Sigma (War for New Terra, Book 1) Page 4

  She knew all this because he also happened to be her father.

  Ghost had lost her own parents during the second wave of London riots about ten years back. She probably thought Ginger had her own daddy issues to work through. For somebody as tough as old Kevlar, the girl sure believed in the healing power of a good heart-to-heart.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I never knew him before. Don’t see any reason why I need to know him now.”

  “Because he’s your father.”

  “Biologically, sure. But not emotionally. It’s not like I blame him for what happened. I just don’t need to bond with him over it, either.”

  “You don’t think you might regret it?”

  “Hey.” Ginger would have stopped if their troupe wouldn’t have kept on walking through the forest without her. “He’s the one who left the human race behind to go gallivanting around the galaxy, remember? If he’s that desperate to make up for lost time, he knows where to find me. I, on the other hand, have a job to do.”

  “True that.” Ghost smirked. She knew when to drop a subject. “How far do you…”

  Her face fell.

  “Urgh. Hold that thought. You’ve got company.”

  Private Jackson had dropped his pace and was closing in on them, a goofy grin on his face. Ghost fell back in line with Duke before he could reach them.

  “Get back here,” Ginger whispered through gritted teeth. “Don’t leave me with… Oh, you’re such a goddamn bitch.”

  “Hey, Ginger.” Jackson did a little upward nod that made her want to punch him. “So you were almost roach chow, eh? Trust you to find the only bug in the whole forest.”

  God, he was annoying. Ginger resisted the urge to accidentally put a bullet through his boot.

  “I guess it was a straggler,” Jackson continued, scanning the deserted woodland. “Unless it was a scout or something. Good thing you killed it, right?”

  “Considering the alternative, yes.”

  “Man, I hope the guys over in Fireteam Upsilon are okay. Weird that we haven’t run into them yet, but I guess they did jump out first. Maybe they’re already at Bravo.” He elbowed Ginger to get her attention. “What do you think happened up there, anyway?”

  “How the hell should I know?” she snapped, elbowing him back slightly harder than she intended. He almost tripped over a fallen branch and her temper subsided. “Someone messed up, that’s what happened.”

  “Those flares were being shot up from the ground,” said Jessie, walking backwards so she could face them. “I watched a few of them go off while we were parachuting down. They were melting the drop ships like they were made of acid, or something. Could be a sort of naturally-occurring geyser or swamp gas, but… well, they didn’t look all that natural to me.”

  Private Jackson made a sort of harrumph sound.

  “Yeah, well, hopefully Fish has some answers.”

  Ginger scrunched up her face.

  “Fish?”

  “Yeah. Staff Sergeant Baker. A sergeant baker is a type of fish. Or it was, I guess. Don’t know if they managed to save any before we left Earth.” He looked between Ginger and Jessie. “Didn’t either of you take zoology back home?”

  “Did anyone?”

  “Hold up,” said Sergeant Parkins up front. “I see fields ahead.”

  Ginger motioned for her own fireteam to stop as well. Sergeant Parkins was the same rank as her, so technically she could only issue orders to Tau and not Sigma. Technically. Ginger wasn’t too proud to let Parkins take the lead this time.

  Everyone’s guard went back up, as did their rifles. They slowly approached the edge of the tree line, spreading out so as not to make themselves an easy target. Nobody knew what lay waiting for them on the other side.

  Grass, as it turned out.

  Fields of muddy green stretched out towards the orange horizon. A few clumps of old, gnarly trees stood here and there, but nothing as large as the forest through which they just trekked. The soil was slushy and pockmarked with craters in some places, while patches of flowers and weeds sprouted in others. Plumes of smoke rose from the wreckages of crashed drop ships in the distance.

  For what had been the site of a massacre the night before, it all seemed awfully quiet.

  “Looks clear,” said Sergeant Parkins, indicating for everyone to proceed. “Let’s hustle. We’re still a good few hours from the rally point.”

  Ginger bit her lip and shook her head.

  “Stay put,” she instructed her own fireteam. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

  Jessie hoisted the strap of her rifle and pushed past her.

  “Oh, come on, Ginger. Sometimes you just catch a—”

  The ground beneath Jessie’s feet erupted like she’d stepped on a landmine. Chunks of wet dirt burst up in a fountain of green flames. Private Moore rained back down in a fine, red mist.

  The seven remaining marines all took a horrified step backwards.

  “Holy crap.” Private Hitch was on the edge of hysteria, his eyes wide and his face speckled with blood. “What the hell was that? Guys? What the hell was that?”

  While everyone else babbled, Duke edged forwards and peered into the crater Jessie’s misstep had left behind.

  “Bugs laid a trap,” he grunted. “Look.”

  Ginger peered around him. Though a couple of metres in diameter, the crater was only a couple of feet deep. Sticking out from the centre of the blackened soil were the cracked remains of what looked like an egg or a sac of some kind. Tiny pockets of green fire still flickered and danced around the pieces of shell.

  “Bugger. They laid something all right. I’m not sure the roach I killed was smart enough for traps.”

  “You heard Jessie,” said Ghost. “She said those flares were shot up from the ground like… well, like artillery. Maybe the bugs are smarter than we’re giving them credit for.”

  “Christ alive,” Jackson muttered in a state of shock. “We really are gonna die out here.”

  Sergeant Parkins wasn’t faring much better than Jackson. She stared at the smoking hole without so much as a word passing between her lips.

  “So, what now?” Private Bradley had taken as many steps backwards as everyone else in the squad combined and now stood with his spine pressed squarely against one of the trees. “We just stay in the forest forever? Those things could be buried anywhere. How the hell are we supposed to get past?”

  Ginger looked up and down the tree line. The craters formed a ring around the forest, spread out like dunes on a golf course. Beyond that, the rest of the field looked relatively intact.

  Good God. The soil in each pit was churned and charred. How many marines had died trying to escape the forest already?

  “Grenades,” she said, reaching into the pouch on her hip. “Everyone grab one. We’ll clear ourselves a path. Ghost, keep an eye on our rear in case anything hears us and comes running. Bradley, you’d best stick with her.”

  Ghost nodded and grabbed a petrified Bradley by the collar as she marched past him.

  “Parkins?” Ginger looked down the other end of their short line. “Sergeant Parkins? You still with us?”

  Sergeant Parkins blinked and shook her head clear. Everyone else had a grenade in their hand already – even the somewhat shellshocked Private Hitch.

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “Right. Now I reckon the craters are safe to walk on, given they’ve blown up already. A landmine can’t go off twice, right? But you see the grassy patches between them?”

  Narrow paths of turf separated one muddy pit from another. Everyone nodded.

  “It’s those clear spots that might be hiding something underneath. They could be harmless for all we know, but I’m not willing to take that chance. I’d rather we blew up our own path just to be sure, wouldn’t you?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Duke said from his spot beside her. Ginger looked up. Jesus. Even he looked a little nervous.

  She gave each of them a different spot to aim for. It wou
ldn’t do them much good if they ran out of grenades blowing up the same small patch of mud.

  “Ready? Three… two… one…”

  Everyone pulled the pins and lobbed their grenades without issue. Thank God for basic training, thought Ginger. There was an eleven second fuse, so they all had time to crouch down and cover their heads with their hands.

  Their aim wasn’t too bad, either. Only Hitch’s missed its mark, and not by much. Five explosions went off in short succession, blasting a wall of roots and soil into the air. One of them struck something – flashes of green could be seen fighting inside the resulting brown geyser. The last clump of dirt hit the ground, the air sizzled, and then all was still.

  “So…” Ginger cleared her throat. “Who wants to go first?”

  Duke hitched up his rifle, his hand cradling its shotgun undercarriage, and approached the nearest crater – the one which up until recently had been their comrade, Jessie.

  He tentatively patted the soil around the cracked shell pieces with his boot and then, grimacing, put his weight on it. No explosion. Everyone relaxed a little. If Duke’s weight wasn’t enough to trigger something, nothing would. He turned to face the rest of them and exhaled.

  “Lets get going, then.”

  Ginger whistled for Ghost and Bradley to come back. Their experiment with the grenades hadn’t attracted any attention, thank goodness. At least they wouldn’t be trying to navigate a minefield with a horde of bloodthirsty bugs on their arses.

  Slowly, in single-file and precisely matching the footsteps of the marine ahead, they started to cross the field.

  Ginger wanted to scream every time she stepped forward. Her whole body was as tense as a bridge support cable on the verge of snapping. Though it wasn’t as if she even had anything to worry about. It was Duke who risked losing his legs if he put a foot wrong. The worst she’d get would be a Duke-coloured spray-tan.

  “Sodding bugs,” came the strained voice of Jackson behind her. “Stupid, sodding bugs…”

  Yeah. Too right.

  They went from crater to crater, only ever stepping where an explosion had already gone off. It took them almost three minutes to cover thirty metres, if that. Not that any of them were in a rush, of course.

  “Stop,” said Duke.

  Everybody froze where they stood. Not one of them dared so much as step to the side to see what blocked Duke’s way. Forget the cat – curiosity would get the whole damn squad killed.

  “What is it?” asked Ginger.

  “The last crater’s just over there,” said Duke. He pointed to a hole in the earth three or four metres away. “But all this green in between? Unmarked. Not so much as a footprint.”

  Ginger felt the bottom fall out of her stomach.

  “Can’t we just chuck another grenade?” Jackson asked.

  “This close?” Ginger snorted. “We may as well try our luck running across.”

  “Not from here, obviously,” Jackson replied sarcastically.

  “And you’re confident you can retrace your exact steps backwards, are you?”

  Jackson’s voice made its absence felt.

  “Didn’t think so.”

  “Have to blast it,” said Duke, brandishing his under-barrel shotgun. “Shield your eyes.”

  “Duke, no!” Ginger went to grab his shoulder. “You’re too—”

  Duke fired off three rounds. Each boomed like a cannon and punched a tight spread of shot into the earth. Thud. Thud. Thud. Ginger winced and ducked behind Duke’s back.

  He admired the makeshift path of ruptured dirt, then nodded.

  “Secure.”

  Not so secure that he didn’t let out a nervous groan when he stepped foot onto the first upturned clump, though. Ginger and the other five marines followed Duke with even more trepidation than before. She chanced a look over her shoulder and was relieved to see that Private Bradley was keeping up. Admittedly, he did have Ghost “encouraging” him from behind.

  Crack.

  “Nobody move!” Ginger screamed before anyone had the chance to run off in a panic. “Who was that?”

  Private Jackson raised a shaking hand. His lip twitched.

  “I think it came from under my foot,” he whispered.

  Sergeant Parkins went to step away from him, then appeared to remember where they were. Or maybe she froze from panic – it was tricky to tell.

  “Okay.” Ginger spoke softly, as if talking to someone going through a bad breakup rather than somebody seconds away from exploding. “You’re not dead yet. Maybe it’s a dud or something.”

  “I’m going to lift my foot up,” he whimpered.

  Ginger turned and shielded her face. She wasn’t sure what good it would do her at such close range, but she might escape with her eyesight if nothing else.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” she heard Jackson say.

  She pulled her hands from her eyes. A milky, yellowy yolk leaked out from the broken pieces of tortilla-coloured shell beneath Jackson’s boot.

  “I stepped on an actual egg,” he chuckled nervously, wiping a tear from his cheek with the back of his hand. “It’s all right, guys. False alarm.”

  Ginger groaned.

  “Humanity’s first chance to interact with New Terra’s animal kingdom, and you stepped on it. Good job, Jackson. You’ve done our species proud.”

  She patted Duke on the back.

  “Keep going, Duke. And I can’t believe I have to remind people of this, but whatever: watch where you’re putting your goddamn feet, all right?”

  They crossed without further incident and rubbed shoulders down in the muddy crater beyond. It was a tight fit, but nobody wanted to be left standing on the “shotgun” patch after Jackson’s close call.

  “Thank God for that,” said Hitch, pointing at the empty fields ahead. “We made it.”

  “Hold up.” Duke stuck an arm like a tree trunk out in front of Hitch, preventing him from climbing over. “Could just be nobody else got this far.”

  He fished out a couple more grenades and lobbed them into the long and otherwise untouched grass. Each went off in the regular fashion – no green inferno in sight.

  “Clear as it’ll ever be,” Duke said with a shrug.

  “So, what’s the plan?” Ghost anxiously peered up from the back. “Keep walking in a line? Send up flares and wait for rescue? What?”

  Duke chewed his lip.

  “Spread out and move slowly. Who knows what else this planet’s gonna throw at us.”

  Ginger sighed. This was going to be one hell of a long walk.

  Chapter Five

  Ghost looked up from her rifle’s scope and grinned.

  “They’re human, all right. Lots of them, too.”

  The seven surviving marines relaxed. Duke smiled. Sergeant Parkins bent over with her hands on her knees. After nearly four hours of tense walking, this was the win they needed.

  There hadn’t been any more incidents involving explosive bug sacs buried in the earth. In fact, as cross-country treks went, it had been wholly unremarkable. They hadn’t seen much of anyone or anything, but the harrowing threat of instant and unforeseeable death continued to hang over them all the same. Only a crumbling stone wall partitioning one field from another and the burned husk of a lone farmhouse – long deserted, of course – reminded them that another species had ever lived on the planet before them.

  They stopped only once to eat their tasteless ration bars under the shade of a plump, towering tree. The morning wasn’t warm, and the sunlight wasn’t strong. But no matter how safe Command said New Terra’s atmosphere was, a lifetime of going outside only at night back on Earth had conditioned them all to associate daytime with danger. Radiation sickness, cancer, death. It was a hard habit to shake.

  Five minutes later they were on the move again… until they spotted a mass of silhouettes gathered on the horizon. They’d all hunkered down in the grass while Ghost took a better look.

  “Do you think they’re our company?” asked
Hitch. There were flecks of Jessie’s blood still caked onto his cheek.

  “Who cares,” said Ghost, slinging her rifle onto her back again. “They’re on our side. That’s all that counts.”

  “We’re still miles from Rally Point Bravo,” said Ginger, frowning. “I wonder why they stopped here.”

  “Maybe they came across more landmines,” said Sergeant Parkins, distantly. Her focus hadn’t been altogether there since the bug sac incident. But now Parkins mentioned it, Ginger could hear a booming sound in the distance.

  “Well, let’s go ask them. It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do. That good with you, Parkins?”

  The question was a courtesy, given their ranks. Sergeant Parkins snapped out of her daydream and nodded curtly.

  “Yeah. Fireteam Tau, move out.”

  Duke and Ghost followed without instruction. Ginger turned to the only one of Fireteam Sigma lagging behind and wheezing.

  “Private Bradley. If a brisk walk knocks the wind out of you, how do you expect to survive against the bugs? Pick up the pace or I’ll leave you behind. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” he gasped. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She shook her head. To think that Jessie was gone while this cretin still walked around breathing. Why the hell had Sigma been saddled with him, of all fireteams? They couldn’t afford a weak link, not now. The first thing she’d do when they got to the rally point was request a transfer – either for Bradley, or for everyone else on her team.

  Because if the bugs weren’t the death of them, he would be.

  They had lookouts, obviously. If you count men crouched behind stacks of supply crates holding pairs of binoculars as lookouts, that is. Their approach was spotted from a mile off.

  “Fireteams Sigma and Tau,” Ginger said to the marine who walked out to meet them at the edge of the makeshift camp. “November Company.”

  The marine checked his data pad. His eyebrows shot up.

  “Staff Sergeant Baker’s girls and boys. He will be pleased. Follow me, please.”

  “Fish?” Private Jackson excitedly jogged to the front of their little group. “Fish is here?”