“Oh my God…” said Duke, picking himself back up.
“Did we use too much?” asked Ginger, scrambling backwards in the cargo bed. “Because I feel like we used too much.”
Tongues of flame began to lash down over the city.
“Don’t be afraid to go a little faster,” Duke shouted into the cab.
“Oh, what?” Ghost stuck her middle finger up through the gap. “Here I was trying to take the scenic route.”
Ginger shakily rose to her feet and peered out over the top of the truck’s cabin. Roaches scuttled across the rooftops beside them.
“Where are we going, anyway?” she shouted.
“How the hell should I know? I’m just looking for a way out. Any way out. Hoping the westward entry point is still clear, though no guarantee this hunk o’ junk will make it over the rubble. Unless either of you have got any better suggestions?”
Ginger sat back down in the bed. Duke shrugged.
“Didn’t think so,” said Ghost. “So will the two of you quit backseat driving and focus on shooting the damn bugs?”
Another pang of hot adrenaline kicked in as Ginger remembered the terrible black plague of flying roaches ascending above the city. But, swinging her rifle upwards, she discovered the cloud had dispersed. Not completely – the newly green-tinted sky was still full of the critters – but the destruction of the keep must have either scared or incinerated enough of their number to scatter the swarm.
Those that survived must have still recognised Fireteam Sigma as the culprits behind their decimated hive, however, because they were making a beeline for the truck.
“Short, targeted bursts,” said Ginger, taking aim. It was hard when the truck was jolting about so much.
“I think I know the drill by now,” said Duke, before taking the first shot.
It missed its target. So did Ginger’s. But so long as there were crates in the truck, they had the ammo to waste. They kept firing – never so quickly that the recoil would throw off their aim, but fast enough that the roaches couldn’t swerve out of the way – and one by one the roaches fell from the sky in mangled messes of blood and broken wings. It was close, though. The last one came within spitting distance before Duke blasted it back with a shotgun slug.
“Chuck me another magazine, will you?” Ginger asked, letting her three-quarters empty one clatter to the floor of the truck.
“Erm, Sarge?” As Duke passed her the ammo, his attention drifted away to the heavens again. “Is it just me, or does the ship look like it’s flying the opposite way to you?”
It was unmistakable – the gunship they assumed was carrying the nuke was now flying back in the direction it originally came. Ginger’s stomach shrivelled. She instinctively grabbed the wheel arch.
“Does that mean it’s dropped the bomb?”
“Not unless standard protocol is to pull a one-eighty right after.” Duke laughed and banged his fist on the back of the cabin with a big, goofy grin on his face. “Hey, Ghost. They’ve called off the nuke!”
“No kidding!” Ghost yelled back at him without turning around. “Look at this place. What’s left to blow up?”
Ginger heard nervous laughter; it took her a second to realise it was coming from her own mouth. After everything that had happened today, she wondered if things might actually turn out all right.
Her smile dropped faster than any bomb ever could.
“Christ, Duke. Watch out!”
A mutant bug stood on the corner of the ruptured street ahead with both of its hand-cannons held out towards them and a furious expression on its mangled face. Ginger pinned Duke to the floor of the cargo bed – as much as anyone could pin Duke to anything, that is. A torrent of chitin rounds sprayed across the side of the truck, smashing the windows of the cabin and rattling down its low metal side-plates.
“Are you okay, Ghost?” Ginger called out as she climbed off Duke.
“Yeah, I’m still breathing.” Private Flores sounded livid. “Cabin’s full of glass, though. And I’m not sure how much more damage this relic can take.”
Now they were out of the mutant’s line of sight, Duke knelt up and started firing at the rooftops running parallel to the street. They still teemed with roaches trying to keep pace. The truck’s constant bouncing made it hard to hit anything.
“That’s the main wall of the city, isn’t it?” said Ginger, indicating towards the imposing stone perimeter a couple of alleyways over to their right. “Get as close to it as the main streets will take you. If we follow it around, we’ll find our way out.”
“Again, what the hell do you think I’ve been trying to do?”
Something crashed into the truck. Ginger spun around to discover a roach splayed half inside the cargo bed and half scrambling up the back of the tailgate. Its claws scratched and screeched against the rusty metal while its mandibles snapped towards them only a couple of feet out of reach. Ginger screamed and unloaded about two dozen rounds into the hard shell of its horrible, bulbous head. The tailgate crashed open and the flailing roach tumbled down the street behind them.
“I think I see it!” said Ghost, as she turned onto a street that headed directly towards the wall. “The opening, it’s… Oh, come on! I think we’ve got a problem, guys.”
Ginger peered over the top of the cab again.
“Oh, for the love of God. Give us a bloody break!”
A giant tank-bug was standing directly in front of the collapsed wall, blocking their escape. As if that wasn’t enough, more roaches were spilling onto the street from the nooks and alleys all around them.
“A big problem, yeah.” Duke readied his rifle against the roof of the cabin. “What’s the plan, guys?”
Ginger did the same with her own rifle.
“Floor it, Ghost! Come on, Duke – let’s give that bastard everything we’ve got!”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ghost, putting the truck back into gear and slamming her foot down on the accelerator.
Ginger and Duke screamed and fired their battle rifles into the monstrous creature’s armoured face as their truck hurtled towards it. Their measly rounds didn’t appear to penetrate its thick carapace… but they did keep the giant beetle distracted.
And that’s all they needed.
Ginger had determined at a glance that the height of the truck was less than the distance between the tank-bug’s exposed underbelly and the rubble-strewn ground beneath. But it would be tight. Very tight. If the bug squatted down on its haunches or blocked their exit with one of its six legs the size of JCBs… well, the roaches would have to scrape their corpses off the pavement with a chisel.
So be it. It sure beat getting eaten alive.
Ginger’s rifle ran dry. There wasn’t time to reload, so she dropped the rifle and switched to her sidearm. They were less than a dozen metres away from the humongous beetle’s battle-scarred head now, and then ten… then eight…
Duke started letting off shotgun shells. The boom of each blast made Ginger’s handgun sound as if it were firing spud pellets. The roaches slashed and clawed at the sides of the truck as they raced past. An unlucky few disappeared under its wheels with a crunch.
Just as they passed beneath the monster’s horn – and now they were so close, Ginger realised the horn alone was easily the size of their truck, if not bigger – Duke fired a slug that burst one of the tank’s beady eyes. It let out a roar (it sounded like a hurt whale, or an old iron bridge on the verge of collapse) and sharply reared its head upwards away from the source of pain. It even raised one of its massive legs as if about to turn.
Ginger ducked back into the cargo bed and shut her eyes. This was it. This was the moment their journey across the cosmos came to a short and bloody end.
Yet the tank-bug didn’t turn. Nor did it move to block their path. Enraged, it swung its giant horn back across the truck’s path like a living wrecking ball.
But it no longer mattered.
They were already clear.
The
truck narrowly squeezed under the giant beetle, the roof of its cabin scraping against its underbelly. Duke dropped down beside Ginger and fired a couple more slugs into the ceiling of rubbery flesh just to be safe. The living tank lurched upwards, giving them an extra foot of clearance as the truck climbed the rubble of the perimeter wall on the other side.
A couple of bangs and grunts as their vehicle clambered over the misshapen terrain, a sharp shriek of metal as its underside got on the wrong side of the rocks…
…and then, for a short moment, weightlessness.
The truck crashed down on the other side of the rubble so hard that Ginger and Duke were briefly thrown back into the air again. She landed on her backside with a dull thud and let out a sharp hiss. Something bony back there was bruised for sure.
The exhaust fell off the rear of their vehicle and rattled away. At least, Ginger thought it was the exhaust. It could have been the driveshaft for all she knew. Whatever it was, it bounced right up to a number of furious roaches that came scuttling out after them through the hole in the wall. The horrid creatures gave chase across the cratered fields without a second thought, but even with all its knocks and bumps, the truck outpaced them all.
With hands that shook far worse than she realised, Ginger dropped her handgun to the bed of the truck and started laughing again. That got Duke started. Before long, Ghost was laughing too.
They’d firebombed a city they were ordered to occupy in order to save it from getting nuked. The rooftops of Rhinegarde burned and its streets still ran thick with bugs. They went against direct orders to evacuate, and that wouldn’t go unpunished.
But as the truck chugged through the mud and long grass, and the fresh breeze cooled the sweat beading across Ginger’s brow, none of that seemed to matter.
What mattered was they were still alive.
Chapter Seventeen
The UEC’s north-westerly base camp was several miles from Rhinegarde – far enough that it would have been clear of the immediate blast zone had the bomb actually been delivered. Ginger couldn’t help wondering if the nuclear option had been considered right from the very start.
Their truck rumbled and rattled to the outskirts of the camp about fifteen minutes after leaving the city. It was barely holding together. Ginger felt much the same way. She jumped down from the loose tailgate and stumbled about as if she had sea legs.
A fireteam of marines on guard duty hurried over with stern looks on their faces. They were so jumpy, Ghost had to almost raise her hands above her head in surrender when she finally got the buckled door of her cabin to open.
“Are you Sergeant Rogers?” one of the marines asked. “Is this your fireteam? Fireteam Sigma?”
“Oh, boy.” Duke unclipped some of his bulkier satchels from around his waist and chucked them into the back of the truck. “This doesn’t look good.”
The guards took that as confirmation. One of them radioed ahead, then nodded.
“Come this way. Command wants to speak with you.”
“Well, it was nice knowing the both of you,” said Ghost. “Do you reckon they’ll take us back up to the Invincible to airlock us, or will they shoot us right here and now?”
Ginger pretended to contemplate the question as they trudged through the dirt towards the camp’s gated entrance.
“Shoot us, I expect. Waste of good rocket fuel otherwise.”
Their escort waved to the guards standing on rickety metal towers to either side of the wire-mesh gate, who climbed down and pulled it open. The base looked busy, though there hadn’t been enough time to bring down reinforcements from the battlecruisers. Ginger didn’t know how many marines had lost their lives when the bug-holes started sprouting across the city, but she was glad to see that at least some companies had made it out of Rhinegarde in one piece.
They were barely inside the camp when a familiar face came marching up to meet them. Shame it no longer looked like a particularly friendly one.
“Staff Sergeant Baker,” said Ginger, holding out her hands. “I can explain…”
“What the hell were you thinking, Sergeant?” Baker was so red in the face, he looked like a tomato ready to burst. “You had clear orders to leave the city. Leave the city – not leave it in bloody ruins! Goddammit. You could have gotten yourself and your fireteam killed, Rogers!”
“We were dead anyway!” Ginger snapped back. All the marines around the camp were watching. “Or… Or at least, we thought we were. There were too many bugs, and we wanted our deaths to mean something, so…”
“So you jeopardised the whole colonisation effort, is that it? And lost somebody in the process, I see.”
“No, that’s—”
“Stand down, Baker.”
Ginger recognised the woman who came striding up to them – she was the same person Baker had been speaking to back at Rally Point Bravo. Major Liu. The haphazard way in which orders were handed down from rank to rank meant Ginger had never spoken to her before, though she had heard Liu address the whole battalion back on the UECS Invincible.
She saluted the major, as did Ghost and Duke. Baker did not. It was then that Ginger realised the two of them had already been discussing the matter before their arrival. There was no other reason for him to drop the formality.
Which made Ginger even more nervous. Maybe Baker wasn’t so much angry at them as he was scared for them. Or maybe even scared for himself.
Major Liu nodded over Ginger’s shoulder at the burning city behind them. The clouds above still carried a faint green tint from the giant fireball that ruptured the keep.
“That’s quite a mess you made, Sigma. More than I thought any lone fireteam was capable of.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” Ginger clenched her jaw and kept her focus on a point three inches to the left of Liu’s ear. “I take full responsibility. Baker gave me orders and I disobeyed them.”
“Full responsibility, is that so? I see. Good. Now I know who to pin the medal on.”
Without moving her head, Ginger glanced at Liu.
“Ma’am?”
“At ease, soldiers.” Major Liu smiled. It was warm and genuine but, given her rank, still a somewhat unnerving sight for Ginger. “Not just anyone could have cleared out a bug nest like the one we detected beneath Rhinegarde. If it weren’t for you, the whole city would be ground zero right now.”
Ginger glanced back at the catastrophic wreckage they’d caused – above and below the ground.
“But ma’am, the city…”
“The city is a bunch of old, structurally-unstable houses we needed to demolish anyway,” the major replied. “The fires will burn out, hopefully taking the last of the roaches with them. If not, we’ll drone strike the rest like we did at the start. The city might fall, but at least now we can rebuild it anew. Good work, Sigma.”
Ginger stopped holding her breath – the resulting sigh came out in a long, staggered shudder. Baker looked as surprised as she felt, and she could only imagine the looks on Duke and Ghost’s faces behind her. Major Liu smiled wryly.
“Of course, you did go against orders, put the lives of your fireteam and others in peril and almost knock a multi-billion dollar nuclear-capable gunship out of the sky,” she added, turning to leave. “So let’s skip the commendations and promotions and call it even, shall we? As you were, soldiers.”
As Major Liu strode back to the Command tent, Baker covered his face with his hands and groaned. He looked on the verge of a breakdown.
“Sweet Jesus. When we left Earth, I thought I’d be training kids to guard supply sheds.”
“Chin up,” said Ginger. “You’ve kept all of us alive this far.”
“All of us?” said Baker, half-laughing and half-crying. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s hardly any of my squad left! And I see you managed to lose…”
His words drifted to a stop as the marines on guard duty rushed past them out the gates. Duke stepped forward, his face scrunched into a twisted rictus of c
oncentration.
“Do you guys hear that?” he asked. “It sounds like… music?”
Ginger’s eyed widened.
“It’s the kid,” she gasped, grabbing Ghost by the shoulder. “It’s Bradley!”
They sprinted outside just in time to see a beat-up old medical transport belch to a stop beside the gates. It hardly looked like the same vehicle the skinny private set off in. Every panel was either scorched black and buckled inwards or missing altogether. One of its back doors hung off its hinges and the rear wheels were worn down to their metal barrels. Its PA system persisted in playing the same godawful guitar track on repeat even though the speakers had long since blown, so it sounded like the band was trapped down a very deep well.
The cabin door swung open. Bradley fell out.
“Well that saves me an awkward email to his parents,” Baker sighed, before collapsing onto the nearest supply crate in exhaustion.
“Bradley? Are you okay?” Ginger and the other two members of Fireteam Sigma sprinted over to help Bradley up. “Talk to me, Private.”
Bradley lay inert in the mud. Only his lips moved.
“You thought I was dead, didn’t you?”
“Still kinda do, buddy,” replied Duke, concerned.
“Come on, guys,” said Ghost, grabbing one of his arms. “Help me get the hero on his feet.”
“I didn’t know where I was supposed to go afterwards,” Bradley mumbled as Ghost and Duke hooked his arms around their shoulders, “so I just kept driving. Are we going to get told off now?”
Duke chuckled.
“No, buddy. Turns out—”
One of the guards inspecting the vehicle screamed as a lone roach scuttled across the roof of the med-transport. The tube from an IV fluid bag was wrapped around one of its hind legs. It furiously smacked its mandibles together and turned its attention to the three nearest marines – Bradley, Ghost and Duke.
Ginger’s hand darted to the holster on her hip. She froze as the icy grip of terror closed around her.
Sigma (War for New Terra, Book 1) Page 16