End of the Line Read online

  “Lofgren,” Lowell said from behind me. “What?” he asked when I turned around with an irritated look on my face.

  “I must have a nice ass or something.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” I shot him a quick salute to let him know I was in Marine mode. “What can I help you with, Sarge?”

  “You’re from around here, aren’t you?”

  “Sort of. I grew up in Ontario.”

  “In California?”

  “Not that one. It’s on the old state border between Oregon and Idaho.”

  “Oh. So you don’t know what’s to the south of here?”

  “Sure. There’s a small city called Salmon, same as the river. Probably three, maybe four times the size of Hamilton. Beyond that, nothing but rugged mountains for a while.”

  “What about to our west?”

  I laughed. “A shitload more mountains, even more rugged and evil than the ones to the south.”

  “Hrmmm…” he mumbled, trailing off.

  “Did your suit’s nav comp malfunction?” I asked, wondering why he was asking me questions that could easily be checked from his suit’s computer.

  “No, but maps don’t tell me much beyond elevation. We made it this far because a few of us knew the areas we traveled and kept us out of more shit than if we’d just blindly wandered around.”

  I shrugged. “I went fishing on the Salmon River when I was a kid, before they put the ban in place. Beyond that, I did most of my hiking in the Blue Mountains and the Cascades.” I tilted my head and looked at him. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m tempted to stay here because of whatever killed the Kai, but the strategic part of my brain says that will only last until the Kai come back and slag the entire city to the ground to make sure whatever it was never gets beyond this valley.”

  “Where else would we go?” I asked. “Nowhere seems safe, especially around the metros.”

  “I keep wondering what might happen if we’re able to survive long enough for the Kai to finish their task. Goldman says they’ll never leave the planet, but I keep grasping at the hope the bastards will assume they’ve killed us all and give up the search.”

  “Sounds like a good hope to grab onto,” I said. “Other than constantly looking over our shoulders.”

  “But is it worth going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if we are the last dozen human beings left in the galaxy? We’re stranded on a planet crawling with an enemy who has sworn to hunt us down to the last man. What happens when our birth control shots wear off? What kind of fucked up world would we curse our offspring with by bringing them into this kind of situation?”

  “Who’s going to explain to the girls that they’ve been tasked with shoving out babies to repopulate the planet?” I asked.

  “Right? I don’t think any of them would agree to that, even if I gave them an order.”

  “Mutiny on the high plains,” I agreed. I shifted to face him. “What’s really bothering you, Sergeant Lowell?”

  “Hollingsworth.”

  I prayed he wouldn’t ask me about last night. I also prayed that he hadn’t discovered a sudden obsession with her after seeing her picture.

  “What’d she do?” I asked, my face and voice neutral.

  “She sent you that fucking picture,” he said angrily.

  “Sir, you’re not jealous, are you?”

  He laughed. “No. Don’t take it that way, Private. That’s not what I mean. It’s… ever since I saw that picture, I can’t stop thinking about how she used to be. How we all used to be. Sure, some of us were already out getting slaughtered by the time you two came through the Academy, but when you graduated, there wasn’t this… pallor of death coating everything.”

  I nodded. The Coalition still believed the war was winnable when I was drafted. Our graduation ceremony had been more pep rally than anything. Speaker after speaker, all with so many medals and ribbons pinned to their chests I could barely tell which branch they were from, droned on about how the Coalition was readying a big push into Kai space, how we’d developed new and better weapons and strategies, and so forth. After spending six weeks training in a suit, I began to believe the hype myself. Until my first deployment into a contested system, when I saw what we were up against.

  “I guess I’m getting burned out,” Lowell continued. “I’m not seeing a point to any of this anymore.”

  “You’re not planning on walking out back and putting a bullet in your head, are you?”

  “No. Not yet, anyway. But I can feel it calling to me.” He stared into my eyes. “I’m telling you this because you’ve kept your mouth shut about the Command Link so far, and you haven’t told anyone about Hollingsworth’s picture.”

  “Yeah, I guess I can be trusted. As long as you don’t tell me you’re planning on detonating your suit to end everyone’s suffering, not just your own.”

  “Good one, Lofgren,” he said and slapped me on the back before standing up. “We had a good talk.”

  He walked away, leaving me confused. Was my commander cracking up? Was I any more or less sane, since I’d let all of his concerns roll around in my own brain over the last few months? My eyes followed him until he left the aisle and turned right. I went back to breaking down my Harper-640. It hadn’t given me a single problem in six months, but I attributed that to my constant attention to keeping it in top condition. An unarmed Terran Marine in a CR-31 is deadly enough. A Terran Marine in a CR-31 with a properly calibrated and functioning Harper-640 plasma rifle was death incarnate.

  ***

  Nina slipped into my tent after our watch was up. I had bathed the night before, so it only took a minute to wash up again. She had the first watch last night, and hadn’t had a chance to wash the war off until now. She was a stark, polar opposite to Hollingsworth in terms of physical features. I didn’t know what racial mix Talamentez was, but she was dark, smoky almost, whereas Hollingsworth was Nordic pale. I couldn’t help compare Veronica’s tall, lanky, athletic body with Nina’s shorter, stockier, well-endowed frame. The only thing the two had in common was the short hairstyle most female suit operators preferred.

  Talamentez didn’t want to talk. She immediately removed her clothes, then mine, and we spent the next hour giving our emotions the same kind of cleansing we’d given our bodies. I knew why the military encouraged partnering up during wartime. It was sometimes the only thing that made us feel human. Before we went to war with the Kai, when we were still fighting other humans, it was discovered that sexual intimacy was the biggest counter to the stress, the fear, and the guilt that war inflicted on soldiers.

  It took the psychiatry profession decades to change the minds and moral compasses of humanity to accept sex as a necessary part of mental and emotional health. Humans had known about the power of healthy sexual relations for centuries, but until it was quietly encouraged during the breaks between one battle and the next, we never knew just how powerful it truly was. Centuries of combat fatigue, shell shock, and post-traumatic stress had been walked back significantly with the simple addition of allowing an integrated military to get frisky when they weren’t marching, shooting, or being shot at.

  Of course, there were rules, and it had taken even more time to educate and counsel our upcoming generations that while sex was no longer taboo, it wasn’t a weapon to be used against others. I’m sure the brass panicked in the old days when dozens, sometimes hundreds of soldiers on the battlefield were suddenly assaulting each other over jealous rivalries instead of killing the enemy. Command listened to the researchers, who pleaded for just a little more time to let the old ways of thinking dissipate and morph into the new way. It worked, and the number of re-enlistments skyrocketed, while the number of psychiatric discharges plummeted.

  I matched Nina’s tempo, both of us holding back the pleasurable sensations so they didn’t become vocalized, both of us clutching each other as if a tornado would rip us apart. I almost deflated a
t that moment, seeing in my mind the Viper ripping Theresa’s tent from the ground before atomizing her chest cavity. I thought of Hollingsworth’s picture, then her thin see-through nightie, which brought me back to proper hardness. I shifted Nina so she was on top. I wanted to see all of her. I didn’t want to think of Veronica Hollingsworth, Theresa Hamedani, or anyone else.

  As with Hollingsworth and me the previous night, we spent ourselves multiple times. I had to beg off a fourth roll in the hay, as I was starting to develop a friction burn down below. She smiled at me, then laid her head on my chest. I ran my fingers through her short hair with one hand, my other hand locked with hers. I heard her breathing become deeper, felt her chest rise and fall at a slower pace, and smiled when she began to produce the faintest of snores. I thought about gently extracting myself, but let her sleep undisturbed. I crashed out a few minutes later.

  SEVEN

  “Wake up, kids,” Lowell shouted as he walked the aisles. “We’ve got company.”

  I opened my eyes, expecting Nina to still be attached to my chest, but I was alone in my tent. I scrambled to put on my freshly washed underclothes, wincing at the discomfort of having to piss while dreading the time when I would have to hook up my suit’s waste collectors.

  “No time for lollygagging, people,” Lowell shouted, making his way back up the aisles.

  “What’s up, Sarge?” Grummond called out from whatever aisle he had staked out.

  “Kai surveillance drones coming down the valley. ETA is about six minutes. Just enough time to get suited up if you move your ass.”

  We moved in controlled chaos. I slotted my feet into the boots, leaned back, and let the suit close around me. The instant the front plates sealed, my earbud chimed to let me know the suit was powered up and ready. I slapped the helmet on my head, the HUD activating the instant the connections were made. I called up my Tac-Com, but it was blank. I could see Monohan’s Tac-Com as an encrypted broadcast, and tuned into it.

  Six red triangles hovered over a thin blob of shimmering metal. Monohan’s suit camera was unable to compensate without active sensors because of the distance. I pushed the feed to the side so I could have a wide field of view through my visor, picked up my rifle, waited for it to power up and sync with my suit, then went to front of the store to wait. The adrenaline began to pump into my bloodstream as I half-watched Monohan’s feed. The drones finally came into range to where his helmet could resolve the single blob into six separate entities.

  “Six Kai Hawks, bearing oh-one-seven,” Monohan called out. “Standard formation. Tac-Com doesn’t see anything else, but without pinging, who knows?”

  “Lofgren, Grummond, Jordan, and Vasquez, take up positions at the front. McAdams, Bishara, Kirilenko, and Goldman, watch the rear. Be ready to blow out a wall so we don’t get trapped in here if shit goes south. The rest of you, get ready to move. Everyone stealth up and sit tight. Let’s hope this is just a recon and not them dropping six nukes on the lab.”

  I kicked on my stealth software and watched my suit blend in with the shadows and muted colors of the store. I turned my eyes skyward, sweeping them down in an arc every few seconds to make sure there were no Kai trying to sneak in on the ground.

  “Six thousand meters,” Monohan said. “Five thousand. Four thousand. Three… break break break. Two peeling off to the west, two to the east, two inbound on their original heading.”

  “Shit,” Lowell grunted, his typical response to any bad news.

  “Looks like the wings are continuing on,” Monohan said. “The other two are beginning to circle above us.”

  “Hollingsworth, what do you see?” Lowell asked. I saw her green marker, my HUD alerting me that she was two klicks to the east and thirty meters above the ground.

  “Nothing yet, Sarge,” she said. “Ground is clear to the horizon in all directions.”

  “Wings are turning back,” Monohan announced. “Center pair are still circling.”

  “Over the lab?” Lowell asked.

  “Negative. Looks like they’re over the airfield.”

  “What the fuck are they doing?” Goldman asked, mostly to himself.

  “Messing with our heads,” Vasquez said from beside me.

  “I don’t like this, Mike,” McAdams said.

  “I don’t either. If these assholes take off, so do we the instant they’re back over the horizon.”

  “What if they stick around?” Jordan asked.

  “I guess we’ll wait and see if they land and want to parley.”

  “Funny, Sarge. I never knew you had a sense of humor.”

  “I don’t. Now shut the fuck up and keep this channel clear.”

  I laughed inside my helmet. I had always liked Sergeant Lowell, but in the last couple of weeks, he’d grown on me even more. Part of it was because he’d shared the Command Link info with me, part of it was how he’d provided Hollingsworth with what her psyche (and my sexual tension) needed, and the rest of it was how he was a good person at his core, even if that core was locked inside of a soldier facing hopeless odds.

  The drones circled for another ten minutes before turning back north and falling into formation. We waited another twenty minutes before scurrying like massive ants as we grabbed our gear and prepped to travel. We filed out of the store at five minute intervals, sticking to the residential streets until we hit the south edge of town. Lowell had us angle toward the western mountains, keeping us a few klicks off the main highway that ran through the valley. When we reached the foothills, we hugged them as much as possible, our green markers stretched out over a four klick line.

  It was almost midnight before Lowell called for a halt. I felt like I could walk for another twelve hours, though it was more of a mental exercise to keep my mind occupied, since the CR-31 did almost all of the work. It had been so long since we’d had more than a few hours break that I was amazed at how fresh I felt. My suit still reeked of sweaty, slimy Dana Lofgren, but there weren’t any military bases in the area that I could think of. Even if there were, I was sure none of them were set up to handle the task of deodorizing, disinfecting, and decontaminating a CR-31.

  “We’ll hold here and get a few hours of sleep. Lofgren and McAdams, set up the perimeter and take the watch. Wake me and Bishara in two hours. Everyone else, you know the drill.”

  Sergeant McAdams and I scouted a half-klick perimeter, set up the sensor stakes, and calibrated the net. Kirilenko, Talamentez, and Vasquez had carried the 300’s, and were busy setting them up, coordinating with us to keep them just inside the perimeter. The forest was thick around us, which meant the firing lines weren’t clear for more than a few meters in any direction, but it also meant that unless we were attacked from above, we would at least have some limited cover.

  McAdams pinged me an hour into our watch. “We’ve got creepers near the south perimeter,” she said in my ear.

  “Call it,” I said, nowhere near the south end of camp.

  “Moving too slow to be Vipers, unless they’re being sneaky. Hold your position but keep your eyes open.”

  “Roger that,” I said, turning slowly in an arc, not focusing on anything for too long. I had learned the easiest way to spot things that didn’t want to be spotted was to wait for them to alert my peripheral vision.

  “We’ve got three inside the perimeter,” she said. Her voice had as much panic in it as a dead tree.

  “I’ve got movement,” I said, noticing a shadow overtake another shadow for half a second.

  “Can you see what it is?”

  “Negative.” I switched to thermal view and began to chuckle. “Scratch that. Affirmative. We’ve got raccoons inside the perimeter.”

  McAdams groaned. “Goddammit. I nearly opened up on the ones near me.”

  “Lucky for them, the 300’s are pretty smart.”

  “Lucky for you,” Lowell said in our earbuds, “Private Lofgren is familiar with the many useful functions of his CR-31.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep, Mike?
” she asked.

  “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he replied. “Other than our furry little scavenging friends, anything else?”

  “Negative. Quiet night.”

  “Roger. Wake me in an hour.”

  ***

  McAdams decided to let the First Sergeant sleep through all three shifts. No one complained, all of us more than willing to give our CO the extra rest after he gave us an extra day of downtime. The only event of interest during the night was a whispered argument about whether or not we should find out what raccoon meat tasted like. Vasquez squashed it by waking up long enough to tell everyone to shut the fuck up and stay alert.

  We were on the move before the sun broke over the Sapphire Mountains on the eastern edge of the quickly narrowing valley. Within an hour we were in the lower foothills, and by noon there was nothing to see in any direction other than the evergreens clinging precariously to steep, rocky slopes that towered above us. Sergeant Lowell abandoned the idea of staying off the road, as the terrain on either side would have slowed us down to a crawl. If the Kai sent more drones to scout further south, they’d be firing down on us before we ever heard them. I hoped he was just being practical and not throwing in the towel by suddenly no longer following protocol for crossing enemy territory. I saw the end coming the same as everyone else, but I wasn’t ready to die just yet.

  I spent the next eight hours trying to unclench my anus as we made our way south through the mountains. The Kai weren’t stupid, but they weren’t human either, something I kept reminding myself whenever I expected them to do what a human would do in a similar situation. Why were we the champions of ground warfare, but they the masters of space conflict? Why didn’t their technical prowess and strategic dominance in space translate into superior ground forces? Mostly I just wanted to scream at the top of my lungs in frustration. Come and get us, motherfuckers! We’re right here! What are you waiting for?