End of the Line

by Travis Hill

  McAdams had mentioned an Aztec ceremony. I rolled it around in my head. Of course, all of that anthropomorphizing shit had to be stripped away, which meant whatever the Kai did for the final hurrah was something we probably wouldn’t have been able to understand even if we’d been close friends with them for a century. It made initiating All-Stop a hell of a lot easier to swallow. There wasn’t the chance of ultimate guilt at the end, thanks to an enemy who was too alien, too strange to comprehend other than their ability to make war against us. An enemy who didn’t really look like us.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine the thoughts that would swirl around my head if I was about to end the lives of countless humanoid aliens who shared the ability to communicate and had a similar psychological makeup. They’d have to be as intelligent as humans, if not more so, as they would be travelers among the stars and advanced enough to have ground up our forces with their own military power. It would be harder to make war with a species so similar to ours. With the Kai, we only knew enough about them to kill them efficiently. On the ground at least. The Navy had won very few battles against the Kai.

  “Tell me more about about this All-Stop thing,” McAdams said after a few minutes of silence, other than the racket the Kai continued to make.

  “I’ve already activated it. It’s waiting for me to start the program.”

  “You said that already.”

  “It’s set to initiate if my suit determines I’m no longer alive, so they’d have to either pick me up and jam me in an oven before I could key it, or maybe just shoot me with a tank. Either would be enough to waste the suit before it could react.”

  “Right, right. Stop stalling and tell me the important part.”

  Jordan had moved in closer to hear the conversation. Without a helmet, he was forced to listen to the continuous rattle, which made hearing even our amplified voices dicey unless he was between us.

  “I just want to see what’s waiting at the end. I’m too curious now. Once I see it, I’ll hit the button and we’ll be on our merry way.”

  McAdams laughed. “You make it sound like we’re stopping to see a tourist attraction.”

  “Whatever it is, it will be interesting, no doubt.” I said.

  The three of us reentered our thoughts. I turned down my mics to mute the incessant Kai thunder so I could think properly. Not that I had a lot of pressing paperwork and Coalition issues that needed to be sorted before my permanent vacation. I thought about what I was going to do. One thing I did know was if we weren’t the last humans in the galaxy, the Kai would destroy themselves, if that’s what it took, to root out the last of us after I gave them a going-away gift.

  It was so… human. Fuck you, you can’t have it, but neither can I, so no one can have it. It was classic human assholery. Want to take our town? Sure, have fun with ashes and poisoned wells and suicide corpses to clean up. I shook my head, but not in disgust. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I had access to such an emotion.

  The UCSF wasn’t even all that clever with their plan. The seedship plan, now that was clever. Nothing new and revolutionary, but clever in the sense that there probably was a realistic limit to which the Kai would search us out. Would they travel forty thousand light years just to find a colony of humans?

  I had to chuckle to myself about that question. If the Kai were smart, they’d damn sure hunt us down no matter where we went, even if we figured out how to get to another galaxy. Because if there was one thing humans excelled at as much as they did war, it was planning revenge. I had no doubt that in ten thousand years, a super-human ancestor would return with a fleet and stomp the Kai into oblivion, or maybe just toss them all in the ovens as a lesson in irony. If the Kai even had such a concept.

  All-Stop was a classic case of revenge. When the Wire relayed the commands, the Kai would be riding the elevator to hell right along with us. Not the entire Kai species, of course. If we’d had a “Super All-Stop” type of strategy or weapon, then I’d still be a Private First Class in the Terran Marines, probably kicking the shit out of some dumbass colonial rebels on a backwater planet, or guarding an agricultural farming outpost from the local predators.

  Since the Kai had intercepted every single drone or probe we’d sent into their territory, it was a good bet that none of the All-Stop weapons would have been effective. However, the sneaky, cunning weasels in charge of keeping all of humanity safe and intact had discovered that the Kai were unable to detect the weapons, radiological and otherwise, if the weapons were seeded in a system before the Kai arrived. The Kai had some way of detecting our method of FTL travel, and though they couldn’t pinpoint exactly where a human ship would arrive back in normal space, it took almost no effort to watch a small area of space then send a few missiles in to destroy anything that suddenly appeared.

  The UCSF estimated nearly one hundred million Kai soldiers had taken part in the assault on our home system, with the majority of them on Earth itself. Command estimated another one hundred million were still mopping up or occupying the colony worlds that had gone dark one at a time. No one had been able to guess at the true size of the enemy’s forces. The UCSF information was adamant that the total number of Kai forces affected by All-Stop would be between a quarter-billion and one billion individual lives, and anywhere from twenty-five thousand to half a million starships. We’d even been able to seed a few of the Hanura and The Seven’s systems before they’d fallen, but nowhere near the two hundred or so systems humanity controlled at the time All-Stop had been rolled out.

  The blow was meant to be fatal, though not instantaneous. Classic human revenge plot. None of the other species in the neighborhood had offered to help, nor had they done anything to warn the Coalition away from its course of action against the Kai. The faint hope from All-Stop was that someone else in the region would decide that with up to ninety percent of the Kai’s military destroyed or disabled, it was time to get some payback for the extermination of humanity, The Seven, and such.

  Personally, I thought it was a stupid hope and a stupid plan. Not that I didn’t relish the thought of one giant final FUCK YOU! as we left the building and turned out the lights. But the idea of an alien species doing anything resembling a human action (or reaction) was as ignorant as going to war with an alien species you knew nothing about until it was too late to say “just kidding!”

  I guess that’s why I had never been recommended for officer training. I would have been considered an outcast, someone who didn’t play ball, the guy who always argued the opposite of whatever dumbass ideas the other idiots in my unit came up with. Like hoping we’d start the revolution, even though none of our neighbors seemed particularly saddened by our departure.

  The final turn that led us down into the Treasure Valley interrupted my thoughts. The sun was still high enough in the sky to give us a beautiful view from above. It also allowed us to see that the road was lined with Kai for as far as the eye could see. I doubted all one hundred million troops would be able to fit in the valley, but it seemed as if the Kai had gone all out for whatever these “end of species” shindigs were.

  It was good that they’d have pomp and ceremony and ritual and maybe even cake and ice cream. I pictured some crusty general or self-important scientist at a UCSF bunker imagining this very moment himself. It probably seemed like a wet dream to him at the time, as if life and fate and the universe would ever line up perfectly with a human’s complex plans.

  I could see the old capitol building to my southeast, along with a number of office towers that hadn’t been there during my last visit more than a decade ago. The horizon was too hazy to see much detail, but it looked as if the Kai were going to have their climax at the capitol, one of the sports stadiums, or the spaceport south of the city. It didn’t really matter to me where we had our final moments. One place was as good as another.

  The upbeat feelings within me were frightening. I figured I had less than twenty-four hours to live, and the way it was looking, probably less than eight. I
should have been even more sad and morose than I’d been over the last few weeks. It was easy to blame the knowledge of All-Stop on my sudden mood shift, though I wasn’t entirely sure if that was the whole story. I had felt something break in me after Hollingsworth’s death, so maybe it was my brain winding down, shooting endorphins and dopamine and serotonin and all that happy stuff through my system as a thank you for finally allowing it to stop reliving the worst moments of my life.

  We wound in through Eagle, an upscale suburb that had taken over most of the hillsides in the northern end of the valley, and into downtown Boise. The noise of the Kai pounding their rifle butts into the concrete sidewalks and asphalt lots rebounded from the tall stone towers, creating a bizarre tunnel of noise and shadows. I looked at the soldiers as individuals, attempting to note their minor differences, but I saw none. Each Kai looked like a mirror image of the one next to it.

  Were they a hive species? Mostly insect DNA that came from a single queen? That information had remained top secret to everyone other than the military, whose scientists had been working frantically to find a way to slow the Kai down once humans stood alone against them. They had to be some kind of clones, which was frightening, as it meant our parting gift might only put a small dent in their ability to remain a galactic power. If they were clones, their factories or birthing planets would be well within their territory, probably guarded by a force a hundred times larger than they’d sent to Sol.

  The living channel of conquerors routed us to the south, down a wide boulevard that had been the setting for a number of my memories. Parades, both holiday and sports team championships, festivals, political rallies, and concerts floated through my mind, some even triggering scent memories which made my skin tingle. That made me think about the Kai, and how we had always assumed they would have a rank, alien odor. The only time I had ever smelled them was when their bodies rotted out in the open. They smelled like decomposing humans, which was both fascinating and strangely unnerving.

  The wide boulevard gradually rose until we were on an overpass that looked out over the ground traffic lanes, the light rail tracks, and the Coalition thruway, a corridor reserved solely for Coalition military transports. I noticed the path before us led into the spaceport grounds, but it seemed to stop in the middle of an older runway for atmospheric flight vehicles. I glanced at my friends, but they looked as puzzled as me.

  I toyed with the All-Stop timer, wondering if I should initiate the program. I had no idea what would happen once we came to the end of our march. I decided to wait a little longer. If the event started before we’d finished the Kai ritual or ceremony, it would be no different than if my suit triggered it after no longer detecting a heartbeat. Either way, everyone within human space was going to lose today. It wasn’t necessary for me to have the last word, the last laugh, the hah! moment where I revealed the depths and the cunning of our species’ plans before theatrically pushing an imaginary button and watching the world go boom. I was just curious.

  The pounding of Kai weapons grew so loud that I had to mute all of my external mics. Even then, I could feel the vibrations of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of rifles and feet and who knows what being banged against something solid. I looked down to Jordan. He’d dropped his rifle at some point to put his fingers in his ears. I looked up to see the end of the line. The living riverbank of Kai became a small holding pen, the soldiers fifty deep all around us. I readied my command to initiate All-Stop when our feet came to a halt.

  The vibrations died out, creating a ghostly silence inside my suit. I activated my external mics only to be met with the same haunting silence. The Kai in front of us tapped their weapons against the asphalt three times then stepped back, creating an uninterrupted view of the spaceport complex. I squinted, my eyes noticing that something seemed off. The area was empty in front of us for almost two klicks until the runway ended and the brown, barren desert began, stretching out to the horizon, except for subtle blurs of motion my eyes kept seeing here and there.

  “What now?” Jordan asked, unable to see with the detail McAdams and I could thanks to our suits.

  “I don’t know, but something isn’t right,” I said. “My Tac-Comp is clear other than the trillion reds behind us.”

  “Same,” McAdams confirmed. “Are those heat mirages we’re seeing out there?”

  I had a sudden suspicion, one that made my heart sink into my stomach. I kicked on my active sensors and sent a full suite of pings into the emptiness ahead of us.

  “Oh my god,” McAdams breathed. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “What?” Jordan asked, looking from me to her as if we were in a tennis match. “What the fuck is out there?” His voice was a whisper, full of fear at whatever we’d seen.

  Before I could answer, the entire landscape in front of us shimmered, revealing tens of thousands of Kai soldiers. The path had been left open for us to continue on to the end of the runway, but as far as the eye could see, as far as our suits could ping, stood a living ocean of aliens. My Tac-Comp informed me that it had roughly estimated the number to be between eighty and two hundred thousand enemy units.

  The beating of their weapons began again, but this time, a high-pitched warbling scream emanated from the mass of soldiers in front of us. I looked at the Kai to my left. They pounded their rifle butts into the pavement, but they also seemed to be vibrating, as if they were wind-up toys for cats that had been given a few cranks. Their mouths were closed, as far as I could tell, which meant something on their bodies produced the sounds.

  “Ow! Fucking bugs!” Jordan screamed, covering his ears. “Fucking die, you cunts!”

  McAdams reached out to touch his shoulder, holding him back from doing something stupid, even though doing something stupid would net him the same reward at the end of the day. I was more curious than ever now. The Kai had seemed either too stupid to understand the concept of stealth, or had ignored it with the knowledge that it wouldn’t change the outcome of the war. They’d never shown a single hint of having stealth technology before.

  The Kai had seemed so oblivious to stealth that the only time we ever needed our thermal or IR filters was at night, and mostly to keep from tripping over what was under our feet. Humans had been worried at first that since the enemy resembled a deadly mash-up of Earth’s insects, they would somehow have the same camouflage abilities as a praying mantis. It seemed inconceivable that such an advanced race wouldn’t have tech that far surpassed ours, the kind that would make their ground units just as terrifying and invincible as their naval units.

  In fact, their technology, while mostly superior to humanity’s, especially when it came to starships, wasn’t anything radically different than ours. They could harness plasma, laser, and magnetic energies, even nuclear, though they seemed more susceptible to radiation than human beings. Their FTL drives were different than ours, but worked on the same principles, only a lot better. The Kai knew how to use the Wire, but had only been able to defeat our ability to tap into it within the systems they invaded. Stealth technology, to me anyway, seemed like it might be an extremely important advantage to any soldier, but it went back to the fact that no one understood the Kai beyond how to kill them.

  The soldiers to the sides and behind us began to slowly move forward. I started walking toward the wall of Kai waiting at the end of the runway. Jordan and McAdams followed without a word. I almost started the final timer for All-Stop, and once again decided to wait. I had no idea what one hundred thousand Kai had arrived to see, but it had to be more than us simply walking to the end and being torn limb from limb. Which would have been odd, as the Kai were definitely powerful creatures, but weren’t good at melee combat by any means. Especially against a CR-31 and an angry human operator.

  The weird scream turned into a howling shriek as we neared the end of the runway. The vibrations from tens of thousands of pounding rifles seeped into my suit even after I muted the mics once again. Two Kai soldiers stepped away from their r
anks and into the middle of the path, bringing us to a stop. The Kai remained still for a few seconds, then stepped back into formation. Fifty meters in front of me was the end of the runway, with a sea of Kai soldiers stretching beyond in all directions.

  A red wing blinked in my Tac-Comp overlay. McAdams and I looked into the southeast sky at the same time. A Kai heavy cruiser floated over the spaceport, drifting toward us. It looked too big to be able to fly within a planet’s atmosphere, even as it gently, gracefully hovered above us. Bay doors on the belly of the cruiser split open, and we watched as a large cylinder with a square base was lowered to the runway.

  Jordan pressed his face into my chest and screamed, “Fuck that! I’m not getting into that!” My suit’s comm system helped make sense of his words as it filtered out the two competing Kai noises.

  “What’s the plan, Dana?” Krista asked, her voice crystal clear in my helmet.

  “I’m working it out right now,” I said.

  I had no idea why I’d said it. I didn’t have a plan. I was winging it.

  “Better grab a slide rule and figure it out quick. I don’t think we have much time left.”

  I nodded my head even though she couldn’t see it. I used my HUD to plug in the final authorization codes to initiate All-Stop. By the time the cylinder touched down, the program was ready for its final command. I’d been too busy working the authorizations to notice that a second item had been lowered to the ground next to the portable incinerator.

  I stared at the oven, hoping for some unknown reason that it would be a “special” unit. I wasn’t sure if I expected it to be coated in gold, have intricate patterns etched into its surface, or what. I didn’t expect it to be almost identical to the one left behind in Hamilton. Other than being free of dust and ash, the two could have come off the same factory line.

  I felt my eyes go wide when I looked to the right of the oven. The ship had lowered three Kai, but they were unlike any Kai I had ever seen. I would have bet all life in the galaxy that no one other than the final members of an exterminated species had ever seen what stood before us. Two of the Kai were at least a meter taller than every other member of their species we’d ever come across. Their derma was almost pitch black, a far darker shade than the tens of thousands of brownish-gray soldiers surrounding us. When the two spread large, translucent wings that caught the dying sunlight as if made of fine crystal, I heard myself gasp in stereo with McAdams. Jordan still had his fingers in his ears, but his mouth was as wide as his eyes.