we were promised that followed, didn’t make me ache for a little payback too.
You get tired of getting kicked. Everyone does.
Even me. If I am honest with this account… honest with myself… even me. I’ll smoke and think about settling up. Even a broken ruck-hump merc NCO can have such foolish dreams.
If only to give back a little of the so much that has been handed out.
Yes, even me, da Little King, as drunk old Stinkeye likes to crow in the lower passages whenever he finds me smoking in the dark and thinking. He always seems to find me when my mind has gone there. Like the old Voodoo warrant officer is some ship floundering on a dark sea looking for a lighthouse of revenge among the rocks and shoals to give him a purpose to haul his tattered gear and bony frame out onto one more contract.
Even me… Sergeant Orion. Keeper of the log. Brother in the Strange. Payback appeals even to me.
But that was in the weeks following Astralon as our broken-down old destroyer hauled herself up to just shy of light and the XO pointed us toward some broken rock on the stellar charts.
We’re all looking for a lighthouse.
Twenty-five years later, the Spider eased out of sublight and settled herself into the local system traffic, not that there was much, that surrounded the desperate bet we’d made on Hardrock Shipyards.
It’s an icy and storm-laden world with giant volcanic rents that add to the chaos and maelstrom planetside. No colony could survive here. But a shipyard lying along an old trade route reaching out along the galactic arm… sure. Why not. Core taps are cheap energy for the repair of starships ranging from super-freighters to old light destroyer merc transports.
Slowing from the painstakingly slow sublight crawl the old destroyer was barely capable of without her jump drive took two full months of heavy burn from the mains in retrograde just to get us set up for orbital insertion around Hardrock.
Twenty-five years didn’t feel like the two weeks plus one epic rack-out our bodies were telling us had occurred. But it had. And the Monarch empire was wrecked when we popped back into current events.
M.O.M. awakened us in batches. Or at least those who could be brought back to consciousness in the waking life that seemed like a dream you hadn’t had in years as you surfaced from the onboard MMO. The severely wounded were left in cryosleep. The dead, and there were always some in cryosleep this long on a ship this old, well, they were just dead now. Everyone wins the lottery, it just depends on
Winning that is.
I knew I was in the early batch of first awakeners because the entire superstructure of the old warship was still violently shaking and threatening to come apart as the massive mains at the back of the ship struggled to slow us for planetary arrival and shipyard entry. I spent two days in rehab with just a few of the command team, none of us saying much to one another as we tried to remember how to move, drink, eat, and just plain-old remember things.
You always lost memories in transit. And sometimes that wasn’t a bad thing. You were probably going to make some new ones you’d want to forget on the next contract.
The Falmorian party girl was still inside my brain bucket, though. Her letter I’d gotten once we boarded the Spider after Crash. That was a good thing. She was. The dead Kid too. Not a good thing. Amarcus dead… good thing.
You add things up when you get back to your locker on the ship you haven’t seen in nine months. That’s a weird moment. The you who closed it is much different than the you who opens it.
On reawakening from cryo, I drank protein and vitamin slurries, pretending they were nillabanana flavored because sometimes you can trick yourself just enough to actually believe it. And all the while I’m abacus-ing up the good and the bad of my life in real time. That’s why we don’t say much to each other during recovery as the ship rattles and thrums all around us during the two weeks of re-entry. I was reconciling accounts and seeing what I had to live with going forward on the next contract.
And always, you’re asking yourself a stupid question you already know the answer to. Am I going?
A casual yet constant observer would have told you I arrived at no conclusion other than that I was still alive.
I always liked moving that mental white bead to that side of the invisible abacus.
I always considered that a win. Life. Being alive one more time. Why? Believe it or not… I’m an optimist. Things can always get worse, am I right? At least I was alive one more time and no one was shooting at me while M.O.M. tried to nurse me back to life one more time for one more contract. I had that going for me.
Plus, things can always get worse.
The first sergeant, as per company standard operating procedure, was one of the first out of cryo and had been for a week before we entered recovery aboard the Spider. The XO, who flew the ship for the company, was out of cryo too, but now much older than he had been during the combat departure out of Astralon, Crash, call it what you will. Apparently the ship had problems during transit to Hardrock, and he’d spent eight years out of cryo keeping us alive with baling wire and bubble gum. He was now older than the captain. Older than the Old Man.
The XO looked worn out and there was no way he’d take command someday, having saved our lives alone while we were all dreaming dreams of other lives not this one. He was just the Strange Company pilot now. But we called him XO anyway because unless we could pick up a hyperdrive on this world there wasn’t gonna be a company much longer.
We all knew the situation. It was grim. The galactic economy had cratered.
The first sergeant barked at all of us first awakeners as rehab injected our muscles full of minerals and nutrients, started us moving inside the dyna-cycles, and got us spun up for self-operation one more time.
“This is the first day of the rest of yer life, Sergeant Orion,” erupted the first sergeant on the other side of the glass near me in recovery. “Company would appreciate it if you’d get a move on so we can go to foreign worlds and kill exotic beings for pay and fun, Sergeant.”
My mouth tasted like pine nuts for the entire rehab. I tried to remember the MMO I’d just woken from. I’d spent a lot of time there, but the violence of cognition regeneration usually blanked out your mind and left you with a pretty severe hangover for a couple of weeks and little memory of what had gone on inside those fantastic virtual worlds you’d just spent the last twenty-five years in as the ship crossed the vast interstellar gulfs of darknesses between the worlds.
Something sword and sorcery… yeah, I remembered fire and steel. But there’d been world-building components and I’d set myself a challenge during the load screen requests twenty-five years ago to make something instead of killing everything like I always did. The loading screens… that was when we got to input and tell M.O.M. how we’d like to be occupied for the flight to Hardrock for repairs and maybe a new jump drive if we promised to go somewhere and kill someone. Sometimes you got your wish regarding the MMOs. Sometimes you ended up in something bizarre.
Twenty-five years later, the matronly AI would apologize as you filed a complaint ticket on the experience you would not recommend inside those virtual worlds. Hoping she’d get it right for the next flight if you survived the current contract.
She thanked you in her kindly voice and told you she’d try harder to improve the experience parameters. But she always said that.
Tags got a simulation of him working inside a massive stellar insurance corporation he couldn’t get fired from. No sword, no sorcery. No harem girls. It was an everyday existence and most likely the psych algos had decided he needed to calm down a bit after Astralon. So they’d sentenced him to twenty-five years of paperwork, coaching Ultraball Little League, and a wife that was pretty hot and kept having simulated children.
“After a while it wasn’t so bad. I got to like it,” he said to no one who cared.
But not for me. No such pastoral pleasure dome to while away the crossing from one ruined world to another icy rock no one should’ve ever stopped at.
“I am sorry, dear.” The AI called everyone dear. “But the psych eval algorithm indicated you needed something a little more challenging this time, Sergeant James P. Orion. We came up with the World of Kronan simulation to meet your current mental health needs. The company feels you might embrace your more violent tendencies for improved contract satisfaction on behalf of future prospective clients. That’s why we developed the Sack of Tulgar and the desert raider cities, and added in the fighting campaigns in the Swamps of Nethramoor against the Octoeyes of Hellbane. The horror factor of the Octoeyes has resulted in a small increase in your cognitive agility, which should serve you should the company have another contract to fulfill.”
Those things were pure insanity. The whole Nethramoor was like a nightmare at three in the morning that never ended. It was haunting and the violence was desperate. Those Octoeyes could suck you down into their lairs like some crocodile taking you down into its den. Then, according to the in-game lore… it fed on you for years, keeping you alive in the watery dark.
Yeah… pass on that MMO ever again.
To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded Tags’s vacation. Mine had been mind-gibberingly insane and very exhausting. Like those heavy sleeps where you wake up from dreaming you’re being chased by a cybertoothed bear, and you’re sweating and breathing heavy and holding your sidearm out in the darkness of your tiny room down near the mains of the Spider. The answer I’d been hoping for from M.O.M. should have been, “Dear, I have something a little more peaceful to keep you in the SAFE PTSD matrix the company requires of its member for all contracts and insurance.” A nice sim about beings some painter, or a farmer. And a hot wife.
And the PTSD matrix… that was mostly bogus though. I’d known guys who were completely sociopathic and homicidal just waiting to get their kill on planetside to see who could nail the war crimes high score on that gig. Choker, my medic, comes to mind immediately. The company lawyers always had waivers signed before we started each gig protecting those psychos regardless of their PTSD flags.
But all in all, my time inside the onboard MMO had been… good. I forgot about Crash and the dead we’d left behind. There had been things in there, moments of beauty amid the carnage of survival. I could still remember feeling that as I slept. Or at least the memory of that feeling as I tried to get my mobility back and forget everything that had gone down on Astralon, or Crash, call it what you will.
The Kid. Most of my platoon.
When I couldn’t shake those memories, the brothers, sipping my not-nillabanana protein smoothie, I thought of Amarcus Hannibal, dead and burning in the crawler… and I smiled, adding a white bead to the mental abacus.
