by Travis Hill
“Jesus, Sarge,” I said, unable to keep my mouth closed. “That’s about two hundred kilometers of hard mountain country. No roads, nothing.”
“So?” he asked, whirling on me. “You got a problem with that, Private? Is your suit suddenly no longer waterproof? Environmental software acting up and you can’t take the cold? Or are you saying you have a better plan that doesn’t have us going through a regiment or more of these alien fuckers?”
“No, Sir,” I said. “Not complaining. Just informing.”
I thought he might slug me, which wouldn’t really do much damage, or shoot me, which most certainly would. Lowell looked and sounded stressed beyond his breaking point. His idea was sound in theory, but I don’t think he had ever spent a lot of time in the mountains, especially not these mountains. The Frank Church—River of No Return Wilderness was one of the most pristine, untouched, yet brutal and unforgiving places on Earth for anyone without top survival skills. Or a CR-31 modern fighting suit.
“Don’t inform unless asked for information, Private,” he said and spun on his heel.
Sergeant Lowell began barking out orders to everyone. We were to grab what we could carry, which seemed to be a lot less now that we only had a single 300 left. I wondered if I was cracking up for thinking more about the 300 than about Sergeant Vasquez, Private Grummond, and Private Monohan. I knew I was losing my sanity by being thankful it hadn’t been any of the females who got wasted. I didn’t care.
I’d mourned enough of my fellow Marines that I had nothing left in the tank for Vasquez, Grummond, and Monohan. I genuinely liked all three, especially Vasquez, but I decided that whatever fraction of sanity and emotion I had left was needed to focus on keeping me alive. I’d find a time to mourn the three, but it wouldn’t be anytime soon.
Talamentez joined us at the park and we rolled out. The Kai at the southern end of town still hadn’t moved, but that was their problem. We began our stealthy trek to the west, thankful it was still dark for another hour or two. When we reached the crest of the first set of foothills, we turned around and watched the city turn into a firestorm.
Sergeant Lowell detonated the power packs from the two suits that were still connected to their fuel sources. Two small mushroom clouds climbed into the sky. The wave of heat, then fire, reached the southern end of town seconds later, Kai ashes joining those of our fallen comrades and the city’s civilians. By the time the pressure wave reached us, it was nothing more than a hot breeze. None of us looked back once we started walking again.
NINE
The Kai scoured the area for a week with drones, but we kept our suits in stealth mode during the day, blacking them out at night while we slept. I had fought on six different planets besides Earth, and though three of the six were what I had considered “hell” at the time, none of them compared to the challenging landscape of the steep, mountainous, heavily forested wilderness we were navigating now. Roads were nonexistent, and streams were sometimes the only way to traverse certain difficult areas.
The streams and creeks were dangerously slick, with the waters freezing at night unless the current was too fast, which was another danger all in itself, regardless of the superb balancing and handling of the CR-31. We barely made seventy kilometers in a week. Our food supplies were dwindling, though rationing helped keep our fear at bay for a few more days. Suit operators needed a lot of calories, as it was still a lot of effort to think and act, even if the servos and gears did all of the heavy lifting. Crossing terrain that looked straight out of a frozen, bitter hell burned twice as many calories as normal, while only moving us forward at half the speed.
“We should have tried to grab the parts from one of the suits to fix Kirilenko’s,” McAdams said when we stopped for an afternoon snack.
Mine was a protein bar that supposedly infused my body with fifteen hundred calories. My stomach complained that the thing couldn’t have had more than a hundred.
“Yeah, we should have,” Lowell replied, munching on his protein bar. “It seemed like a get the hell out of Dodge moment at the time, but now…”
“They were just waiting for us,” Talamentez said. She’d watched the Kai come out of the south and form up at the edge of town.
“Well, they’re now waiting at their version of the Pearly Gates,” Jordan said.
“You’re so fuckin’ crass sometimes,” Hollingsworth nearly shouted. “Can’t you be serious and have respect for anyone or anything for ten fucking seconds?”
“Sure I can,” Jordan replied, popping the last of his protein bar into his mouth. “If Sarge ever gives us some downtime, I’ll show you respect.”
“I wouldn’t fuck you with a Kai plasma rifle set to ‘crispy,’” Hollingsworth said in disgust while the rest of us burst out laughing.
“Have it your way, sweets,” Jordan said, blowing her a kiss through his visor.
I thought for a moment Hollingsworth would lose it, just come unglued and start pumping rounds into Corporal Jordan’s chest. She gave him a hateful stare for a few seconds then blacked out her visor.
“Speaking of which, when are we gonna get some downtime, Sarge?” Goldman asked. “I think something died in my suit, and I’m afraid it might be my bowels from being hooked up to this… thing for two straight weeks.”
“I guess we could use some downtime,” Lowell said thoughtfully.
“We haven’t seen a drone for days,” I offered.
“There’s a ton of places on these rivers that have trees and other cover to keep us out of sight,” Bishara added.
“We could go in halves or pairs or something,” Kirilenko said.
“Okay, Jesus. We’ll wait ten more minutes to let the ol’ protein wafers settle, then we’ll look for a good place to settle up. First sign of a drone or anything else suspicious, it’s back in the suits, even if you didn’t get a turn.”
The squad gave a minor, half-hearted cheer. It wasn’t as good as a warm bed, a hot fire, and a sizzling steak, but a plunge in an icy river and a good washing of my suit’s lining would reverse my descent into becoming a wild animal (or at least smelling like one) by a fair amount. I tried to avoid looking at Sergeant McAdams, even though I was hopeful she remembered her offer to partner up during the next downtime. A lot had happened since we’d had that conversation, and nothing had been mentioned since, but what else did I have to hope for? To live for? It sounded shitty to think all I lived for now was to see another day, in the hopes that I’d get to fuck one of my squad mates one last time before taking my final breath. I didn’t care.
We resumed our walk, picking our way down into a deep, narrow canyon. It wasn’t the best place in the world, as the ground was too rocky and too steep for trees to grow in the half-klick long canyon, but it was either risk it or backtrack twenty klicks and take another route that was probably just as risky. We had already backtracked too much, even with our Nav-Comp supplementing our task.
I was in the middle of the pack, Goldman, Kirilenko, Bishara, and Talamentez behind me, when the Kai drones appeared behind us. The two drones dove straight for us, and we instantly froze in place. They roared over our heads, their wingtips barely a meter apart as they shot through the canyon in tandem. No one said a word, no one moved. I unconsciously held my breath as we waited for a second pair, or an entire squadron, to come down the canyon next. Nothing happened for three full minutes.
“Shit,” Lowell finally said. “All right, kids, let’s—”
He was interrupted by the whine of turbine engines as the drones screamed through the canyon in a line toward us, barely twenty meters from the river itself. The wind whipped around us, and I could feel my suit straining to keep both feet on the slippery, rocky riverbed. I heard a splash behind me and knew someone hadn’t been as lucky. I chanced a look back, seeing Talamentez get back on her feet at the same moment the drones appeared again.
This time, instead of cruising through the canyon at high speed, they came in slow, firing their plasma cannons at the ground,
the river, and the rock walls surrounding us. The entire canyon filled with steam, dust, and rock fragments.
“What do we do, Sarge? We can’t just stand here!” Jordan’s voice was angry, but not at our CO. “I’ve still got a G-60. We can take at least one of these bastards down.”
“Negative, Corporal,” Lowell said. “Best thing we can do is wait it out. If we move, we’ll be too obvious.”
“We’ll be too fucking obvious once we’re covered in dust and mud!” Jordan shouted, directing his anger at Sergeant Lowell this time.
“We’re on a slick riverbed and—” McAdams began before the drones reappeared at the head of the canyon.
They made a final pass, blasting everything they could, including Talamentez. A plasma round turned most of her chest and left shoulder to atoms. Bishara ran the ten meters to get to her, even though there was nothing anyone could do to save her. She was already dead, according to her suit. Bishara looked up at the rest of us. We were all rooted in place, staring at Nina’s remains in horror. The ground rumbled under our feet and made us look down. The water began to turn frothy, and I saw rocks and dirt being shaken loose up and down the canyon.
“Leave her,” Lowell commanded. “We have to move. Now!”
We ran as fast as we could, which seemed like slow motion to me. Large rocks began to roll down to the bottom where we were frantically trying to escape. The Kai drones appeared again, but this time, instead of going east-west through the canyon, they made a couple of north-south passes to shoot at the giant boulders and rock outcroppings a thousand meters above us. The bastards were trying to collapse the entire canyon on us.
Kirilenko and Bishara were the last two left in the canyon when a massive boulder bounded down the canyon wall, making an enormous racket as it smashed and banged its way to the bottom.
“Come on,” I said aloud. “Run goddammit!”
The squad joined me, shouting at the two suits as they awkwardly ran toward the gap we stood in. Bishara and Kirilenko must have felt (and heard) the boulder coming toward them, but only Bishara made the mistake of looking up to see it. His foot caught or slipped, I couldn’t tell, but either way, he twisted and fell on his back. We screamed until we were hoarse for him to get up. He made it to his knees when the boulder bounced on him before bounding twenty meters up the opposite side. I couldn’t watch as it came back down to roll over Bishara again before going up, then once more rolling back over the private’s body.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Jordan screamed. “Fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck!”
“Calm down, Corporal,” Lowell said, his voice completely devoid of emotion. “Deal with that shit later. We need to move. Now.”
I thought Jordan would argue. The corporal seemed in the mood for murder, and with all that had happened in the last few minutes, as well as losing Grummond, Vasquez, and Monohan in Salmon, it wouldn’t have surprised me if one or all of us decided to end our lives in an orgy of violence as we tried to take our frustrations out on each other. Instead of raging, possibly inciting us to join him, he grabbed his Harper-640 and took the point. I looked back one last time as I took up the rear. I couldn’t see Private First Class Nina Talamentez, thankfully. I tried to keep from focusing on how the giant boulder and the red remnants of Private Muhammad Bishara blocked the rest of the canyon from my view.
***
We walked, climbed, stumbled, and struggled through a landscape that did everything it could to make us miserable, if not outright kill us. We stayed on the move for three days without more than a couple hours of rest. On the fourth evening, we were forced to stop because of Ensign Kirilenko’s suit. The towering mountains and heavy forests produced long, thick shadows which kept her suit’s auxiliary solar chargers from working efficiently. We really needed a break anyway, as eighty hours of traveling over such rough terrain with barely six hours of sleep was starting to affect us. We needed time to rest, to eat, to relax as much as possible. More than anything, we needed time to mourn.
“Fuck this,” Sergeant Lowell said, as if reading my mind. “Jordan, keep an eye out for a proper spot along the river.”
“Roger that, Sir,” Jordan replied.
The two men sounded as dead as I felt inside. We were down to seven, though in our mental and emotional state we might be lucky to count as three fully combat-ready soldiers—but only if we were somehow mashed together in a machine. Either the Kai didn’t know exactly how many of us there were and assumed they’d killed all of us in the canyon, or they had gone back to taking a break for a while.
I’d never hated our enemy like a good soldier was supposed to, as I understood why they’d gone to war with us. I hated them as an enemy, but not as a people or a civilization, since they were only doing what we claimed to be doing, which was protecting our species from aggressive xenos. The hate for them was rooted only in the fact that I had to kill as many of them as necessary to drive them back and force them to make peace with humanity. At this moment, I absolutely loathed them in ways I had never felt before, simply for the fact that they were aliens, not human in any way, shape, or form, and therefore couldn’t be understood.
There was a burning frustration growing in me that we’d chosen to go to war with an enemy who couldn’t be understood or reasoned with. They might have been reasoned with if we had talked to them before bombing one of their planets back to the Kai version of the Stone Age, but that time had long passed. We would soon be a footnote in some galactic historian’s dusty tome. We were supposed to be the victors, the ones who wrote the history.
I put those thoughts in the back of my mind as we rounded a bend in the river and found a few hundred meters of cover on both banks. The old growth pines had migrated themselves all the way down to the river’s edge, giving us a decent canopy to rest under, as well as a few spots where the branches hung out over the water. Unless the Kai showed up again, we’d finally get to wash some of the stink out of our suits, along with the unpleasant task of doing a complete cleaning of our waste units.
“Listen up,” Lowell said as we gathered around him. “Here’s the deal. Downtime. Right now, for I don’t know how long. Not forever, so don’t get any ideas either about building a cabin, or that I’m giving up. Right now, though, I’m too fucking exhausted to give a shit about anything. I don’t give a fuck if the Kai show up with mechs and tanks and orbital bombardments. I don’t give a shit if you all fuck yourselves into comas. We’re taking a break is all I know. I’m going to clean out my suit, wash the lining and my undies, and then I’m going to build a fire and roast a protein bar until it’s crispy.”
The sergeant turned away and walked to the river’s edge. None of us moved until we heard his suit seals begin to pop. Like a herd of animals finding an oasis in the desert, we moved as a single unit to the water and began to debark from our suits. No one said a word, though McAdams reversed her suit before unhooking herself and went to the 300. Lowell saw her, but remained silent as she carried it to the perimeter of our little campsite. McAdams returned after programming it, popped her suit, and began climbing out.
“Uh, need a hand?” I asked after walking up to her.
“Getting out of my suit?” she asked in return, as if I was the stupidest human left alive. I probably was.
“Sorry. Was just trying to…” I mumbled and began to turn away.
“Stop. I’m sorry, Dana. I still owe you for that ping.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t mean—”
“Just shut the fuck up, Private,” she said, pressing her mouth to mine with one leg still in her suit.
We spent only a few seconds with our faces locked together before realizing the rest of the squad had stopped what they were doing to watch us.
“Fuck off,” McAdams said to them.
“Get a fucking room,” Jordan called out before resuming his scrubbing.
I smiled when I saw Hollingsworth kneel down next to Jordan, and I elbowed McAdams lightly to get her attention when the two exchanged a quick
kiss before the specialist rose and walked away. She saw us watching her, and gave us her middle finger before her bright red face began to study the ground.
“I hope Kirilenko is okay,” I said softly as I helped Krista out of her underclothes.
“She’ll be fine.”
“She’s not a Marine.”
“She’s a human being, just like we are. She’ll be fine. You could invite her for a threesome, but you’d probably end up eating a thousand rounds of plasma for that kind of skulduggery.”
“Did you… did you just use the word ‘skulduggery’?” I asked.
“You were a college boy, weren’t you?”
“A long time ago. A very, very long time ago.” I thought back to when I had received my draft notice four years ago.
“Well, come on, college boy. Let’s see if you remember what’s more important than homework.”
She began stripping my underclothes off. I stood there, letting her do it, feeling the stares of the squad on me once again. Except when I turned around, everyone else was pointedly ignoring us. I decided that I didn’t care anymore, even though I cared enough that I would wait until Krista and I had found our way into a tent before displaying any more affection. I didn’t know what I cared about anymore.
I cared about Bishara and his lyrical, musical Arabic prayers. I cared about Talamentez and her squat, powerful, muscled body that still looked every bit as feminine as Hollingsworth’s and McAdams’. It’s funny how I remembered the two fallen friends differently. Genocide does crazy things to a person’s mind. Or maybe Krista’s gentle touch as she led me to the icy waters made me think only of what was to come later.