End of the Line Read online

  TEN

  I’m not exactly sure what I expected when it finally came down to having my moment with Sergeant McAdams. I’d been hopeful for months that she’d eventually find me interesting enough, or at least be bored enough with the rest of the squad, to spend some downtime with me. Now that we had finally partnered up, that near-obsessive passion I’d always felt for her was gone. Not gone enough to not perform, and not even to the point it felt like I was hooking up with my first cousin, but whatever it was… it was missing. I went through a selfish moment when I raged at Vasquez, Talamentez, Grummond, Monohan, and Bishara in my head for ruining what was supposed to be my special moment.

  Krista and I spent the night taking care of each other physically, but most of it, for me anyway, was emotional comfort. Neither of us said a lot, but as the old story goes, there wasn’t much to say. We relayed a few tales of our fondest memories with our fallen comrades, then became silent until our hands could no longer stand the sad tension that began to suffocate us. When we weren’t searching for that explosive release, allowing us to leave this world and enter a pristine, untouched, beautiful one for a few seconds, we held each other and spent the time within our own heads, seeking answers to questions that shouldn’t have needed asking in the first place.

  I woke to a pale gray light outside of my tent. I felt unsatisfied, as if I’d downed twenty pints of beer and hadn’t caught even a hint of a buzz. McAdams was nowhere to be found without my HUD, and there was no way I wanted to be anywhere near my suit until Lowell ordered me back in. I hoped everyone else would mount up when that time came. None of us had any idea what we were living for anymore other than because living was likely our most basic drive, our core need.

  To live. To keep going. To not be the last one to fall, but to be the last one standing. Going on with our suits and the (probably false) security of a squad, instead of solo or a duo trying to settle down in the middle of nowhere, was the smarter thing to do. I spent three years of active combat willing to give up almost anything if it meant never having to step inside a suit again. These days, I felt cold tendrils of fear about being exposed without my suit to protect me, whether from the environment, from nature, or from our alien hunters. There were no more dreams of finding a hidden valley where we could store our suits in the barn and raise a few pigs and chickens while tending the wheat and potatoes until old age or accidents took us down one by one. I was going to die in my suit, and it wasn’t going to be from old age.

  I saw Kirilenko walking toward me. Somehow I knew what she was going to ask. It should have made me feel better, should have boosted my ego, but all I felt inside was the desire to say no. I didn’t want to be intimate with one more living corpse. It was easier to cope with when the men died, as sexist as that sounds. I hadn’t been intimate with any of the men, and even though some of them had been true friends, guys I would have spent summers roaming around the country or the colonies with, it wasn’t the same. I had partnered with a dozen of my fellow female Marines since we’d crashed down, and all of them except McAdams and Hollingsworth were dead.

  “Hi,” Kirilenko said shyly.

  She’d never fully fit in with our band of troublemakers, but none of us had ever treated her as anything but one of the squad. I had comforted her plenty of times, but never as a downtime partner.

  “Hey,” I said, beginning to scrub at my legs to both wash them and keep the blood flowing.

  “Are you up for tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I’ll have to ask McAdams.”

  “I already asked her. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  “Then I guess I’m free,” I said, my words short and my tone full of irritation.

  “Never mind,” she said, her face clouding with anger. “Sorry I bothered you.”

  “Wait,” I said, grabbing her hand. “I’m free. I’m sorry. I’m just really fucked up inside right now, you know?”

  “I know,” she said softly. “You’re freezing.”

  Kirilenko let go of my hand and began rubbing hers together. I smiled and splashed some more of the cold water all over my legs and lower half.

  “Don’t look down,” I said, giving her a smile as I turned my body away. “This shit is freezing. I don’t want you to think the other girls have bad eyesight.”

  “If anything,” she laughed, “I’ll be pleasantly surprised once it warms up.”

  I splashed some of the freezing water her way then tried to finish bathing without experiencing heart failure. I laughed to myself about Kirilenko, and even about McAdams. I imagined the sergeant giving Kirilenko a sly grin as she told the ensign I was without a partner for the night. I finished and jogged back to my tent to grab a towel, then made my way to the small fire that we’d restarted. McAdams and Sergeant Lowell sat on a rock next to the small fire pit, arms around each other, talking in low voices. They became quiet at my approach.

  “Don’t mind me,” I said through chattering teeth. “Just freezing my balls off. Be out of your hair in a couple of minutes.”

  “An appointment with the nurse?” Lowell asked.

  I glared at Sergeant McAdams. “Is nothing sacred?”

  “You’re welcome, Private,” McAdams said. “I told the poor girl she better hurry up and take a turn with you and Goldman before it’s too late.”

  “I’m pretty sure I could have negotiated it on my own,” I said, doing mini-squats to help the fire warm up my lower extremities.

  “You haven’t done a very good job of it over the last six months,” Lowell chided.

  “Can we not talk about how you pimped me out to Ensign Kirilenko?” I asked.

  “What should we talk about then, Private?” Lowell asked.

  “Where are we going? When are we going? What’s the plan? Should we just eat a round from our Harpers and get it over with now?”

  “Intriguing questions, indeed,” he said, rubbing his chin as if in deep thought.

  “That’s not really an answer,” I prodded after a few moments of silence.

  “I don’t know, to be honest. I’ve been checking the Nav-Comp. We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere, and we need to be somewhere.”

  “Real helpful, Sarge,” I said, growing frustrated.

  “Why is it important, Dana?” McAdams asked.

  “It just is. We can’t stay here. We can’t go to any of the metros. The Kai will hunt us to the end. I just need some kind of direction so I can tell my brain to shut the fuck up, Sergeant Lowell has a plan. You do have a plan, right? Sir?”

  “We’ll continue west,” Lowell said. “In a week or less, we’ll come out into a valley. There’s a couple of cities, nothing major, and a couple of big lakes. We’ll take a look around, see what the area is about, and make a decision then. Is that good enough for you, Private Lofgren?”

  “Yes, Sir,” I said, giving him a salute. “Thank you, Sir.”

  “Don’t be insubordinate, Private,” McAdams warned.

  “Actually, Sergeant, I’m not. I’m happy to hear we have a plan. We need a plan, to keep going. As long as we have a plan, we have purpose, which means we have a reason to go on, as stupid as that reason probably is by this point.”

  I saluted both of them again before turning on my heel and walking back to my tent. Lowell’s plan sounded like he’d made it up on the spot, which meant he hadn’t even been thinking of a plan. Or maybe he had. I couldn’t read his mind, and he was nearly impossible to read when it came to actions and body language. My frustration and annoyance dissipated once I entered my tent and found a paper note from Kirilenko. I grinned after turning it over, appreciating the treasure map she’d drawn on it for me to follow.

  ***

  “Are we still inside the perimeter?” I asked after ducking inside her tent.

  “Yeah, I checked with Jordan to make sure.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a bit nervous that we were a klick from everyone else. “I hope our pals don’t show up, or at least don’t show up
on this side first.”

  “How chivalrous of you,” she said, her light accent almost as musical to my ears as Bishara’s prayers had been.

  “No offense, but better them than me while I’m, uh, you know.”

  “Shut up and get those clothes off,” she demanded, her demeanor becoming that of an an icy Russian princess.

  I laughed and began to strip, pausing for a moment when she dropped the thermal blanket from her chest. I let my eyes wander while removing my shirt and the boxers I’d snagged from the store in Hamilton. It was an unbelievable relief to be free for a day or two from the tight microweave of our normal underclothes. She pulled the blanket all the way to the side, inviting me in, giving me a light punch in the chest when I spent too much time staring at her body.

  Unlike with McAdams, my mind was free to immerse itself in the pleasurable activities Helen and I engaged in. It annoyed me that the one woman I truly wanted to be with had offered, and while she was everything I had dreamed of, it had left me unfulfilled. My mind had been unable to focus on anything other than staying hard and paying attention to cues from her that I was doing things correctly or needed to adjust my technique. With Helen, all I could see was her bright blue eyes. I stared into them while our hips synced up in a rhythm that soon caused my world to lurch and my eyes begin to blink uncontrollably as exploding suns formed then popped in my vision.

  “I miss Nina,” Helen said after we laid in silence for a while.

  “But not Bishara or the others?” I asked, staring at the fabric ceiling above us.

  “I miss them too, but not like I miss her.”

  “Oh,” I said, my dense brain putting two and two together. “You guys were…?”

  “Here and there,” Helen said, turning her face toward me. “Does that bother you?”

  “No, why should it? I don’t care what people do, or who they are.”

  “It still bothers some people.”

  I laughed. “I think those people have literally gone to Hell.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It is, kinda,” I said, turning on my side to face her. “But seriously. I’m sorry that she’s gone. For me, for the squad, and because you two were more than friends. It sucks.”

  “We’ve lost so many…” Her hands found my neck and pulled me in.

  I no longer felt weird, guilty, or ashamed for having sex in the wake of others dying. Some part of me still did, I’m sure. Fortunately (or maybe not), the growing despair, the overwhelming desperation of being trapped in a slowly shrinking box, the knowledge that I could join the rest of my species any moment, and the deep, bitter sadness that we were near the end of the line buried those feelings under the collapsed remains of hope.

  ***

  Two days later, as we were discussing plans to suit up and continue on, Lowell’s suit shut down in the middle of a maintenance check.

  “Shit fuck goddamn motherfucker bitch cocksucker!” he screamed, losing his cool in front of us.

  He stepped back from his suit, then charged it with a flying kick, knocking the CR-31 over into the dirt. When he turned toward us, I sensed that he’d lost it for good. If not at this very moment, it was coming soon.

  “Come on,” I said, tugging at Goldman’s sleeve, stepping between Sergeant Lowell and his suit before he flipped completely out and decided to pump it full of plasma from his rifle.

  The specialist and I righted Lowell’s suit and spent a few seconds checking it to see if it would reactivate. I wasn’t an expert mechanic or diagnostic tech when it came to a CR-31 combat suit, but I’d been lodged inside one for weeks at a time over the last few years. I felt disoriented trying to work with the HUD controls from outside of the suit. A blue initialization light began to glow, even though I hadn’t actually done anything to the suit other than get a headache from looking at it.

  “Sarge, she’s got some life in her,” Goldman said.

  Lowell walked up to the suit, giving the two of us wary looks as if we’d planned to trick him somehow. He peeked into the helmet, saw the light, now joined by three more, and stepped back.

  “Okay,” he said, his voice calm. “I apologize for that outburst. I’m sorry. It’s bad for morale to see your CO wig out.”

  “No sweat, Sarge,” Jordan said. “I’d have dropped a grenade in the motherfucker if it shut down on me like that.”

  Lowell only nodded, as if Jordan’s reply seemed perfectly reasonable. The sergeant’s face watched the suit go through its startup sequence. When the CR-31’s sensors detected that a human wasn’t present within the suit, it beeped three times and went into standby mode.

  “What the fuck?” Lowell asked. Most of us shrugged when he looked around. “Lofgren, help me get into this bastard bitch son of a whore.”

  I laughed at his sudden grin and stepped forward to keep the suit steady while he secured himself.

  “I’m not stuffing these fucking tubes inside me,” he declared, as if we’d all been giving him accusatory stares that he was forgetting something important. “I don’t care if this fucker never turns back on again. I want at least another day or two of not having to experience that kind of torture.”

  I’m not sure why the six of us stood around watching Sergeant Lowell go through the initial startup sequence in his suit. It felt like we were all waiting for the suit to explode, or maybe just catch fire. Maybe we were scared that the suit would malfunction again, once and for all, and if we stood near it, our collective willpower would somehow keep that from happening. My thoughts centered more on how Sergeant Lowell would be truly screwed if his suit decided to conk out for good. There was no way he’d be able to keep up with the squad, even had we not been in the middle of the harshest terrain I’d ever known. On the plus side, my morbid brain offered, at least we’re on a planet with a breathable atmosphere.

  “What the fuck?” Lowell asked. “What the—”

  “Are you all right?” McAdams asked when Lowell’s words were cut off in mid-sentence.

  She took a step toward him, but he held up a hand. We waited in silence, afraid the sergeant was about to hand us another helping of bad news. Or problems. Or both. Most of us began to fidget after five minutes. After ten, I became worried that maybe the suit’s neural feedback units had warped (or wiped) the sergeant’s brain.

  “Hole. Eee. Shit.” His words came out in a sudden, halting breath. “Holy fucking shit.”

  “What?” McAdams asked, the irritation in her voice bordering on anger. “What the fuck, Mike?”

  “You won’t believe this shit,” Lowell said, turning in his suit to face us. “You simply won’t fucking believe it.”

  “If you don’t tell us, Sarge,” Jordan said, “I think we’re all ready to mutiny and torture your ass until you do.”

  “Corporal Jordan,” Lowell replied, “only a stupid, brick-headed, dumbass, hillbilly Marine would threaten the new Chancellor of the Terran Coalition.”

  “Fuck you,” Jordan said, but the humor in his voice had an edge to it. He looked around at us, then back to Lowell. “Seriously? Don’t be fuckin’ with us, Sarge.”

  “That’s Chancellor Lowell now, you slimy little fuck,” Lowell roared, followed by a fit of laughter so hard he went to one knee.

  “Bullshit,” McAdams whispered. “You’ve lost your fucking mind, Mike.”

  “Listen up,” Lowell said, his command voice reappearing out of nowhere. “Suit up. Now. That’s an order. You don’t need to hook into the waste system, but suit up. Go.” We only stared at him. “I said GO!” he screamed, and we evacuated the area as if we’d seen a ghost.

  ***

  I still couldn’t believe it, even as I watched my suit go through the same reboot cycle. When it powered back on, the comm system icon began to blink red. I looked around at everyone else, but they were busy going through the reboot cycle or watching something on their visors.

  “Listen to the nice man, Private Lofgren,” Lowell’s voice said in my helmet. “Go on, click th
e icon.”

  I activated the flashing icon and heard a man’s voice tell me I was listening to a pre-recorded message, followed by two minutes of protocol explanation about the power structure of the Terran Coalition’s ruling bodies. The voice then rattled off a bunch of code names I didn’t recognize, and ended with a string of verification codes that caused my suit’s comm controller to chime and flash green after each pause.

  “The Terran Coalition, under the executive powers of Colonel Ryan Lyle Jefferson, has authorized the following message.”

  I glanced at Lowell’s suit during the pause while the audio message was queued, but he was facing away from me. Last I’d heard, the Chancellor of the Terran Coalition was a woman named Chantalle Ryley. The mystery of where the hell this message originated from seemed more important than whatever some asshole named Ryan Lyle Jefferson had to say. Assholes like Ryan Lyle Jefferson, Colonel, Terran Coalition Marines, were who got us into this mess. When the same voice began speaking again, I knew I’d have to ponder just how the hell we picked up the message later.

  “I regret to inform you that—” there was a noticeable pause “—Colonel Ryan Lyle Jefferson—” another pause “—has been killed in action. Under the Coalition Charter, Article Sixteen, Amendment Four, Section Three, the position of Chancellor of the Terran Coalition shall fall to the next available ranking member of the Coalition government, including members of the Terran Military Forces, should civilian candidates be exhausted.”

  What the fuck? was my first thought. Lowell wasn’t shitting us, was my second.

  “This automated message carries the necessary authorizations and verification ciphers to declare that—” pause “—First Sergeant Michael Donald Lowell—” pause “—is granted the title of Chancellor of the Terran Coalition, along with the powers and responsibilities of the office. May he serve the Coalition well.” There was a three-second pause before the voice began again. “This message will repeat in ten seconds.”

  I clicked off the comm function and walked to the knot of suits gathered around our new supreme leader.