‘I’m used to hearing troopers whining but there is a war on. Could you please get on with it now?’ Rolleston asked, smiling.
‘Fuck you!’ Ash was off the hood of her Land Rover heading towards the Major. I felt rather than saw Bran shift slightly. ‘I ain’t going out there!’ There was murmured assent from Bibs, Sharon and even David Brownsword, our taciturn Scouse medic. Rolleston sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb. He looked at Ash.
‘I’m not giving you a choice. You either take your chances out there as befits a soldier in the SAS or you get shot for mutiny right here and now.’ Ash was incredulous. I didn’t like the way this was going down. I felt the Wild Boys move from where they’d been sitting on the remaining Land Rover.
‘Don’t threaten my people,’ I told Rolleston evenly. He ignored me. Ash took a few more steps forward. ‘Ash,’ I said warningly.
‘Have a look around you, Rupert. I see a lot more of us than there are of you,’ the Brummie said. I closed my eyes momentarily. Rolleston smiled. Bran lazily brought her Bofors laser carbine up to bear on Ash. I heard the rest of the squad bringing weapons to bear on Rolleston and Bran.
‘Now why don ‘tyou just calm down?’ I heard Gregor say from behind me. Rolleston was just smiling. He looked perfectly calm.
‘You can’t win this.’ I told the Major.
‘Yes, Douglas, I can and will,’ Rolleston said. His voice was cold but the smile hadn’t left his face. ‘This will soon become a farce,’ he added.
‘She can’t get all of us,’ I said.
‘She can with my help, though that won’t concern you as I’ll take you out first.’ Again there was no trace of doubt in his voice; he just sounded bored.
‘Why don’t you be reasonable about this?’ I asked him. I wasn’t feeling quite as confident as the Major was.
‘I am. I’m not going to court-martial and shoot Ms Broadin.’
‘Fuck you!’ Ash said unhelpfully. Rolleston was still staring at me, his cold blue eyes looking into my matt-black lenses. He seemed to be telling me that this was a no-win situation. I seemed to believe him. That’s when I sold the squad out.
‘We’re going,’ I said to the sounds of incredulity behind me. ‘Put your weapons up.’
There was something wrong with Buck and Gibby, other than them still being here. Attached to Royal Air and Space Force 7 Squadron, British special forces bus drivers, they were on loan from 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the ‘Night Stalkers’ as they preferred to be called.
The two Americans barely looked like pilots. They were both jacked into the heavily modified, stealth-outfitted Lynx VTOL gunship. Gibby piloted the bus and Buck was co-pilot and gunner. The pair of them were all hair, leather, ratty dreadlocks, cybernetics, tattoos and old-fashioned, wide-brimmed cavalry hats that had no place in the cramped interior of a gunship. They looked more like a pair of cyberbilly degenerates, both their artificial eyes covered with cheap plastic sunglasses. The pair of them were much higher than the nap-of-the-Earth flying their bus was throwing us through.
Gibby had tricked out the cockpit with a keyboard. What plugs of his weren‘t wired into the gunship were wired into the instrument. Buck had slaved the gunship’s weapons into his guitar and the pair of them accompanied our trip with the pounding, rhythmic, harsh strain of ancient country and metal riffs.
Had I not been so tired I would’ve questioned the stealth benefit of playing retro at high volume. On the tail of the irregularly shaped craft one of them had written, ‘Jesus Built My Gunship’. Buck and Gibby were the kind that loved the war. To them it was just one long drug-induced guitar solo of miniguns and chaos surfing.
We’d taken more speed, more Slaughter, more ammunition and then out again. In the gunship nobody said anything, we were all too tired despite the amphetamines and Slaughter. The drugs woke up the body but our consciousness and the meat and metal of our bodies were two very different things. None of this was real. It was just bad news, drugs and dislocation.
Nobody would meet my eyes. I couldn’t blame them. I’d sold them out. We’d talked about it in the past. At what point do we say no? At what point do the orders become so psychotic that we can’t follow them? If ever there’d been a time we, I, should’ve said no that was it. The reason I hadn’t said no was simple: fear. I tried to tell myself it was for the squad, that I really believed that Rolleston and Bran would’ve killed us all and I did believe that.
Rolleston did not strike me as the sort of person who bluffed or took risks beyond what his profession asked of him. He was too controlled for that and Bran may as well have been a force of nature. Besides, even if we had managed to take out Rolleston and Bran, what then? We were still more than eight light years from home on a planet that was about to be overrun, and sadly our only hope of getting off the world was the same military organisation that had put us in harm’s way in the first place. At the back of my mind, however, was the nagging doubt that I’d done it because I didn’t want to die. I’d bottled it.
In the short Sirius night we were aware of rather than saw the huge organic armoured advance on either side of us. None of us really wanted to look too hard.
‘Listen up,’ I said. The six remaining grudging faces of the Wild Boys turned to face me. Grudging except for Gregor; there was no judgement there. He was there for everyone in the squad, even when they fucked up. I looked at them and despite my fatigue I managed to feel something, regret for putting them back on the line and the need to try and make amends.
‘We’re going in hot. We will find the best place we can to hole up. Wait the least amount of time possible to make a bad impression and then call for extraction. We are not fucking around out there and we are certainly not hunting a Ninja. You see, hear, feel anything that strikes you as Ninja-like, or even if you just get a little bit scared, we are out of there, okay?’ There were nods of agreement and even a few muttered affirmatives. Normally we’d hold a Chinese Parliament and refine the plan but nobody cared.
Across my internal comms link Buck sang some garbled slang and American military terminology at me that led me to believe we were approaching the LZ. I felt the four vectored thrust engines power back and saw the miniguns begin to rotate in their ball turrets.
‘Jake?’ I arched an eyelid open and saw Morag looking down at me, concern on her face. I felt somewhat in awe that she could still be bothered to care about anything.
‘Don’t call me that,’ I said. I opened the other eye and searched around for a cigarette. Then I remembered I couldn’t smoke and wondered if the captain would actually throw me out of the sub if I sparked up again.
‘What?’ she asked, sounding slightly confused.
‘Jake, my name’s Jakob.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘One I like, the other I don’t. It makes me sound American.’ She stood up and smiled.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. I’m just not,’ I said. I was never great when I was woken up. Something that even twelve years in the service never quite overcame.
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah? Why?’ I asked, knowing why.
‘You looked like you were having a dream,’ she said.
‘Know any vets who don’t have problems sleeping?’ I asked. Suddenly her eyes looked haunted.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘The bad ones.’ This war just reaches out and touches everyone. She shrugged it off quickly. ‘We’re here.’
9
It was brown, very brown. It took a while to focus and realise that I wasn’t just looking at a plain of mud, though the only difference was the swell, as far as I could see. There wasn’t much in the way of landmarks to help either. Lincolnshire, although one of the least affected eastern counties after the Final Human Conflict, was pretty much a featureless green and grey.