End of the Line

by Travis Hill

  Better yet, if (and when, always a “when”) a section of the armor was damaged to the point the relays were destroyed or missing, the wave would simply route itself around those areas. I had to walk for almost two hundred kilometers through Oklahoma without any shielding on my left leg until we came across a battlefield—a slaughter, really—and I’d been able to cannibalize enough intact armor plates from dead soldiers’ suits.

  And it wasn’t as if the shielding was something soldiers would bet their lives on. Modern fighting suits are horribly complex, and even with the seven layers of redundancy built into every component and subsystem, they always seemed to fail at the most inopportune moments. Colonel Andersen’s suit decided to reboot its tactical computer in the middle of a vicious fight in Little Rock. His boots were what we buried that night, since that’s all we ever found of him.

  “Whatcha thinkin’ about, sport?” Sergeant Lowell said from my right, startling me.

  I looked over at him to see his familiar goofy grin pointed toward me. I had a strange feeling that if we weren’t suited up, he’d have tried to ruffle my hair as if we were in a feel-good holotainment show.

  “How we buried the Colonel’s boots,” I said.

  “Jesus, what a fuckin’ clusterfuck that was,” Lowell said, shaking his head.

  We ducked under a low hanging branch before continuing along a trail that Monohan had scouted earlier. Little Rock was where we found out that fighting the Kai was a bad idea. The dropships and escape pods were given a tactical update flash right after translating into the system but before the Kai fleet cut us to ribbons. The ships had been ordered to land near Little Rock, at Fort Ibrahim, the largest military base on the planet, in an attempt to consolidate what was left of our forces rather than scattering them all over the world.

  Out of two million Terran Marines, less than two hundred thousand made it to the surface. Within three days, we liberated Little Rock, saving at least two hundred thousand citizens from becoming part of the atmosphere at the cost of only ten thousand soldiers. Two days later, at least half a million Kai troops arrived to finish us off with extreme prejudice.

  Less than a thousand of us made it out. The hardest part was watching the Kai round up everyone we had just liberated and march them into the ovens. We butted heads with smaller Kai forces over the next three weeks, staying mobile enough that they couldn’t predict where we’d pop up next, which kept the huge force that annihilated us at Little Rock from becoming a factor.

  The CR-31’s most treasured feature was its stealth capabilities. Like the relays for the energy shield, the composite armor was also embedded with a layer of photosynthetic pigments which could be manipulated to alter the armor’s surface to blend in with its surroundings. A moving suit in stealth mode would look like a pixelated blur to the unaided eye and most visual sensors, though easily spotted if you looked for the tell-tale signs.

  However, a stationary suit in stealth mode was nearly impossible to detect, especially when three or more were linked and within sight of each other. The CR-31 computers were designed to work together to create a larger picture from which to emulate the environment. It was fine for soldiers, a lifesaver even, but it didn’t help when it came to camouflaging weapons and gear.

  To address that problem, Command tasked R&D to integrate the technology into a “blanket.” The result was a thick, heavy sheet, three meters square and about four centimeters thick, which linked with our suits to match the stealth patterns. Whenever we were faced with a threat, we went to ground and covered everything up with the blankets, then shut our suits down other than the LoS Wire and stealth systems.

  No one was sure if the Kai were unable to detect us because they only used visual sensors. We weren’t even sure if they were familiar with the concept of stealth itself. They had to know what our suits were capable of since they’d killed more than enough of our side while our guys were playing chameleon. I watched a Kai squad gun down a stealthed human fireteam on the move before, which meant the Kai must have seen the oddly out of place digital blurs moving across the landscape. I’d always assumed that once they’d fired on the blur, revealing four dead humans in fighting suits, they would have gone apeshit deploying new sensors to root us all out.

  That hadn’t happened yet, thankfully, as it was the only reason we had been able to cover three thousand klicks successfully. I wasn’t too keen on labeling our journey across America as successful, since we’d lost ninety-nine percent of our forces along the way. Still… I was alive, and so were eleven of my fellow human beings. I felt guilty that I lived while millions—billions by now—of innocent civilians were driven to their deaths by an enemy that was supposed to have folded in defeat decades ago.

  “Good ol’ Colonel Andersen,” Lowell said after we’d both let our minds wander down dark paths. “Can’t even say he died with his boots on.”

  I laughed, a genuine, hearty laugh at the Sergeant’s black humor.

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t do anything for Missoula,” he said after another minute of navigating a winding, rocky path that led into a shallow ravine.

  “Don’t apologize,” I said without looking at him. “There’s nothing we can do for them, same as the others we’ve had to walk away from.”

  “I know, but I don’t want anyone to think it doesn’t eat me up inside.”

  “Shit, Sarge,” I said with a grin, “everyone knows you’re a fuckin’ android that fell off the assembly line before you got your emotion chip.”

  “Goddamn right,” he growled, returning my grin. “Emotions are for civilians.”

  “Sir,” I said, changing the subject to a more official, formal one, “can you tell me where we’re going?”

  “Fuck if I know,” he answered. I glanced over at him to see him wink at me through his open visor. “I figure we’ll head down to Hamilton, then from there, I guess Salmon.”

  “Making it up as you go along, Sir?” I asked.

  “Honestly, Private, I don’t know. We’ve been on the run since the day we translated into the system. Six months of nonstop stress leads to fatigue. Six months of nonstop fighting leads to combat fatigue. The two are different, and yet they complement each other, just not in a way that is healthy for human psyches.”

  I nodded at him. I had been on the way to graduating with a degree in Economic Theory and a minor in Philosophy. I wasn’t a stranger to concepts that were more intellectually challenging than suiting up and shooting at alien soldiers.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I need a break. We need a break. Hollingsworth is about to snap, and Jordan might be close behind. Which reminds me, don’t let your mind wander while on the clock. You can get mushy with the Specialist on your own time, when it isn’t your job to be alert and ready to fight at a moment’s notice.”

  I felt my face turn red, its heat reflecting off my visor. Sergeant Lowell laughed.

  “I didn’t know about the Command Link until we buried Andersen’s boots,” he said. “I’m not a real officer, just a Sergeant, so I wasn’t entrusted with such a thing. Beyond being an essential part of what’s kept us alive through every fight so far, it has some fun little features, like listening in on any and all LoS Wire comms.”

  I cursed him and his stupid Command Link for a few seconds.

  “Don’t sweat it, Lofgren,” he said, bumping his suit into mine just enough to confuse the stealth pattern around our shoulders. I could hear the grin in his voice. “I saw the picture. I never would have guessed…”

  “It’s funny how people change so quickly sometimes,” I said, deciding not to be embarrassed that he had listened in on the somewhat intimate conversation between Hollingsworth and me.

  “It’s sad how that change can turn a beautiful, sweet young cadet into a hardass bitch, but there’s no opposite, no counter to change her back into a beautiful, sweet young cadet again.”

  “True,” I agreed. “I bet you were a hot beach hunk with rippling abs and a gaggle of group
ies before you shipped out, weren’t you?”

  “You wish, you fuckin’ deviant.”

  “I’m just saying. If I was into dudes, then I’d have been into the pre-apocalypse Mike Lowell far more than I’m into the post-apocalypse Sergeant Ballcrusher.”

  Lowell held out a composite hand and made an exaggerated show of crushing a pair of testicles, emphasizing it by making the servos in the suit’s finger joints whine and grind. I laughed and sent him an insulting picture across the LoS Wire. It was one we’d been passing around for more than a year.

  The image had Admiral Polinski’s face captured at the perfect moment, completely enraged, a death threat rolling off the man’s lips while at least a dozen hands held him around the neck and shoulders, as if to keep him from murdering someone out of the frame. The caption read, “I’ll make you eat your own fucking cock and balls!” It was what the infamous admiral had screamed at Senator Davies when the senator attempted to indict him on homicide charges after the disaster known as The Fall of Draconis, where the Kai wiped out the entire Blue and Yellow fleets to the last man.

  “Enjoy your downtime with Veronica,” Sergeant Lowell said, giving me a servo-powered thumbs-up before dropping back to Grummond, ten meters behind me.

  I made a mental note to let Hollingsworth and the others know about the Command Link’s ability to listen in on LoS Wire comms, then decided to keep it to myself. It would be just one more thing to stress everyone out even more. Right now, I was in agreement with the First Sergeant. We needed a break, and we needed it badly.

  THREE

  “Incoming,” Talamentez whispered over the Wire. “Eighteen hundred meters, bearing two-one-four degrees, speed is twenty-three knots.”

  “How many?” McAdams asked.

  “I can’t tell, Sarge,” Talamentez answered. “They’re kicking up a lot of dust. Tac-Com says they’re most likely Vipers. By the size of the dust they’re churning up, I’d guess three or four. Only way to be sure is to ping ‘em.”

  “Negative,” Lowell said automatically. “Shit,” he added, mostly to himself.

  “They must know we’re here,” McAdams said as we all watched whatever it was continue to move in our direction.

  “Not necessarily,” Vasquez said. “We’re still pretty close to Missoula. Could be just a couple of hunters looking for stray humans.”

  “Or it could be scouts for a whole fucking division,” Lowell countered. “Hunker down, everyone. Let’s see if they pass.”

  We quickly, quietly set our gear on the rocky ground, making sure to keep everything completely hidden under the stealth blankets. Once I set my 300 down, I lowered myself to the dirt then shut down all of my suit’s non-essential systems. I didn’t want to find out today was the day the Kai had upgraded all of their units with EM detectors, or infrared sensors, or whatever other tech that could detect us under our digital camouflage. We went to ground, other than Lowell and McAdams, who crept forward until they could get a good look at the approaching enemies.

  Time always seemed to stand still while waiting out a threat. I’d never been in a sensory deprivation tank, but I felt like I understood the concept pretty well after spending a few hours in the darkness of a deactivated fighting suit. I used my chin to activate my visor. The world was tilted at an angle, the green-brown mix of western Montana filling my vision sideways. I caught sight of the dust cloud that Talamentez had mentioned, but it was a hell of a lot closer than eighteen hundred meters. I thought I could see metal legs and the glint of sunlight off of one of the Vipers’ rear-mounted guns, but it was too hard to tell. The only thing I knew for sure was that whatever they were, they were making a beeline toward us.

  “Listen up,” Lowell’s voice said in my ear after a double click. “When I call it, Lofgren, Bishara, and Vasquez bring it, knee-height. Jordan, Hollingsworth, and McAdams, over the top. The rest of us, stay prone. Weapons hot.”

  I kicked my suit into combat mode, immediately seeing the confused red markers appear over the dust cloud in my visor. After checking my HUD to make sure my rifle was fully charged and the safety was off, I closed my eyes and began to count, opening them as I passed five. By the time I hit ten, my breathing was calm, my pulse charged but not poisoned by an overload of adrenaline.

  “Now,” Sergeant Lowell said in a calm voice.

  I raised up to one knee, swung the barrel toward the dust cloud, now less than a hundred meters away, and pulled the trigger the instant my HUD crosshairs centered on it. The chatter of multiple plasma rifles was muted by my helmet’s noise cancellation feature, but I could feel my own weapon’s faint recoil through the suit’s armor and padding. I gritted my teeth as I watched sparks and shards of fragmented metal explode from the dust cloud. Within seconds, all four of the Vipers were down, though one was still alive enough to take a shot at Corporal Jordan with its tail gun. Jordan clubbed it with the butt end of his weapon until the faint green glow faded from the thing’s eye panels. Goldman punctuated the kill with a three-round burst through the Viper’s head.

  “We gotta move, Sarge,” Vasquez said.

  “I know, Pedro. Grab your gear, kids. Keep those blankets tight. We’re gonna be running for a few hours.”

  Half of the squad groaned as if we were in basic training again and had just been told we were being punished. I said nothing, preferring a distance run in an exo-assisted combat suit to a firefight with the Kai or any of their mechs. I picked up my load, secured what I could, adjusted the stealth blanket, and began to jog after the three green markers in my HUD. My tactical computer showed me a representation of the entire squad, with nine more green markers trailing behind mine.

  “Monohan,” Lowell said over the Wire, “keep an eye out for airborne units.”

  “Roger that,” Monohan replied.

  I chanced a glance skyward, hoping my foot didn’t find a hidden but exposed rock while my face was turned to the sky.

  “Lofgren, eyes forward,” Lowell growled.

  “Sorry, Sarge,” I said, wondering how the hell he knew I’d been looking at the sky.

  “I can see what your suit sees, dimwit,” Lowell said, this time with a laugh, as if I were a moron whose mind was so feeble that he could read it from a hundred meters away.

  I almost said something insulting about his Command Link discoveries, but once again decided to keep it to myself. I wasn’t down with Sergeant Lowell being able to spy on me or my conversations, but then again, it was probably a good thing he could. As our commander, we were his responsibility, and if that meant keeping an idiot like me from going face-first into a pile of rocks while carrying a two hundred kilo precision weapon, then I wasn’t going to bitch too much.

  We ran for almost six hours before Kirilenko’s suit began to run out of juice. We hadn’t seen a single sign of pursuit, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a Kai satellite tracking our every move. No one knew if the Vipers had sent some kind of message to the Kai in the area before we wasted them, but with the level of tech the Kai possessed, it was naive to think our presence hadn’t been noticed. It was also stupid to think the Kai wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between civilians banding together with non-military weapons and our squad’s top-end firepower. We just didn’t know what the Kai were capable of in terms of thinking or planning. That had always been the problem.

  ***

  I was disappointed we wouldn’t get any downtime. The digital image of Hollingsworth pinned to the corner of my HUD kept my mind occupied for hours while we ran. I imagined meeting her at the Academy, when everyone was still excited to be part of the war effort. Even after watching countless holos and 2D vids of what real war with real aliens looked like, cadets always assumed that they’d be light years away from such action. The Marines were great at marketing, making promises to recruits.

  When addressing draftees like me, they promised that if we were skilled enough, we’d never see combat, never be within ten parsecs of an engagement. Of course, by the time basic was ov
er and it was time to stop conditioning and start the real training, we found out that “All positions are currently filled, we put you on the waiting list” was the theme of the day. Which was followed by the lovely “In the meantime, here’s a Harper-640 personal battle rifle, a sidearm, and a few grenades… Happy hunting!”

  Once we set up the perimeter and had the 300’s up and running, I dropped my helmet and looked for Hollingsworth. She saw me approaching and started to say something, but I held up my hand. She gave me a strange look, but closed her mouth. I motioned for her to take off her helmet.

  “What the hell, Dana?” she asked, annoyed.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said, grabbing her by the hand and leading her away from the others, but not far enough to trigger the FoF challenge of the perimeter sensors.

  “Lofgren, we can’t have a quickie right here. Lowell, hell, McAdams will shoot us then drag us out in front of a 300.”

  I smiled, then leaned in close to her ear. “Turn off your suit.”

  She gave me a cold stare. “I said no.”

  I leaned in again, my hands out to let her know I wasn’t going to try anything weird.

  “Turn off your suit, dummy. With you in it.”

  She glared at me for a few seconds before finally shutting her fighting suit down. It was possible to move in a powered down suit, but it felt as if fifty kilo weights were strapped to its arms, legs, and chest. The suits had been designed to allow soldiers to sleep in them, though I can say from experience the only soldier who wouldn’t complain about how uncomfortable it was, was a soldier who had been through nine straight days of constant fighting and no sleep. Even then, he’d probably bitch up a storm.

  Because the CR-31 was designed to be slept in, it could come out of standby mode in less than half a second. Since it took almost ten minutes to suit up properly, it was safer to simply stay suited up. We’d seen too many instances of Marines torn to pieces while frantically trying to get back into their suits. Since we had no downtime to debark from the damn things, the only way to make sure Lowell wasn’t listening in was to shut them down.