by Travis Hill
“So what you’re saying,” Lowell said, “is that we should do what the dipshits from Command didn’t do, which is to get the fuck out of Dodge and survive as long as we can.”
“That’s a good plan,” Sergeant McAdams said softly.
“I’ll second that,” Private Talamentez said, her voice full of resolve, though she looked as devastated as I felt after hearing that Missoula was just like everywhere else.
“And just let all of our people become firewood?” Specialist Hollingsworth asked in angry disbelief. “How many cities will we pass by and watch it happen from a distance?”
“What the fuck are we going to do?” Private Bishara, the only Muslim among us, probably the only Muslim left alive by now, asked in a heated tone. “Lofgren already said all there is to say. Even if we liberate Missoula, the Kai will hunt us down.”
“We can’t just let them die!” Hollingsworth shouted. “They might be the last ones left besides us!”
“Too fuckin’ bad,” Corporal Jordan said. When Hollingsworth shot him a hateful glare, he gave her his middle finger. “That’s what they get for not getting off their asses and joining the Corps to fight.”
“You’re a real humanitarian,” she said with disgust. The specialist looked around to the rest of us. “So that’s it then? This is it? We just wander around the country, maybe around the world, and take note of how every single city has been emptied out and dumped into the ovens?”
“It’s the end of the line for us,” Sergeant McAdams said, but her eyes were locked on me.
“That it is,” Lowell agreed. “But not today. Maybe not for a while, if we’re lucky and we keep our heads on straight.”
“So,” Monohan said from behind me, “our plan now is to… what? Survive and…? Repopulate the planet after these assholes have wiped everyone out and gone home?”
“They ain’t going anywhere,” Goldman said. Everyone turned to him. “The Kai swallow up their enemies’ systems. There’s a thousand light year wall pinning us in. No one knows what they do once they’ve cleansed a planet, but they damn sure don’t take their toys and go back home when they’re done.”
“Where did you hear this?” Lowell asked.
“I was attached to Command S-7 before Green Fleet was annihilated at Pavonis. The Coalition had sent automated drones deep into Kai space to find remnants of the Varu and others. The Navy sent at least one per day, and they kept that up for thirty years, until someone decided the trillions of dollars spent on the program had been a total waste.”
“None ever returned, eh?” Lowell asked, scratching his cheek as if in deep thought.
“Nope,” Goldman said with a sigh. “The best intel we got was from the Rizor Empire, as they’ve been around as long as the Kai. It should have been a sign when the Empire suddenly cut their Wire with us. Command had always assumed that the Empire and the Kai were evenly matched, but when the price of losing a war is total extermination…”
“They weren’t gamblers, I guess,” McAdams said.
“None of this helps us,” Hollingsworth said.
She’d lost some of the bitterness that had erupted earlier, but I wondered if she wasn’t starting to crack. I hoped I wouldn’t have to shoot her in the back if she got a crazy idea to try and liberate Missoula by herself. I hated the thought of it, but it was either her, or the eleven of us. Missoula, and every other city on the planet, was doomed no matter what we did.
“Before the planetary Wire went dead,” Kirilenko said, standing up, “there was talk of the underground complexes in Moscow, Berlin, and Alaska.” Everyone looked at her as if she’d grown a second head.
“There ain’t no fuckin’ underground utopias, goddammit!” Jordan shouted, making most of us jump from his sudden explosion. “There’s no Captain Johnny Hero coming in from deep space with a ragtag fleet of misfits to save us at the last moment. There ain’t no fuckin’ cigar-chomping hardass colonel assembling a crack team of Special Operations spooks to blow up the Kai main generator, or power source, or whatever the fuck, so we can win the war. The war is fuckin’ over! We lost! We backed the wrong horse, and now we’re fucked! Get used to it!”
The camp was quiet other than the light rustling of the pine trees in the breeze. Corporal Jordan’s face was red, his angry glare directed at Kirilenko for a good fifteen seconds before slowly passing over the rest of us, as if daring any of us to deny the truth of his words.
“I’m sorry,” Helen whispered, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.
I gave her shoulders a squeeze, and she hugged my ribs almost to the breaking point. No one said anything, no one moved, no one wanted to break the silence. Finally, Sergeant Vasquez cleared his throat.
“We need to at least get the fuck out of here. I want to be fifteen klicks away from here by the time night falls.”
He looked at Sergeant Lowell, only a First Sergeant, but it was enough to be the senior officer. Lowell nodded his head.
“Right. Lofgren and Hollingsworth and Goldman, you three are on 300 duty. Pack ‘em up and get ‘em ready to move. Bishara, Monohan, and Grummond, do your best to wipe any trace of our existence from this spot. The rest of you, get suited up. We’re moving out in ten minutes.”
TWO
Packing up the KTL-300 wasn’t nearly the hassle that carrying it was. Not that the thing’s weight was a problem while suited up. Our Combat Spectrum Package R-31, or simply “CR-31,” or even more simply, “suit,” was a composite combat chassis built around a powered exoskeletal frame. Each soldier could lug around a thousand kilos as if it were no more than a sack of grain, though it would deplete the fuel cell much more quickly than if we were carrying our normal operational weight, which was about two hundred kilos of weapons, ammo, and survival gear.
We’d stolen the tech from the Hanura, the composite materials formulas from The Seven, and the power source from the Kai’s automated mech units. It’s probably why humans had outlasted the Hanura and The Seven. Both were much older races, but like the Kai, neither were what anyone would call “cunning” or even “strategic.” None of the races were stupid, but being truly alien meant that they had personalities, cultures, customs, and thought processes that were beyond human understanding. Sergeant Vasquez said something once about humans losing the war because we anthropomorphized our enemies, and even our allies. It was impossible, he said, to form a strategy against an enemy we assumed would do things the human way.
“I’m sorry you had to see it again,” Hollingsworth said over the LoS Wire, our suit-to-suit communications system that couldn’t be detected or hacked—as far as we knew, anyway.
“It’s okay,” I said automatically, folding the upper legs of the 300 into its base.
“It’s not okay,” she said, her voice barely a whisper in my earbud. “It’s not okay at all. We’ve watched millions of our people fed to those ovens. There’s billions more that we’ll never see.”
“Thank God,” I said quietly.
“There is no God.”
I looked up from my task to see where her marker was in my HUD. My tactical computer put her at three hundred meters to my northeast.
“Veronica,” I said, “please tell me you’re not thinking of doing something crazy.”
“That’s Specialist Hollingsworth to you, Private.”
It took me a moment to decide she was just being ornery, but I couldn’t be sure based on her voice. She—like most of us—had a proper sense of humor. We were possibly the most morbid band of humans left in the galaxy, but it was either figure out how to inject some humor into our own personal end-of-days scenario or go insane. Or have a serious emotional breakdown. Or any number of things that would get us killed. I hadn’t dipped into the darkest depths of hopelessness yet, but I was closing in on it quickly. I was afraid one day I’d snap. I didn’t want to be the reason my entire unit got wasted.
“Fine. Specialist Hollingsworth, please tell me you’re not thinking of doing something crazy.”
“Maybe,” she said.
Before I could reply, she sent me a picture across the Wire. When I saw bare calves and knees, I held my breath for a moment, thinking she’d sent me an image of her without clothing. I’d seen her naked hundreds of times. Our whole platoon had, as an integrated military had no room for prudish morals or modesty. The grim prospect of humanity’s end cures one of such outdated modes of thinking rather quickly. But I’d never seen her without her clothes in a setting other than suiting up, showering, or some other function that had one or all of us dressing or undressing.
Intimate encounters between soldiers wasn’t frowned upon unless it was between two different ranks. Legally—and ethically I suppose, if there was still such a concept as ethics left for us—Hollingsworth was my superior, and it was still technically a no-no. However, Sergeant Lowell made it clear after Kansas City that those rules had changed. We were human beings, and we all had a natural urge to copulate, even if it was more for the sensations and pleasurable feelings than it was to reproduce.
Since there were only twenty-nine of us left at the time, it was pointless to follow such protocol anymore. He was quite adamant that while we were suited up, it was all about rules and regulations and chain of command. During the tiny slices of downtime, once the suits were off, we were just Dana, Mike, Krista, and Nina.
Sergeant McAdams spoke up then and added a few rules, Lowell nodding his head in agreement to verify that they were now in play as well. Anyone caught fighting over a partner, or potential partner, would end with both getting a trip out in front of a 300 without an FoF transmitter. We don’t have time for that petty shit, people, she’d said, making sure we all understood. Fuck like rabbits with as many partners as you can if that’s what you want, but no means no, and jealous rage means you’re gonna take a short walk with a rifle in your back while the rest of us try to find another human who will fit in your suit.
I hadn’t slept with any of my squad mates, any living ones, anyway. Theresa Hamedani, Corporal Hamedani while we were suited, had been my last partner. She’d had her chest blown out and her legs ripped off by a Viper as we made our way down the western slopes of the Rockies. Vipers were nasty buggers, about the size of a sheep or a large dog, with six legs, four grappling arms, and a mounted energy weapon on a small turret attached to its tail. The bastards were a nightmare, a horrifying mix of organic and mechanical components, and they were lightning-fast.
Either our perimeter system had malfunctioned, or the Kai knocked it offline somehow. Either way, four Vipers made it into camp before the alarm was raised. Theresa had been sleeping less than a meter from me when one of the monsters pulled her entire tent up, leaving her exposed underneath. It shot her in the chest with a ball of plasma, then tore her in half with its four arms. Bishara and Jordan had to pull me away after I unloaded more than two hundred rounds into it, screaming at it until I couldn’t hear anything but a high-pitched whine.
I finally let out a breath when the image fully loaded in my HUD. It was Hollingsworth, but not the Hollingsworth I’d known for the past two years. The Specialist I knew was a tall, pale, short-haired Amazon who would (and could) kick the shit out of you for looking at her the wrong way. The woman in the picture wore a mid-thigh skirt, a form-fitting top, high heels, white stockings, and had a thick mane of auburn hair that reached the middle of her back. And makeup. And a genuine smile that I hadn’t seen on any of my fellow Marines’ faces for at least six months.
I closed my eyes to focus my mind on my last memory of Hollingsworth, standing between Lowell and Jordan, her face full of fury because we were letting the Kai liquidate the entire city of Missoula. The dark circles under her eyes matching the dirt smeared across her face, all the way down her neck and into her undershirt. She looked like she could be thirty years old, or sixty, but either way, she looked tired, haggard, and used up. Just like the rest of us.
“When was this picture taken?” I asked, opening my eyes to compare the image in my head to the picture on my HUD.
“Six years ago, just before graduation at the Academy.”
I waited for her to say more, but she remained silent, most likely focused on her task. I resumed my own breakdown of the 300, dedicating only a fraction of my mind to it since it was mostly muscle memory. While my hands were busy, my mind continued to compare the picture of Veronica Hollingsworth to the current Specialist Hollingsworth, 307th, B-Company. I felt stirrings in my nether regions as I gawked at the vibrant, beautiful, mostly innocent girl who had morphed into a hardass, dead-eyed killer over the span of eighteen months. I had never seen her wear makeup in the entire time I’d been in the 307th, not even during our formal dress reviews when the bigshots from Command “toured” whatever sector we were getting our asses kicked out of at the time.
I wasn’t sure if she sent me the picture because she wanted to partner up during our next downtime. We were rival-friendly, the same as everyone in a squad full of Marines, but we’d never warmed to each other in that way. She had shared her tent with a few of the guys since we crashed ten klicks west of Fordyce, Arkansas, but I never felt pangs of jealousy like I did whenever Sergeant McAdams partnered up with someone other than me.
Maybe seeing her as a human being, a civilian, instead of a mechanized combat engineer who got to bathe every other week, if that often, altered something in my mind that changed how I felt about her. I wasn’t suddenly in love with her, but I was definitely interested in a way I hadn’t been before. Genocide does crazy things to a person’s mind.
I laughed at the thought that less than an hour ago I’d watched in horror as tens of thousands of my fellow humans were swallowed up by the Kai furnaces, and now I was having trouble remembering to unharness the 300’s ballast anchor from its base because my eyes and mind kept wandering to Hollingsworth’s picture that I’d pinned to the corner of my HUD.
“Dana?” Hollingsworth asked softly.
“Sorry,” I said, popping the pins from the unit’s barrel. “I guess I’m too busy staring at your picture to think of anything to say.” Good one, I thought to myself. When she didn’t say anything, I did. “You’re very beautiful. I know I’m not supposed to say that while we’re suited up, but it’s true.”
“Thank you,” she said. “That girl is beautiful. But she’s a stranger. I don’t know who she is anymore.”
“You’re still you,” I said. “Get yourself a shower and some blush or lipstick and it’d be like looking at a mirror image.”
She laughed. “Thanks, Dana. Are you… all right?”
“It snuffs out a little bit more of the fire within me each time I see it,” I said, thinking she was asking me about Missoula.
“No… I mean… with having company?”
“Oh. Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”
“Theresa,” was all she said.
“Yeah. I’m okay. It hurt when Spacek and Linderman got wasted, but they bought it somewhere else, not a foot in front of me.”
“It’s never easy,” she said.
I heard the clink of the ammunition cannisters being locked into the 300’s carrying case. Hollingsworth had seen her share of loss. We all had. We hadn’t spent our days and nights having orgies all the way from Arkansas to Montana, but we found small moments of downtime along the way. It had been just enough rest to take a short mental vacation from the paralyzing fear that chipped away at our collective sanity during the often brutal battles we’d been through. Most of our journey had been running and hiding. It wasn’t wise to engage the Kai. No matter how lopsided our initial advantage, one call to their HQ or commanders and there would be a hundred thousand alien soldiers scouring the area for us. Not even our suit’s stealth functions could protect us then.
“I hate to say it,” I said, breaking the uncomfortable silence, “but if I hadn’t watched Theresa die right in front of me, it would have been easier to let it go a lot sooner.”
“It’s not terrible. Plus, you’d been with her that night, right?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, not wanting to relive that memory again. I changed the subject. “So… is this picture an invitation to get together during the next downtime?”
“It is, but you don’t have to make it sound so formal, like we’re lawyers negotiating a contract.”
“I’m just following Sarge’s orders. Making sure I’m not misreading the signals.”
“Trust me,” she said with a laugh. “If you misread the signals, you’d be apologizing around the gun jammed in your mouth.”
“Speed it up, lovebirds,” Lowell called out over the Wire. “One minute and we’re ghosts.”
“Roger that, Sir,” Hollingsworth and I said at the same time.
***
The CR-31 heavy fighting suit was a marvel of modern engineering, but it hadn’t been enough to turn the war in our favor. Thanks to the suits, any time a company of Terran Marines was able to successfully land and gain even a small foothold, they’d more often than not overpower, outfight, or simply outsmart the Kai. Stopping a dropship full of Terran Marines from successfully landing (or docking, or getting near enough to launch a squad of Spec Ops spooks like torpedoes) in one piece was where the Kai had the advantage.
Their infantry’s armor and weapons were similar in features to ours, but our fighting suits had a few features that gave our ground units the edge. One of those features was a local energy shield. The shield wasn’t anything like the invincible stuff portrayed in movies and games. The suit’s composite armor had hundreds of thousands of tiny relays that protruded less than a millimeter from the material’s surface. When the shield generator was switched on, a polarized static wave would bind to each relay and link with other relays near it. The suit’s operator could control the shield in a sense, such as strengthening the chest area by leeching the wave from the back and leg areas.