Strange Company 2: Voodoo Warfare, page 15
Still under the influence of Stinkeye’s berserking, Dog isn’t done in the least. They go Ultra. Guys are shot and bleeding out and shoving mags into smoking weapons as they head to the next kill zone. No one is in control of anything and Amarcus is in front, swearing murder and shooting down retreating Froggos. No one is assisting the wounded. Hell, the Old Man and the first sergeant didn’t even know about it until it was over. The first clue they had something was wrong was seeing the village on fire from the pontoon base as the horizon filled with black smoke.
That whole world was nothing but endless horizon. It was oceans and seas of reeds and the occasional small island hill rising from the whole stinking mess.
When the Monarchs sent in their Maulers, the Froggos finally surrendered because the Maulers can fly atmospheric and let go with their ten-gigawatt plasma beams. In one day they could have set the whole world on fire and left it to burn.
The Froggos got the point when they saw the Maulers making high-orbit passes and surrendered, choosing to become slaves of the empire.
The Inquisitors charged us with war crimes and the company took it hard on that one. Contracts with the Monarchs don’t cover war crimes. Yeah, it was really Stinkeye’s fault. But we always blamed Amarcus for it anyway.
Stink had just freaked out when it got bad and used one of his more powerful weapons to get them out of there. But there was something about Amarcus that made it worse than it should’ve been. Stinkeye would avoid Hannibal every chance he got after that. Something inherently wrong inside him that we’d suspected all along, had bloomed in full that day.
After that, it never fully went away.
And in time, we became enemies.
Amarcus Hannibal had never been far from that kind of savagery Stinkeye had awakened in him. It had taken the merest of pushes from Stinkeye’s Dark Labs powers to let it loose, and once it was loose, it stayed.
It was bad. Stink was afraid. Even though the old drunk never said so, I could tell. Whenever Hannibal was around, a good game of Cheks or not, Stinkeye got quiet and faded into the shadows as soon as he could.
After Astralon, as the Spider ramped up to sublight, Stinkeye cornered me one time, drunk and his breath stinking.
“Ya done good, Little King,” he gasped.
I told him we were just trying to survive down there. We’d all done our best.
Stinkeye smiled and got all serious, raising his head and looking down at me with what he called his Eye of Truth look.
Again, it’s all an act. But if you don’t know him and you’re a little child easily frightened… it’s worth the ticket at the cheap carnival on the edge of the starport.
“Not that, Little King. Da other thing. Ya sent the darkness back where he belong now. Universe got a chance now for a little while more.”
Then he wandered off drunkenly singing some old song about having something to believe in.
Another classic none of us would ever find in the entertainment streams. Another mystery. Another cheap bit of costumery for the space war wizard act.
That was the day we pushed the dead into the engines.
Now, incoming QRF and seconds to react to contact, he was gonna do to me, to us, what he’d done to Hannibal. What had ruined Dog.
I wasn’t cool with that because I knew of it and had always feared it being done. And I was powerless to stop it so I ran and tried to be a busy NCO who could actually get his studs out of this one.
I didn’t feel very wily old hobo at that point. But I did feel it, what Stinkeye was doing to us, coming on like bad food poisoning or a real bone-chiller flu. Where you feel it deep down inside of you and you know it feels very wrong and it’s barely even begun. Like something seriously toxic inside of you that’s going to take you some places you don’t want to go right now, or ever.
I was thinking… I don’t have time for this right now.
I remembered afterward, I think I was chanting that very thing as I came down off the berserking on the other side of it when I was covered in wet blood. I was backing away from the flaming wreck of the Ultra Little Raven then, a light armored fast-attack drop specializing in suppression with six minis chained together. You get on the wrong side of one of those on a gun run and your day just got a whole lot worse.
I hope you like having a thousand holes in you.
But I remember chanting I don’t have time for this afterward, coming down off Stinkeye’s Heart of Darkness juice, thinking, but mumbling really, “I don’t have time for this.”
Like that had been the anchor that hadn’t worked as the murder roller coaster began to climb for the first drop.
I was only dimly aware I’d been saying that in the moments it all began to start, as I turned and saw the weird, crazed look on our space war wizard’s face beginning to consume all my attention as I ran from him, heading for the debris piles, shouting orders to my team that seemed meaningless because no one was going to listen now.
But I was still trying to avoid what was coming because that’s how Dog lost her way. How Amarcus became who he really, really wanted to be standing there in that burning village full of shot and gutted Froggos.
Hauser. Hauser wouldn’t listen to Stinkeye’s murder chanting because he’s immune. He wouldn’t listen, he’s a machine. I remember that being important as I tried to resist the tendrils of madness taking hold of my mind.
Wun two, dey comin’ for you. Tree four, open da door to darkness. Five six, Little King, gonna make a real big mess. Seven eight… da MK Ultra she is great. Taste and see, nine ten… we gonna kill, again and again and again… Wun two…
Then the rest of us… we were gone off on a murdering spree like nothing you’ve ever experienced.
I knew the stories from Amarcus’s genocide on Koogar Village. Dog had butchered those Froggos. Fighting-age adults. Younglings too.
It was bad even by the standards of war.
All the time after that, after what Stinkeye had done to Dog that day, I would always think back that that was when they’d lost their way. All the soldiers in Dog. Good guys I’d once known had become mean, and sullen, and began to behave in ways that made me think I’d never really known them. Hannibal, like some evil spirit, had been let loose that day. He’d taken control of all of them on the bloody red afternoon out in the marshes, burning villages and cutting up Froggos for more than just payback.
It had crossed a line than cannot be crossed back over.
When the first sergeant made it out there that afternoon with the Old Man, the whole platoon was dry on ammo. And they were still killing Froggos. Knives out.
It had taken the anger and iron will of the Old Man, a real live Ultra commander, if the rumors are true, to rein them in and stop the madness.
I gathered all the stories as the Log Keeper on the other side of it.
They’re horrible.
But… the truth just is. So, it’s in the main logs if you ever wanna see what we’re capable of. What we did out there. And why sometimes I think our story is a tragedy that hasn’t seen its final act yet.
But I can feel it coming. I can feel it most days and always late in the night. Like there’re some sins that just can’t be let pass. Like there’s no good thing left in the universe.
I could feel Stinkeye’s witchery taking hold of all of us, Duster, Wolfy, even Ulysses, as I ran forward, battle-rattle rattling, gunshots still ringing in my ears despite the ear pro. Insides beat to death by the HERK rounds.
The chanting was already filling me with rage as I tried to run from it, as I made it to Ulysses who already had a wild look in his eyes and was on one knee, sketching out our defense in the dust. Normally he has the calm cool of a pro soldier. Hard. Filled with quiet hate just waiting for a target to lay it on with all the fury and malice he has trained to be the best at. Now he had this dangerously energetic look in his eyes as he laid out how we should take on the incoming Ultra QRF. Almost like we were long-lost friends, reunited on some wild night when the winds were high and dry, the liquor cold and burning, and no rules to hold us back from the trouble we could get up to in the dark.
“We got two Bulldogs comin’ in hot, Sergeant. That’ll be a driver, a gunner, and four to dismount. Two of those each. Standard is they’ll have a drop ready for suppression by air on their six and riding overwatch. Sounds like one of the little Ravens coming in with ’em now, Sergeant Orion. We can take these guys!”
When I responded to this, Duster was already there saying, “Yeah, we got this, Sar’nt. We can do this.”
He had the look of a bad bet junkie gambler who’s got a system this time.
And Stinkeye, deadly serious, lips moving in his chant as he faded and let the mischief run. Even at that moment I was still resisting him. This was exactly how Dog had lost their soul, I kept telling myself. This was how Amarcus Hannibal became what I’d begun to think of, picture really, whenever Stinkeye raved and muttered about there being an actual Heart of Darkness to the galaxy.
I didn’t want that. Not for my guys. Not for me.
I was trying to respond to Ulysses, but my lips were moving through gun oil gone bad. Sluggish and dirty like it’d been reused on a bad op downrange and beyond the love of constant supply. Thick and slow and dirty.
I was shaking my head, fighting it with reason I no longer possessed as my shaking hands did the trick of checking my mags, knowing, wanting, to use them a lot. Knowing the killing was coming. We were hunkered there in a rough circle as the QRF came down the wide road from the Y intersection, on the other side of the debris. No short halt for us. No patrol clock to watch sectors. No one thinking anything but murder and rage as two armored fast-attack a-gravs throbbed silently into our area of operation. Having no idea what they were getting into. No doubt they were seeing their murdered dead in the red chalky debris of the weeks of constant shelling that had failed to mar much of this fantastic city. Realizing the perpetrators had come, killed, and maybe gone.
Ulysses, like the combat leader I’d never be, assault-gloved finger tracing our lines of attack in the red dust as we got ready to make an attack that was our only option, outlined the simple pincer. I was fighting the madness with all I had. Shutting my eyes and gritting my teeth as my guys turned into ghouls, jittery and laughing about what was coming.
They were… highly motivated. Imagined wrongs were suddenly shouted out, courtesy of Stinkeye. Vows to punish and pay back were used in response.
It was like some religious service for a religion of violence.
No, I wanted to shout into the dead streets and tall Monarch monuments. This is how we lose our way. This is how we go where Amarcus went. This is where things go bad!
And maybe, whispered the galaxy, Amarcus is waiting for us where he went…
I looked around as I lost it totally and became just like them, feeling the red rage take me. Now, later, I realized I was looking for the Little Girl at the last second. The one the Seeker had taken with her when she left us to the twenty-five-year haul to another world for an engine she had waiting for us. The Little Girl who’d been, impossibly, a part of the company.
I was looking for her friend, really. The Wild Thing.
But she was gone…
I may have imagined I was smelling the smell of burnt leaves on an autumn wind. Power chords of some hellish guitar stoking all our hatred to life in the distance that had nothing to do with Stinkeye’s mischief. Hatred for the Monarchs. Hatred for the Ultras. Hatred for… just plain old life.
“Good… Little King,” hissed Stinkeye from across our tight circle.
The Ultra drop was howling close and coming in now. We’d get some kind of jump on them on the ground force. The drop would kill us a whole lot and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about that. The pilot would spool up the guns and we’d be dead. We were running into our own kill zone, and we were helpless to do anything about it.
So, there was that.
“You are da darkness now…” said Stinkeye as he drew his ancient scarred and dented 1911 I’ve never seen him do a lick of maintenance on. Or load it. Or even fire it unless he was drunk and just wanting to make noise and trouble after getting beat bad at Cheks.
“Les get it on now, childrens,” he crooned. “Only way tru dis is to let go and let da hate flow…”
Chapter Sixteen
The one thing we had going for us as we lost our minds and went berserk in a sudden battle rage, was that Hauser had taken control of the crew-served gun in the dead god’s eye three stories above the fight. When I’d gone up there after seeing Plague dead on the throne there were piles of brass from the huge fifty-cal shells littered all over the place.
But there were still belts and cans of fifty-cal orange-tip HERK rounds ready to go. If we’d had time, I would have taken that gun. But we couldn’t do it effectively and pull back to our line. So I left it. Could’ve ruined it with thermite, but maybe there was a part of me hoping we could get back and commandeer it later.
Ever the wily old NCO, I am always looking to work smarter and not harder, if just for the amount of paperwork when you do it the hard way being more, and having to explain mistakes that were made and could have been avoided.
Like I said, the one thing the lunatics we’d become had going for us as the Bulldog a-gravs came throbbing into the kill zone and the Ultra cav troopers dismounted to secure the area, was Hauser on the gun.
It was Wolfy who lost his mind first. He never made it to the planning circle where a feverish and wild-eyed Ulysses was showing us how we could do this right now instead of running like we should’ve. Wolfy had continued down the overhead sidewalk, sticking close to the shadows from an overhang, when he engaged and fired first on the Ultra QRF.
He hadn’t totally lost his mind before his first shot, he’d tell me later. He domed the gunner on the lead vehicle as they came in. Bonus round for us. Hauser, who’d heard my insane babbling about not having the time for this and “rally on me,” but spoken by some snarling beast who was swearing he’d rip the heads straight from these Ultras’ mangy corpses, opened fire on vehicle two. The a-grav gunner there was torn to shreds in the turret with a perfectly ranged and on-target burst from the Ultra crew-served Hauser had just swiveled to orient the gun sight on the arrived QRF.
Remember… detailed files.
We were on the move as the a-grav Ultra troopers dismounted with short hops over the sides of snub-nosed disc ships levitating off the ground six to four feet.
Both gunners died within seconds of each other, and you’d think we had the advantage immediately. But remember, these were Ultras. No easy day. Ever.
What I can remember about what happened next are snapshots covered in a blood-red haze of battle. All I know is that I wanted them, the Ultras and anyone who opposed us, dead. I wanted to kill them myself. All of them. And… everything.
I was tired of the state of the Strange Company and the hard times we’d fallen on as of late. It was payback now and the galaxy had obliged a guilty pleasure.
The first trooper to hit the ground got rag-dolled by several sharp bursts from what had to have been all of us shooting that guy. Ulysses had gone wide right again around the debris pile and was engaging immediately. Stinkeye had followed hooting and hollering, waving his relic sidearm and probably flagging all of us.
Who cares?
We were a-murderin’ now.
Duster and I were supposed to go left. This seemed like a rational plan. Pincer attack supported by a heavy weapon.
Except no one was communicating with the heavy weapons, and we were all rushing in like breathless junkies rushing on the drug of their choice. Breathing heavy, gasping for hot dry air as I just ran straight over the top of the debris instead of going left because why wait? Scrabbling up through the ruined scree, cutting and slipping on shattered shards of High Monarch Culture, one assault-gloved hand barely controlling my battle rifle. I remember seeing my own spit drooling out on the dusty red marble and brick that formed the pile. Then I was up and mag-dumping on that first guy I could sight.
Meanwhile seven other Ultras in complete control of their faculties took cover, or tried to, and began to return fire at less than fifty meters. Hell, this gunfight might have been at twenty-five.
It was that close. The very definition of a real knife-and-gun show as you’re about to see.
At the top of the pile, I swapped mags because I’d just burned thirty rounds on a dead guy and so had Duster. Ulysses might have even engaged that guy. I had no idea. All I knew is… he was the first down, even as the others leaped over the sides, we shot him a whole bunch.
I had the presence of mind to try to get another magazine in, but my feet wanted to move at the same time because I needed to get close and bleed them. I got the next mag out of my carrier, slipped, and went face forward, who cares, and then started burning rounds from the prone on an Ultra who’d taken cover behind one of the blown-apart mortar men and was getting ready to lay some in our direction.
He was my next target. I shot him in the helmet and kept shooting, not realizing his twitching meant he was dead. I thought he was still in it to win it.
In the meantime, Ulysses was moving straight up on the four that had come out of the rear a-grav. Like a madman. No cover. Nothing. Just working the Bastard we’d issued him like it was his own personal precision death machine. He was shooting the Ultras down and probably killing them in the first few rounds. But there were some shots that had to have tagged armor. So extra shots were needed to make sure they were dead.
Stinkeye followed, blasting away on his six to clearly no effect.
