Sigma (War for New Terra, Book 1)

by T W M Ashford

  “Just climbing the north-west tower now, sir,” she whispered back between laboured breaths. A few steps further up, Duke and Ghost paused to listen.

  “Well, hurry up, will you? The other three fireteams have checked in already. You’re making us look bad.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Ginger felt her face turn red. Being told off by Baker was bad enough, but on a channel that her whole fireteam could hear? That was just plain embarrassing.

  “Pick up the pace,” she ordered. Duke and Ghost did as she asked even though the metal steps clanged like dinner bells as they stormed upwards. They were lucky nothing answered the call to feast.

  A few more rotations later, they reached the top of the stairwell.

  Duke used the muzzle of his rifle to push open the hatch above their heads. It creaked on hinges that hadn’t been used in years. Peering through the crack and seeing nothing but cloudy skies, he shoved the hatch open fully and climbed the short ladder onto the battlement. Ghost and Ginger followed.

  The top of the tower was a little less wide than its base and surrounded by a chest-high parapet. Ghost took up a crouching position with her sniper rifle aimed at the rocky, rolling hills beyond the bridge, though the drifting mist was scarcely any clearer up in the tower than it had been back amongst the troops. Duke peered over the edge of the parapet and made sure there were no roaches crawling up the outside, while Ginger squinted across at the other three towers. Sure enough, the other fireteams were ready and waiting. She could just about make out their brown helmets poking up from the copper battlements.

  Better check in.

  “Baker, this is Rogers,” she said, kneeling down. “Fireteam Sigma is in position. Do you copy?”

  “We copy, Sigma.” This time, Baker sounded relieved. “Stand by.”

  Ginger waited until she was confident the ranking officers were no longer listening before she checked in with her other squad mates.

  “Sergeant Parkins. How’s it going down there?”

  Nothing. Ginger’s heart rate quickened.

  “Parkins?” she hissed. “Jackson? Bradley?”

  “Sorry,” Parkins whispered. “That roach we saw earlier came back. It was sniffing around the north-east tower, but the guy from Fireteam Charlie kept still and it crawled right past him. Otherwise all good here.”

  “Good. Stay alert. It sounds like the rest of the battalion is on its way.”

  “Thank God for that,” came the uneasy voice of Private Jackson. “I want solid ground beneath my feet ASAP.”

  They went back to radio silence. Even Duke and Ginger refrained from communicating with anything more than hand signals. Their thankless first objective of making sure the battalion didn’t walk into a bug trap was complete. Now all they had to do was hold the fort until the rest of the troops got there.

  It was a long and empty wait. The rain poured through gaps in the parapets like miniature waterfalls. Eventually, the temptation to speak grew too great.

  “Anything your side?” Ginger whispered.

  “Nothing,” replied Ghost, not taking her eye off her scope. “You?”

  Ginger shook her head.

  “Nah. Zilch. I guess they had to go the long way around the cliff because of the tanks. Or maybe they…” She stopped and squinted. “Wait. Scratch that. Here they are, right on cue.”

  The first wave of marines stalked out from the mist with their rifles raised. Then another wave, and then another. Dozens – perhaps even a hundred – men and women crossed the bridge. The curious bug from earlier scuttled in front of their path and was dispatched quickly and without mercy. Ginger winced at the gunshots, but it didn’t matter so much if they were forced to eliminate any stray roaches at this point. If the thunderous roll of their rifles attracted more bugs from the other side, so be it. They now had the numbers to deal with them.

  With each passing second, Ginger could better hear the rumble of tank treads and the grumble of their engines through the rain. One of them got as far forward as the base of the bridge before grunting to a stop. Another two positioned themselves parallel to the edge of the ravine and trained their 120mm cannons on the cliffs on the other side.

  Ah, armoured fighting vehicles. Better than a warm blanket.

  “All right, guys.” Ginger sighed as she turned to face Duke and Ghost. “I think we’re—”

  Something came screeching through the mist before she could finish her sentence. It was a roach, only this one flew on a pair of translucent wasp wings that unfolded from inside a split shell on its back. It swept towards Fireteam Charlie’s tower, grabbed one of the three marines standing at the top, and dropped her screaming into the pitch-black ravine below.

  Everyone opened fire. The bug was shot to pieces and plummeted into the abyss after her.

  “Look out!” Ginger screamed.

  A second flying roach hurtled towards Ghost with its claws out. Duke spun around and fired a couple of shotgun slugs. Reduced to bloody shreds by the blasts, the roach flailed past them and crashed into the parapet on the other side of the tower. Ginger popped a few rounds into its head for good measure.

  “Thanks, guys,” Ghost replied, picking herself up off the floor. “But I think we’ve got even bigger problems.”

  “Eh?” Duke aimed his rifle down the exterior wall of the tower. “What? Where?”

  “Not there.” Ghost lifted the barrel of Duke’s rifle with the tip of her finger. “There.”

  A dark, amorphous shadow bloomed deep inside the mist. Like the wave of a stormy sea, it shifted and surged over the rocky hills towards them. Ginger’s legs turned to jelly as she realised what it was.

  A crawling carpet of bug silhouettes.

  “Baker? Staff Sergeant Baker?” Ginger ducked down and screamed into her headset. “You know that trap Command was worried about? Consider it well and truly sprung.”

  Chapter Ten

  Thousands of roaches swarmed towards the bridge in a monstrous tide of scrawny claws and fat pincers. The rocks and boulders of the barren hills were quickly lost beneath their twitching, writhing bodies. Even greater shadows loomed heavily in the mist beyond.

  “What do we do, Ginger?” shouted Ghost. “What do we do?”

  Back on the UEC side of the bridge, the tanks began to fire. So did the long-range artillery cannons. Huge swathes of bugs blew up in clouds of rubble and limbs… and yet still the swarm kept coming.

  “Shoot them.” Ginger joined Ghost and Duke by the parapets and trained her rifle on the incoming roaches. “Shoot them, goddammit!”

  They opened fire at the horde. So did the troops crowding onto the bridge. It was hard to tell what good, if any, their rounds were doing from so high up. Whenever a bullet-riddled bug fell, it was instantly drowned beneath a dozen more rushing forth from behind it. More flying roaches soared towards the towers; Duke switched targets and started blasting these out of the sky instead.

  “Ginger?” came Sergeant Parkins’ panicked voice over her headset. “What’s going on up there? What do you want us to do?”

  “Hold your position for now,” Ginger replied, ducking into cover to reload. “At least until we get new orders from Baker.”

  There was a brief pause before Parkins answered.

  “Don’t you think we should ask for new orders, given the circumstances?”

  Ginger gritted her teeth as she slammed a new magazine into her rifle. The last thing she needed right now was a fellow sergeant fighting for command of the fireteam.

  “I think if Baker had new orders to give us, we’d know them already,” she snapped. “Just do what I say and stop any bugs from climbing up here, okay?”

  “Ginger?” Ghost sounded concerned. “I think you ought to see this.”

  Ginger stood up. Her face fell.

  “Oh, crap.”

  Thanks to the tanks, the artillery cannons and the wall of marines holding their ground, few of the roaches were yet to make their way onto the bridge. But lumber
ing through the insect masses was a much bigger threat – bigger being the operative word.

  Three bugs bigger than London buses lurched towards them. They were more like beetles than the standard roaches, with six elephantine legs that shook the earth and a black shell that must have been at least a foot thick. Their heads were covered in scarred carapaces and ended in blunt horns like that of a rhino. But it wasn’t the tank-bugs alone that worried Ginger.

  No. What worried Ginger were the roach-operated bug-cannons fused onto their backs.

  The tank-bug up front came to a grunting stop a few dozen metres from the bridge and burrowed its thick claws into the dirt for stability. The marines turned their fire on the beast but their regular rounds couldn’t penetrate its shell. The roaches crawling over its back retrieved an explosive sac from a sling on the rear of the bug and loaded it into the cannon.

  “Not so fast,” Ghost muttered to herself, as she lined them up in her sights.

  She pulled the trigger and the roach standing behind the cannon’s trigger-lever went flying off the tank-bug’s back in a geyser of purple blood. But her victory was short-lived. The roach cranking the cannon with its pincers knocked the lever free before she could fire a second shot.

  The cannon went off with enough force to drive the tank-bug’s rear legs another foot into the earth. The explosive projectile soared right over the bridge and crashed down on one of the tanks at the other end. Its gunmetal grey chassis sheered outwards in every direction and smeared a couple of marines across the dusty track nearby.

  One of the tanks on the other side of the ravine fired a shell from its primary cannon. It punctured the titanic bug’s shell and blew it apart from the inside.

  Back on top of the north-west tower, Ghost lowered her scope from her eye.

  “Erm, guys? Is it just me, or does that fat-ass beetle look like it’s aiming at us?”

  Ginger followed her line of sight. Another tank-bug was digging its claws into the dirt about a hundred metres north of the bridge. The roaches crawling over its back were loading an egg sac into its cannon. The grotesque contraption was unmistakably pointed at their tower.

  “Oh, crap. Get off the roof!”

  “I can bring it down,” Ghost replied, aiming her rifle.

  “I’m not taking that risk.” Ginger threw Ghost towards the hatch Duke had already pulled open. “Move!”

  They dropped through the hatch onto the staircase and raced down to the ground floor. Ginger reached out to Sergeant Parkins over her comm unit.

  “Fall back to the south side of the bridge,” she ordered.

  “What? But you just told us to stay put!”

  “That was before the whole damn tower was coming down,” she screamed, taking the steps two at a time. “For God’s sake, run!”

  They were halfway to the bottom when the payload hit. The top third of the tower was sheered off in the blast, leaving jagged sheets of scorched metal sticking up at the storm clouds like copper shark teeth. Ginger was thrown down the steps and narrowly avoided breaking her neck by grabbing a nearby handrail. Duke yanked her to her feet again. Green flames dripped down amongst the shrapnel and rain and sizzled against the walls.

  The metal tower groaned like a derelict ship. The stairs shuddered as its foundations started to come loose.

  “Go! Move!”

  They reached the ground floor just as the tower started to break free from the bridge. Parkins, Jackson and Bradley were nowhere to be seen. Ghost and Duke sprinted through the open doorway; by the time Ginger got there, she had to leap across the growing gap to keep from falling into the ravine along with it. Lying on the floor gasping, she watched the tower split into pieces as it tumbled into the infinite darkness.

  “Christ almighty,” she said, picking herself up. “That was—”

  A roach scuttled around the jagged hole where the tower had been, chittering to itself and clacking its mandibles menacingly. It rose onto its hind legs and screamed at Ginger, spittle spraying from its splayed mouth.

  Ginger went for her rifle, but she already knew from her previous close encounter with a roach that she wouldn’t be quick enough. She was lucky Duke and Ghost were at hand. The roach was halfway through the air towards her when a shotgun blast knocked it off course and a torrent of submachine gun rounds sent it flailing over the edge.

  Ginger glanced down the end of the bridge. The tanks and artillery cannons were cutting down a decent number of the bugs before they reached the crossing, but a great many of them were still getting past the bombardment. They threatened to overrun the marines. She watched as even more of the six-legged freaks came charging over the rocky hills towards them.

  “Christ, it never ends,” said Ghost, backing away.

  Oh, it’ll end, thought Ginger. It’ll end when the whole battalion’s wiped out and our brains are in some bug’s stomach.

  Sigma assimilated themselves within the ranks of marines still trying to hold the bridge, firing backwards at the incoming throng of bugs as they went. Their insectoid snarls and screams now drowned out the sound of rain drumming on metal. The north-east tower was consumed beneath their writhing mass until no sign of the original structure remained; the terrified soldier guarding the base was quickly torn apart as they swarmed inside.

  Command finally recognised the full scope of the threat. Everybody on the bridge started to fall back.

  Ginger was almost at the charred wreckage of the frontmost tank. She coughed as thick smoke and the stench of burned flesh wafted into her throat. A blackened, skeletal arm dangled out from inside the turret. She turned her head and ignored it.

  “Retreat behind the artillery,” she shouted, rattling off a few more rounds from her rifle. “And find the rest of our fireteam. They should—”

  The world turned bright green, and the next thing Ginger knew she was lying on her back beside the bridge’s left-side barrier. Her ears were ringing. Something sticky trickled down her forehead. It ached to breathe. Everything felt hot, as if she were sitting too close to a garbage fire.

  She sat up, blinking heavily.

  One of the tank-bugs had launched another explosive sac at the bridge. Some of the marines had been disintegrated in the immediate blast. Others lay on the floor twitching and screaming as the flames roasted them alive. With fewer marines left alive to keep the horde at bay, roaches of both the regular and flying variety swept in to finish the wounded off.

  Duke and Ghost were nowhere to be seen.

  Ginger scrambled to her feet and looked for a way out. The south-west tower to her right hadn’t collapsed, but it sure looked like it was considering the idea – half of its northerly side lay smashed across the front of the bridge, blocking Ginger’s way off. She guessed she could walk around it – or even risk clambering over the hot, sharp metal – but that meant running back towards the swarm of roaches first.

  Watching them tear the bubbling flesh from off the dying soldiers’ bones, this was something Ginger felt particularly reluctant to do.

  She peered over the side of the barrier. The arches of the bridge’s foundations were constructed from interlocking beams and girders. If she was careful, she reckoned she could climb across them and then back up on the other side of the broken tower.

  Presuming she didn’t fall into the deepest chasm known to man, that is.

  She turned back to the scenes of carnage. The bugs continued to tear their way through the remaining marines, ripping off limbs and tossing them back into the rabid crowd. One of them snapped its head up in Ginger’s direction.

  Ginger’s intestines shrivelled. Nothing else for it. She grabbed the top of the barrier and vaulted over the side.

  She immediately regretted her decision. The girders were slick from the rain and the constant rumble from the cannons on both sides made the whole bridge shake. Twice her boots slipped out from under her and left her dangling from the bridge by only the tips of her fingers. The wind picked up and tugged at her fatigues. Yet slowly, sca
red even to look down and see where she was putting her feet, she made her way across the five or six metre stretch to a spot where she believed she could climb up again.

  As she began her ascent, the bug from before crawled over the barrier after her.

  “For Christ’s sake,” she muttered, shakily reaching down for her sidearm with one hand whilst holding onto one of the bridge’s girders with the other. But it slipped out of her grip. Her pistol went spinning down into darkness.

  Goddammit. There was no use going for her rifle. Even if she could reach it, she wouldn’t be able to fire it with one hand still clutching the metalwork.

  All she could do was climb.

  She doubled her pace, no longer bothering to check if her handholds and footholds were stable. But she knew it was ultimately futile. She could hear the bug scuttling across the beams towards her. Roaches could navigate vertical planes as easily as a human could run on land. She winced as it grew closer, knowing that any second now a pair of serrated mandibles would pierce her thigh and drag her to her death.

  A pair of gunshots went off just above her head instead. Ginger opened her eyes and watched as the roach fell convulsing from the bridge’s supports. She looked up and found two members of Fireteam India leaning over the barrier, their arms outstretched to pull her up.

  “Thanks, guys,” she gasped, as they dragged her back onto the bridge.

  “Don’t mention it.” One marine nodded over her shoulder while the other fired at the roaches climbing over the partially collapsed tower. “It’s Sergeant Rogers, right? The rest of your fireteam are already clear.”

  They sprinted off the bridge, past the last line of marines. There were hundreds more of them amongst the tanks and lining the edge of the ravine, and mobile rotary cannons had been installed beside the guardhouses, but Ginger had seen what the bugs did to those trying to cross. Sooner or later, the whole battalion would be overrun.

  Duke and Ghost hurried over, relieved. The marines from Fireteam India left to go find their own comrades.

  “We thought you were dead,” Ghost sighed, punching her on the arm. It made a fitting wartime substitute for a hug. “That blast nearly knocked us off the bridge.”