by Travis Hill
Contents
End of the Line
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Afterword
The End
Launch Sequence
Chapter 1
Characters
Author's Note - EotL
Thanks To - EotL
Shameless Self-Promotion
END OF THE LINE
By Travis Hill
Copyright 2015
Cover art by: Trevor Smith
http://www.trevorsmithart.com
ONE
I watched from three klicks away as endless lines of humans were herded to their deaths. The combat scope’s digital zoom was top-notch and allowed me to see too much detail. The military-grade optics showed me a woman in a torn red dress, crying with two children clutched to her chest, then a family of at least eight, most of the children still in their preteens. I forced myself to finish my recon after the scope faltered over a group of at least thirty senior citizens, all too dazed to resist as they were led like cattle to the slaughterhouse.
The building that housed the Kai ovens looked like a warped children’s toy invented by a sadistic madman. Instead of malleable clay being fed into one end and spaghetti or pizza coming out the other, this one took in human beings and belched out an oily, blackish-gray smoke that hung in the air like thick smog. I wondered if the Kai had bothered to learn some human history, then decided to pick one of the most terrible events ever recorded as a fitting end for us. We had no idea exactly what the Kai had done to the Hanura. We only knew once their Wire went silent, their amusing voices no longer chattering on the network, it meant they had become part of galactic history. The same with The Seven, our other ally against the Kai. Maybe this was the way the Kai always vanquished their foes.
A commotion to the right caught my attention and I shifted the scope. A Kai soldier had picked up a human in each of its two powerful hands and carried them toward the entrance of the furnace. The two Kai soldiers guarding the doorway stepped forward to block the mass of waiting humans while their comrade dragged the kicking, screaming men inside the building. The soldier reappeared three seconds later and began patrolling the area as if nothing had happened. I thumbed the power button on the scope and turned away when the Kai started shuffling humans into the incinerator again. I couldn’t watch anymore.
“How bad is it?” Sergeant McAdams asked me from a few feet down the hillside.
“The same as Denver, Salt Lake, and Great Falls,” I whispered down to her.
“Come on, let’s go,” she said.
I slid down the hill, grabbing on to the sergeant’s arm to steady myself once I reached her. The hard smile she gave me was her way of apologizing that I’d been the one to scout the scene playing out on the other side of the hill. I thought I was going to be all right until my stomach rippled and my knees buckled. I spewed my MRE lunch all over the soft dirt and pine needles, barely missing her boots.
“Dana—” she started, but I held up my hand to let her know I was okay.
I tried to stand, but my stomach lurched again, and I fell back to my knees. I was supposed to be a man, a Marine, too tough to be affected by anything, but I couldn’t get the images out of my head no matter how many times I gagged, puked, and coughed. The familiar, burning, acidic pit began to form in my stomach. I was sure I had a hole in my guts by now, or at least a bleeding ulcer.
Hearing that the Kai were putting the last of us to the torch was one thing. Seeing it in action in every major city we came across was another, especially when I considered that it was happening all over the world. I felt Sergeant McAdams’ hand on my back. She’d knelt down and tried to comfort me as best she could while I fell apart. We’d all done it, and this wasn’t my first time. I’d been there for Sergeant McAdams—Krista when we weren’t acting in an official military capacity—when she popped after watching the citizens of Salt Lake City being funneled to their deaths.
Her hand moved from the middle of my back to around my shoulders. I dry-heaved one last time then put my arms around her. We held each other for a few minutes, the silence overpowering anything we might have said to each other. There was nothing left to say.
“It’s the end of the line for us,” I whispered.
Krista touched her helmet to my forehead and forced a smile onto her lips. I wanted to break down and cry, but it wouldn’t do any good. I returned her smile and let her help me up.
“Where do you think Sergeant Lowell will want to go next?” I asked as we made our way down the hillside to the tree line.
“Hell if I know,” the sergeant answered. She gestured to my head without looking at me. “Put your helmet on, Private.”
The HUD in my visor powered up once I’d secured my helmet.
“If the bastards are in places like Missoula and Great Falls,” she continued after nodding at me, “then they’ll be pretty much everywhere. If not now, then when the bigger cities are empty.”
We walked for another fifteen minutes until we were deep under the pine forest canopy. Private Monohan challenged us with a “Friend or Foe” ping when we crossed the camp’s perimeter motion sensor ring. Sergeant McAdams touched the comm screen integrated into the left forearm of her fighting suit, letting the three automated turrets know we were friendlies. The KTL-300 automatic plasma repeaters were a bitch to lug around, especially over the three thousand kilometers we’d had to carry them, but when the enemy came calling, a single 300 could target and fire with the efficiency of ten Terran Marines.
We’d lost six of the 300’s since Little Rock, but then again, we were what was left of B-Company. Sergeant Vasquez and Corporal Jordan were the only two left from all of A-Company, which was better than Specialist Goldman, whom we picked up outside of Denver. Goldman was the only surviving member of the 133rd. When we’d found him and heard his story, all I could think of was how weird it must be to be the only person left of an entire division that had once numbered twenty-five thousand.
These days… I had a pretty good idea. Goldman wasn’t alone in sharing such a burden. Ensign Kirilenko, a combat nurse from the 7th Support Wing, Gold Fleet, was, as far as she (or anyone still living) knew, the last surviving member of the entire Terran Navy. I was sure there were still a few human ships out there somewhere, but by the time the call came in alerting us that the Kai had taken our home system, none were broadcasting on the Wire.
***
I spent the walk back to camp brooding with the strange mix of feelings I always felt after witnessing the Kai’s endgame strategy. I’d seen the Kai hundreds of times, both dead and alive, and even though they were ending humanity’s timeline, they were still infinitely fascinating. I couldn’t help my curiosity whenever I saw one. Or hundreds, as was usually the case. Part of me felt guilty, like I might be a traitor for wishing we could have learned more about them instead of frothing at the mouth to kill them without a second thought. Being a student of philosophy must have wired my brain differently than the majority of humanity. Or maybe the majority of humanity would have felt the same as me, but the minority in charge obviously felt we needed to teach the Kai a lesson.
When humanity first encountered the Kai, the consensus had been that the real aliens were hiding inside of a weird suit that looked as if a lizard and a honeybee had birthed a mutant offspring. After we’d killed a few thousand, the scientists at Command began cutti
ng open the bodies we had been able to retrieve, only to find out that the Kai exterior wasn’t a suit. I’d always been fascinated by their alien features from the earliest time I can remember, but it was their huge compound eyes that were almost hypnotizing to look at.
It was hard to sneak up on a Kai soldier, but it wasn’t that hard to understand why our stealth technology fooled them. From what we understood, their eyes saw in a visual spectrum much like ours, albeit with extremely alien stand-ins for rods and cones. The way their eyes looked so out of place on a head that seemed straight out of a horror movie about lizards mutating in a toxic waste dump is what made it easy to label them an enemy. The Kai weren’t like us, nor were they like the Hanura or The Seven.
Humans, as a species, weren’t prepared for the variety of physiological diversity in the galaxy. To say that we were xenophobes was only half-true. If an alien species looked relatively humanoid, and didn’t resemble something out of a childhood nightmare, then our representatives worked overtime to establish positive (or at least neutral) relationships with those civilizations. The Hanura, our main ally, resembled humans in the way that dogs resemble deer. Both of our species were bipeds, had two arms, and vocalized language. Beyond that, the Hanura had skin that looked and felt like soft tree bark, two extra eyes slightly above and to the side of their main pair, and utilized a strange, shape-altering tentacle at the end of their arms to manipulate their environment.
The Seven, our other ally against the Kai, didn’t possess earthly bodies. They were a strange species of sentient energy beings who grew or built (or both, most likely) semi-organic shells to inhabit. The Seven never explained how they were “born” any more than they explained why their tailored bodies resembled human beings. The Seven, according to everything I knew, hadn’t done a lot of explaining about anything. The fact that they looked like weird, hairless, orange-pink humans who had Down syndrome was the number one reason the Terran Coalition agreed to enter the war. That was the consensus of every Terran Marine I had ever talked to, at least.
For most, the endless curiosity about our enemies had evaporated the instant we’d heard about the Kai extermination camps on the Wire. We’d raced home to Sol from TS-137, the last standing outpost of humanity, sixteen light years away. The enemy fleet had slaughtered us when we spun down from Q-space. Task Force Midnight had translated into the system two light minutes above the plane of the ecliptic near the asteroid belt with over sixteen hundred warships and two million marines. It was everything we had left.
There’d been arguments that maybe we should try and use our forces to break through the lesser-defended Kai regions and on to deep space beyond. We had enough genetic diversity to restart our civilization somewhere else, and we had enough tech, fuel, and food for a difficult but not impossible existence until we could get a resource production system going. The argument against it was based partly on the fact that we had assembled the largest fleet ever known (to humans anyway, as we would find out a week later), which gave too many in the command ranks too much confidence.
On the ground, the Kai were average fighters with average personal hardware, but their tanks packed a huge punch, while their mechs were able to easily ventilate our fighting suits. Then there were their automated units such as Vipers. Humans were superior fighters with superior (and mostly stolen, then hybridized) hardware, which gave our generals and admirals the idea that if we overwhelmed the enemy with numbers, our numbers would be the winning factor.
When the orders were handed out, my first thought was that we were making another wrong decision. We’d made a series of wrong decisions, all the way back to when the Terran Coalition decided it was a good idea to join forces with the Hanura and The Seven to take on the Kai. It must have seemed as if we’d easily rout the Kai and send them home to lick their wounds while they sued for peace, lest we impose blockades and sanctions on them. For a while, it seemed as if the strategists and think-tanks had been correct in their predictions and endless simulations. Then, I guess, the Kai finally decided to do more than swat at annoying flies.
Someone higher up than my pay grade apparently forgot to do their history homework. The Kai were already feared in our neck of the galaxy, but for the most part as long as no one intruded upon their domain—an empire that stretched across seven thousand light years—they ignored other races.
The Hanura and the Kai got into a spat about something, then The Seven began fighting with them soon after. I guess humans decided it was time to get some fightin’ in, since apart from minor conflicts or whenever one of our own colonies needed to have an uprising quelled, we’d been at peace with our neighbors for almost a century. At some point, the Hanura and The Seven formed an alliance with the Terran Coalition, and then “it was on,” as the old saying goes.
The fate of the Varu and the Hoerus was the history lesson. We learned about them three months after a Kai light cruiser landed in Gelta-III’s capital city, hacked the airwaves and the local Wire, and broadcast their one and only message to humanity that there would now be no quarter, no mercy given for bringing war to the Kai. The cruiser then belched out a company of infantry and two heavy mechs. The message was repeated until the cruiser was brought down by the local Home Guard units, but not before the Kai incursion eliminated forty thousand humans and flattened a quarter of the city.
Someone finally decided to ask around about our new adversaries, and what we found out was that we were up against an enemy who didn’t believe in winning and losing like most of the galaxy’s denizens did. The Kai, when angered, exterminated their enemies. Down to the very last member of the species.
They had waged war with the Varu more than a millennium earlier and defeated them in less than twenty years. The Kai then spent the next century hunting down every last Varu in the galaxy. In the meantime, the Kai wiped out the Hoerus simply for helping the surviving Varu hide or escape.
The big mystery for humanity had always been exactly how the Kai went about exterminating their enemies. Once the Kai had an opponent surrounded, the Wire went dead and none of the races watching from the sidelines ever heard from that doomed civilization again. At least we knew the answer to the mystery now.
***
“Shit,” First Sergeant Lowell muttered when McAdams told him what I’d seen. “Shit fucking shit.”
“What are we gonna do, Sarge?” Private Grummond asked.
“We’re gonna shut the fuck up and let Sergeant Lowell tell us what we’re gonna do,” Sergeant Vasquez growled.
“That’s right, Pedro,” Lowell said, looking up. Lowell was the only one allowed to use Vasquez’s nickname.
Helen Kirilenko, the Navy ensign, sat down next to me. She looked sad, defeated, but still had a tiny spark left within her that kept her going. How, I don’t know. She’d watched her entire fleet become atomized carbon, and then during the massive escape pod exodus from the doomed ships, she watched again as what seemed like millions of Kai fighters picked off thousands of her comrades before the pods could enter Earth’s atmosphere. Not that hitting the atmosphere was any safer, as the Kai defensive batteries had opened up the second the pods came within five kilometers of the ground.
How the woman wasn’t a puddle of emotional goo, or worse, a catatonic zombie, was beyond me. Especially for the fact that she wasn’t a combat soldier, and the closest she’d been to the fighting before crashing into her home planet outside of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had been measured in terms of light years. I decided it was the Russian genes in her that made her tougher than just about all of us.
I put my arm around her and gave her a soft smile. I hoped the misery of what I’d witnessed from the hilltop didn’t make my smile resemble a mad clown’s grin. She returned the smile and gave my bicep a squeeze. I wondered for the hundredth time how relieved she must be that she wasn’t a Naval Warfare Officer and had three blooded Marine sergeants who outranked her.
“Lofgren,” Sergeant Lowell called out to me.
“Yes, Sir,�
� I said, standing up and saluting the highest ranking soldier left in the Terran Coalition.
“Quit hamming, Lofgren,” he said. “Did you notice anything new or different down there?”
“No, Sir,” I said. “Same basic setup, just a lot fewer of the bastards since Missoula isn’t Houston or Denver.”
“What about defenses? Patrols? Surveillance units?”
“You planning on trying to liberate that camp, Mike?” McAdams asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I don’t know,” Lowell said. He looked over at me again. “What do you think, Private?”
I shrugged. “It’s a terrible idea, but whatever.”
“Why is it a terrible idea?” he asked. The entire squad had stopped whatever they were doing and were listening to our conversation.
“There’s what… twelve of us?” I asked. He nodded. “Okay, so we got twelve meat sacks and three of the 300’s left, but those aren’t so hot for offensive missions. But let’s say we got them set up, without being detected, and somehow, through magic or divine intervention, we defeat or drive the Kai off from the area. What then?
“There’s probably twenty thousand citizens left down there, who knows, but that’s not even as important as what the fuck we’re gonna do when our liberation instantly converts them into twenty thousand refugees. We could probably scrounge up weapons and ammo for maybe three extra soldiers. We don’t have enough food to feed even a hundred of them. Then there’s the bigger question, which is how the Kai will respond to our little liberation.”
“They’ll come at us hard,” Vasquez muttered.
“As hard as they did in our home system,” Private Monohan said in agreement.
Lowell and the others nodded. When our fleet translated out of Q-space, we expected a thousand, maybe as many as three thousand Kai warships waiting for us. In fact, Fleet Command had run the simulations to see what the theoretical limit of enemy strength required to defeat our combined fleet would be. The sim servers at TS-137 predicted that we could still win in a situation where we were outnumbered three to one. When the sensors lit up after translation, no one believed it at first. The Kai had almost twenty thousand heavy warships parked from Mercury to Neptune. The tactical nets nearly melted from having to track such a large number of enemies.