Sigma (War for New Terra, Book 1)

by T W M Ashford

  “And if it doesn’t?” asked Private Hitch, ducking as projectiles like tiny porcupine needles sprayed only a few feet above his head. “What if we get lost down there, or we get overrun?”

  Ginger shrugged.

  “Then at least we’ll die trying to survive.”

  Sergeant Parkins let out a resigned and impatient sigh.

  “Well, you’re in charge, Ginger. It’s up to you.”

  “And I’m saying we’re going in. Duke, you take the lead. And make sure Private Bradley sticks close behind you.”

  “You’ve got it,” Duke replied without enthusiasm, dragging the paralysed private in line. “Come on, buddy. You ain’t dead yet.”

  Ginger pulled Parkins to one side.

  “We take it slow,” she whispered. “Keep all gunfire to short, controlled bursts. If we encounter overwhelming resistance, we pull back to the nearest opening. Got it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  One by one, the marines of Fireteams Tau and Sigma filed into the tunnel. Ginger hung back a moment and watched as even more troops charged towards their deaths. Sure, humanity had the numbers… but this was madness.

  Hell, this was suicide.

  She followed them into the darkness.

  Chapter Seven

  The roach tunnel was pitch black. They saw only what the thin, shaking beams of their flashlights swept over – rough, circular walls of dirt that crumbled each time something exploded on the surface. Aside from the muted sounds of battle above their heads and the crunch of earth beneath their boots, everything was eerily quiet.

  The tunnel widened the further they followed it down. Duke still took the lead with a petrified Private Bradley in tow, and Sergeant Parkins had fallen back to guard their rear, but there was now space for two people to walk side by side and protect the group’s left and right flanks as well. Privates Hitch and Jackson formed one pair in the squad’s middle; Ghost and Ginger formed the other.

  “I don’t like this,” said Ghost. She barely needed to whisper, her voice carried so well in the confined space. “We should have come across a bug or two by now.”

  “Flores is right,” said Hitch. “There’s no way the two roaches we killed up top could have dug all of this on their own. There has to be more of them.”

  “Then where are they?” asked Jackson, the beam of his flashlight growing even less steady.

  “Quiet,” Ginger snapped. “I agree, something isn’t right. But giving our position away by nattering about it is hardly going to help our situation, is it?”

  You should count yourselves lucky, she mentally added. If I’d taken us over the top like everyone else, we’d already be dead.

  They walked for another thirty seconds without so much as a cleared throat passed between them. Then Duke stopped and raised a fist for everyone else to do the same. Those at the front dropped to one knee so that those behind had a clear line of sight down the tunnel ahead.

  For the first time since their descent into the tunnel, the path forked. One continued straight, the other curved around towards the left. Regardless of which path headed towards the bug cannon, it was impossible to tell which would actually get them there.

  Duke shone his flashlight onto his compass and waited for the needle to stop spinning while Ginger and the rest of the marines kept their rifles trained on the dark bottleneck ahead.

  After a brief round of mental tug-of-war, he gestured to the path heading straight. Everyone rose shakily to their feet. Out of everyone present, Duke had the best orienteering skills. They’d have to trust him, even if it mostly came down to guesswork.

  They inched forward one step at a time, their fingers trembling. Thank God none of their guns had hairpin triggers. Ginger didn’t know which she hated more – a bug attack, or the anticipation of one. Each breath came out sharp and staggered.

  “What was that?” whimpered Private Bradley, his flashlight whipping across the tunnel walls. “Seriously, guys. You see it?”

  “Shut up!” Ginger gave the back of Bradley’s helmet a hard smack.

  “No, he’s right.” Duke slowly traced the ceiling with his beam. “Something’s moving down there.”

  Ginger anxiously peered through the gloom, but she couldn’t see anything. Then suddenly she realised there were a great many smaller holes in the walls of the tunnel ahead. Dug from the same dark dirt, and with the walls so uneven to begin with, they were almost invisible. And now she’d noticed them, Ginger couldn’t ignore the quietest of scratching sounds – a noise she’d written off as their own shuffled footsteps before.

  A long, spindly leg extended from one of the holes. Torchlight glinted off a pair of big, black eyes poking out from another.

  And another. And another…

  Roaches. The whole damn tunnel was teeming with them.

  “They’re everywhere,” Ginger gasped as even more bugs crawled out of the walls. “Run. Run!”

  Privates Bradley and Hitch turned tail immediately, pushing past Sergeant Parkins in their bid to escape. Ginger, Duke and Ghost opened fire as they ran backwards, lighting the tunnel up with blinding muzzle flares. Hordes of roaches jerked and twitched like zombies under the strobing light as they rushed down the walls towards them.

  At least Parkins and Jackson were a little less cowardly than Bradley and Hitch. Though they retreated faster than Fireteam Sigma, they traced the walls with their flashlights as they went, spraying rounds into anything that so much as crumbled in the group’s direction.

  Back down the tunnel, bug limbs burst off in showers of purple goo. The bodies of roaches built up into a carpet of bullet-pocked shells… and yet there was almost no slowing the horde down. The living simply clambered over the dead.

  “There’s too many of them,” screamed Ghost.

  “Just keeping shooting!”

  “Reloading,” grunted Duke, clumsily switching to a fresh magazine.

  “Goddammit!”

  Hitch had pulled ahead of Bradley who, in his desperation to catch up, tripped over a gnarly root sticking out from the ground. He face-planted the floor and coughed up a mouthful of dirt.

  “Get up, you cretin,” said Private Jackson, grabbing Bradley’s arm and yanking him back onto his feet.

  Hitch reached the fork in the path a couple dozen metres further down the tunnel. He spun on the spot, unable to remember which route led back up to the surface. The more he turned, the less sure he became. Each looked as barren and foreboding as the next.

  “Guys?” he called out as the rest of the retreating marines rounded the corner towards him. “How the—”

  Suddenly, a bright orange jet-flame shot out from down the tunnel to Hitch’s left. It drenched him like a hose. An inferno from head to toe, he staggered towards their group with his hands waving blindly out in front of him. Ginger could hear his agonised screams even over the thunderous clattering of roach claws swelling behind her.

  “Somebody put him out!” cried Sergeant Parkins, rushing towards their flaming squad member.

  “Don’t!” said Ginger, pulling her back just in time. “He’ll only burn you up with him. There’s nothing you can do.”

  Hitch collapsed to his knees and then the floor, his entire body charred to a black crisp. Nothing about him was recognisable. His corpse barely even looked human anymore, so much of his flesh had melted and dripped away. The fire continued to crackle and consume him.

  Ghost and Duke kept spraying rounds into the tunnel behind them, but they could only slow the roaches down, not stop them. And now a new threat came scuttling around the corner ahead.

  It looked similar to the roaches they’d already fought, except this one had a thorax so grotesquely swollen that the creature practically had to drag it along the ground. Its whole rear pulsated a sickly yellow colour like a firefly burning up from the inside. A sticky hot residue dripped out from a tight sphincter at its end.

  It twitched its pincered head towards them, then quickly spun around and raised its backs
ide.

  “Oh no you don’t,” growled Duke, marching towards it. He pumped slug after slug into its bulbous rear. More of its fleshy sac popped with each shot until finally it burst, showering the bug with a chemical that ignited upon contact with air. Apparently its carapace was fireproof, but it ran off with its collapsed thorax flapping behind it like a deflated balloon all the same.

  “This way,” Duke announced, leading them down the tunnel from which the fire-roach came.

  “A little help here,” screamed Ghost. The horde was less than a dozen metres away now. With only Private Flores left to fight them off, the whole tunnel was overflowing with them.

  Ginger, Jackson and Parkins hung back and opened fire while Duke ploughed the group forward, leaving Private Bradley to flounder about in the middle.

  “Er… Duke?” Ginger called out about ten seconds later. “I’m pretty sure this isn’t the way back to the camp.”

  “Nah, it ain’t,” he yelled back. “But you left me to take point, and I’m pointing us someplace better.”

  Ginger glanced over her shoulder at the tunnel ahead. In all the fear of having her body torn apart by a hundred pairs of serrated mandibles, it took her half a second to figure out what seemed so different about it.

  Light. There were slants of light streaking through holes in the dirt ceiling, and a hell of a lot more of the stuff pouring in from a much larger opening further on.

  “The cannon?” Ginger went back to shooting the roaches in disbelief. “You’re still taking us towards the cannon? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “You heard what Baker said.” Duke blasted a bug in the face with his shotgun. “If we don’t take out those cannons, the invasion’s not happening. And if the invasion’s not happening, we’re as good as dead anyway. Don’t worry. I’ve got a plan.”

  “I guess we’re screwed then,” Ghost muttered to herself.

  The roaches kept on coming. Their mouths snapped only metres from their faces with all the ferocity of a tiger trapped in a cage. For every one they killed, two more seemed to slither out from the tunnel walls. Ginger didn’t know how many they cut down in the end – it could have been twenty, it felt like two hundred – but she did know they were running short on rounds. Her own rifle was down to its last magazine.

  “Chuck a grenade back there,” Duke suddenly shouted as they approached the opening. “Trust me!”

  “What?”

  “Just do it!”

  Ghost pulled the pin of a grenade and lobbed it down the tunnel behind them. It was quickly lost amongst the throng of insects. At the same time, Duke rolled a second grenade down the tunnel ahead of them.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” yelled Ginger.

  “Stop asking questions and keep shooting!”

  They stopped beside the opening and unloaded the last of their clips at the bugs closing in on them. Jackson and Bradley climbed up into the bright light. More roaches crawled along the tunnel on the other side.

  With a harrowing click, Ginger’s rifle ran dry.

  “Ah, shi—”

  Both grenades went off within half a second of each other. Ginger winced as a chunk of dirt rocketed past her face. A sharp, high-pitched whine rang through her ears.

  The tunnel behind them collapsed, as did the one heading further into the roaches’ network on the other side. Most of the bugs were either trapped or crushed by the falling rocks and earth. Those that weren’t were quickly dispatched by Ghost and Duke, whose own clips clicked empty soon after Ginger’s. Sergeant Parkins, on the other hand, was halfway through the opening already.

  “Nice job, Duke,” Ginger said between hacking coughs. “Quickly, up through the hole before any of them squeeze through.”

  They pulled themselves up the dirt wall, terrified that one of the roaches would dig through the collapsed tunnel and snap their foot off at the ankle. Ginger rolled onto her side and aimed her sidearm back through the hole. Nothing had followed them through… yet.

  They jumped as a series of staccato gunshots went off outside.

  “Bollocks. Jackson and Bradley. Move!”

  It took a couple of seconds for Ginger’s eyes to adjust to daylight again. She coughed and spluttered up the sloping tunnel towards its source, hoping that nobody else was dead. She couldn’t get the image of Hitch burning out of her head.

  They cleared the mouth of the tunnel and found themselves standing in a wide but shallow pit. The blue sky, blemished by clouds of ash and cannon fire, stretched overhead. Human voices could be heard shouting in the distance. Screaming in the distance.

  Private Jackson and Sergeant Parkins stood beside a pair of dead roaches. Ginger gulped down fresh air in relief. Private Bradley sat slumped against one of the walls of the pit, shaking his head with eyes as big as moons.

  “What the hell is that?” he whimpered.

  Ginger took a step backwards, horrified she hadn’t noticed it until now. An enormous, gelatinous slug was chained to the cannon they’d been sent to destroy, but it was like no cannon she ever wished to imagine. Beneath the grotesque construction’s gnarly, creeping exoskeleton were pockets of raw flesh, ribbons of tendons and valves of chitin shell. The roaches had been using the nightmarish device to launch sacs laid by the poor creature, and turning and aiming it with a pair of bony, claw-shaped cranks. Like the fire-roach, the slug’s rear end pulsated sickeningly, swelling like a python struggling to lay an egg.

  “Bugs enslaving other bugs,” said Private Jackson. “Now this I haven’t seen before. In zoology, I mean. Anyone else getting the feeling these roaches aren’t quite what they seem?”

  “Yeah.” Ghost twirled her finger impatiently. “Guns, complex mechanisms – we get it. They’re smart bugs. Now can we kill this thing and get out of here already?”

  Duke studied the disgusting creature with his hands on his knees, then squatted down and opened one of the larger satchels fastened around his waist. He pulled out a small block of C-4.

  “Jesus, Duke.” Ginger put her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t you think that’s overkill?”

  “Look at the size of that thing,” he replied. “You want to be sure, don’t you?”

  Ginger shrugged and let him get on with it. He was the fireteam’s explosives expert, after all. But between the C-4 and the slug’s explosive egg sacs, they’d better not be anywhere near her when it went off.

  She hoisted herself up the side of the pit for a better look at the battlefield. It was only two metres high, but the dirt was brittle and fell away easily under her fingers. Only her eyes and helmet poked above the edge.

  It seemed as if there was less shooting coming from the bug’s side now, at least. Fewer explosions, too. Of course, that could also mean the human forces were already wiped out… but Ginger reckoned she could make out dark shapes through the smoke and dust. More fireteams pushing across the battlefield, with any luck.

  It even seemed as if some of the nearby bug cannons had been disabled. Plenty more still launched their explosive discharges up at the battlecruisers lurking just inside the atmosphere, however.

  Ginger was about to drop back into the pit when something to the right of the ruined fields caught her eye. More dark shapes, only this time they were coming from the opposite direction. The bug direction. And these ones weren’t running across the ground.

  These were big… and they were flying through the sky.

  A trio of monstrous beasts resembling giant horseflies hovered over the battlefield on translucent wings the width of airplanes. Their backs were shackled with iron chains, and beneath the folds of their furry underbellies hung slings full of the same explosive egg sacs birthed by the slug and buried like mines in the earth.

  One of them dropped their payload. The sling hit the ground and an area the size of a football pitch was engulfed in a mushroom cloud of green fire.

  Ginger tried to swallow and couldn’t. If those things reached the troops… if they reached the camp…

 
; “No, don’t!” Ginger yelled, rushing back to Duke just as he was planting a charge of C-4 on the monstrous slug’s back. “Not yet, I mean.”

  “What?” Sergeant Parkins looked over from her spot guarding the path back into the roach tunnels. “Why the hell not?”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Private Jackson, gawping up at the sky. “Bomber Bugs. I’m not the only one seeing this, am I?”

  “I think they’re headed for the base,” Ginger gasped. “If they blow that up…”

  “Then we’re all done for.” Ghost threw her hands in the air. “Well, what the hell are we supposed to do about it?”

  “We could…” Ginger bit her lip. “We could try and bring them down with this thing.”

  “You want us to use the cannon?”

  “Why not? You’ve seen what they can do to a drop ship. And if those dumb bugs can operate it, surely so can we.”

  “You have got to be kidding,” said Parkins, shaking her head.

  “Anyone got a better idea?” Ginger replied, on the verge of hysterics.

  “Sod it,” grunted Duke, stuffing the C-4 away. “Ghost, you’re the markswoman. Tell us where to point this damn thing.”

  “Oh, yeah. Because a sniper rifle and an alien cannon are exactly the same, right? I don’t even know what the trajectory of this thing is like!”

  “Then let’s try firing it and see.”

  Ginger climbed up onto the cannon. It was far from stable – she could feel it squelch and crunch under her boots – and on closer inspection resembled more of a biomechanical catapult or slingshot. She wondered if the bugs were actually capable of building macabre contraptions like these, or if they’d simply taken something left behind by the planet’s previous occupants and adapted it for use with their own unique form of ammunition. Either way, surely it was nothing a twenty-first century human couldn’t figure out.