A Final Memory
Emily moved a few of the pieces of paper in front of her around, and then stared intently at them for another few minutes. [Charles] looked at her desk from the opposite side of the small reception room, still trying to figure out why she liked the activity.
“What’s this game called again?”
“Solitaire,” Emily responded as she continued to stare at the various piles of cards in front of her.
“You enjoy it?” asked [Charles].
The young Human shrugged. “It’s something to do. Better than what you’ve chosen as a recreational vice.”
[Charles] didn’t say anything. He had put the bottle away on a shelf in the cabinet, trying to hide it from her, but it was rather noxious. If there was one thing the Humans could do better than the Empire besides FTL technology, it was alcohol. He was still adjusting to the strength of what the Humans brewed in the bunker.
“You made a decision yet?” Emily him, glancing over as she flipped some of the cards in front of her.
[Charles] leaned back in his chair. “No.”
Emily put a card to her lips as she pondered her next move. “I suppose that’s a good thing.”
[Charles] set the legs of the chair back down. “What?”
“It’s a good thing that you’re having this debate. It proves you do actually care in some capacity. Sure, you don’t care about killing a few billion humans, but some of your own men dying in agony from radiation weighs on your mind more heavily than them simply being shot through the head.”
She punctuated her statement by slamming the paper card onto her desk.
[Charles] looked away from her and closed his eyes. “I was ordered to use it, you know. The weapon that I dropped on your planet.”
“That is an excuse that ran its course with our species a few hundred years ago, [Charles]. ‘I was only following orders.'” Emily snorted. “You knew perfectly well what it would do, and you still authorized it.”
“I’m not denying that! It’s just.. I don’t know.”
[Charles] opened his eyes and looked at the Human woman.
“I had always been taught that class C’s were monsters. Genetic plagues, dirtying what it means to be Dorvakian. Something that not only should be destroyed, but needed to be.”
Emily scoffed. “You’re the plague, [Charles]. Not us. Humanity has had the power to completely demolish a planet for centuries, but during our wars we didn’t even consider it. We might fight with one another, kill one another, but we won’t slaughter one another. Throw a human solider in a room full of civilians and tell him to kill them, the ones that aren’t sick in the head will refuse, turn around, and shoot you instead.”
[Charles] didn’t say anything.
He didn’t regret his actions in service of the Empire. As much as he hated to exterminate life from a planet, class C species needed to be eliminated. He had been taught that all his life. Except… maybe those teachings were wrong.
[Charles] looked over at Emily and considered her.
Humanity was violent, that was undeniable. She had killed her own patients, but not out of malice. It had been to end his suffering, rather than forcing him to survive in pain. They had rammed ship after ship into the [Singer] in vain and ineffectual suicide, simply to slow the ship down and allow their fellows a chance to escape. They had destroyed their space station and investments in it to perform a last ditch attack against him. Sacrificed millions only to slow the [Singer] down so a few could survive.
Humanity was violent, yes, but there was an undeniably brutal beauty that accompanied it. Of all the Humans he had seen, none had derived enjoyment or pleasure from the pain they inflicted. They did not hesitate to kill or fight, but they did so with regret foremost on their minds.
Humanity at its core did not wish to fight, but if pushed to fight, they would not restrain themselves. It was an enigma that Humans themselves seemed to have difficulty articulating with any coherence.
It made them dangerous. Humanity could be as violent as the cruelest class C species, yet at the same time as selfless as, or perhaps more selfless than a Dorvakian. Honor was not a foreign concept to them, but when forced into a corner, they would abandon it and every other creed they held dear simply to survive.
Groaning, [Charles] reached over to the shelf where he had hidden his bottle, grabbed it, and gulped at the liquor to try and calm his head, and quell the thoughts that were taking root in his mind.
The floor beneath [Charles] shifted slightly. The metallic instruments in the cases around the room all quietly chimed as they rolled and bumped one another. He opened his eyes just in time to meet Emily’s. She looked frightened for only a brief moment, before her gaze hardened.
The breech alarm began to blare, warning of intruders in the bunker.
“Well, I guess you’re not going to have to make that decision after all.” Standing up, Emily walked over to a small locker in the medical ward, punched in a code to open it, and extracted her rifle.
She hesitated for a brief moment, the weapon held at the ready, and turned to look at [Charles].
The alien Captain raised his hands. Emily raised the gun, pointing it at him for a moment before lowering it again.
“God damn it,” she muttered.
Reaching into her desk, she grabbed a set of handcuffs.
“You’re staying here.”
Emily latched one set of the metal loops over his wrist, and hooked the other side to the gigantic metallic cabinet against the wall. It wasn’t bolted in place, but even in one-third gravity it was more than any person could move.
“Alright.”
Emily looked at him for another moment, and then charged out of the room, her weapon at the ready.
[Charles] closed his eyes. He was no traitor, but the Empire had lied to him about something! Either this species was not class C, or they had lied about something else; been misinformed about something else. [Charles] wracked his brain, until the thoughts that had been squashed in childhood slowly drifted to the surface, dislodged by stress and the alcohol in his system.
What made class A’s so special? Anyone could claim they were the root, the purest form of some genetic line.
“No,” growled [Charles], speaking to himself with a whisper that traveled no further than his own ears as the alarms continued to blare.
“NO!” [Charles] screamed it out this time.
What if the Empire was wrong?
His thoughts were broken as another explosion rocked the bunker. He heard something crash in the room behind him, followed by pattering feet. A Human dressed only in a medical gown emerged and stumbled past him. The man’s right arm was gone, and he had burns over most of his skin. The gauze that was holding a healing paste to his wounds was falling away with every movement, yet he continued forwards. Stumbling to the weapons locker, he extracted a gun, and without even looking at [Charles] staggered out into the corridor.
Another crash from behind him. [Charles] turned to see a Human child who had been in the medical ward for some sort of infection crawling out of the bed he was in. Falling to the floor, the child collected himself and ran towards the door. “Momma!”
“No! Don’t go out there!” shouted [Charles]. The child glanced back at him, but ignored his warning and ran out into the corridor as well.
[Charles] swore under his breath and looked around. He had to get to a communicator and warn Emily; warn someone that the child was on the loose, lest he get caught in the crossfire.
[Charles] froze. The child was class C, and so was Emily. The people attacking the base were Imperial soldiers, the ones who would rescue him. Why did he care?
The battle raged on in the rest of the Bunker. What had once been a complex with forty levels had been reduced to only twenty levels during the siege, with only the very bottom of those occupied by Humanity. The mood in the air was that this was the end. Humanity had held out under the surface of Mars for nearly four years now. This was it.
An imperial solider stepped into the medical ward, and [Charles] snapped his head up to look at the man. For the first time he was not sure if he was happy to see a member of his own race.
“Sir!” said the solider.
Stepping over, the man pulled out a tool and cut the cuff from the Captain’s wrist.
“Solider,” breathed [Charles].
The man nodded and offered him a hand, just as other men stormed into the medical wing behind him.
[Charles] didn’t move quickly enough. The men raised their weapons and opened fire on the occupied medical beds.
[Charles] lunged forward and grabbed the gun from the solider who had rescued him, turning towards the other two that had opened fire on the Humans. He heard the agonized cries from the Humans as those who were still conscious cried out in agony and died in the beds where Emily and her staff had placed them to heal.
“No!” shouted [Charles].
The three soldiers all looked at him in mild confusion.
“Sir?” asked the man he had stripped the weapon from.
[Charles]’s hands shook as he held the weapon. A weapon he was pointing at loyal Imperial soldiers, soldiers that had just eliminated class C deviants. Humans.
[Charles] felt tears streaming down his cheeks. He was crying, but he didn’t know why. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what he should do.
He didn’t know what the right course of action was.
There was no right course of action. Unless he wanted to eliminate himself from the equation, and not have to choose.
Looking down at the rifle, [Charles] hesitantly twisted it in his hands. A single shot to his heart or his head and the choice wouldn’t be something he would have to live with. But running away from the problem would only mean it would go unresolved; the Humans would die.
Other class C species like the Humans would die as well.
[Charles] paused at that thought.
Billions of lives snuffed out in an instant, on his order. Men, women, and children. Men who would have fought to their last breath, like the man who had torn himself form the bed, still bleeding, to fight. Children who wanted only the comfort of their mother’s touch. Woman who, like Emily, healed and fought to protect those around them.
Class C or not, Humanity and every other species like them deserved to live, fight, and survive.
The moan of a patient in the back of the medical wing caught the attention of the two men that were still armed. They turned back towards the beds; they still had a job to finish.
A job that [Charles] could not allow them to complete in cold blood.
Spinning the weapon around, [Charles] pulled the trigger.
The loyal soldiers of the Empire in front of him collapsed as the plasma punched through their armor. Armor that had been specially built to combat the kinetics the Humans were using, not Imperial plasma rifles. Looks of horror and confusion plastered their faces as they collapsed, suffering the same horrid fate they had bestowed upon so many Humans.
Still, they had more warning than the Humans he had killed on Earth.
[Charles] put his hands on his knees and dropped the weapon, retching. His stomach was rebelling, but he refused to let himself lose control.
He had killed billions already. What were a few more lives in the penance he would have to pay?
Grimacing, he reached over to the shelf and grabbed the bottle again, taking another swig from it to try and clam himself down, and maybe drain away the thought of what he had just done.
Collapsing into his chair, [Charles] stared at the corpses of the men, and then at the bodies of the Humans in the medical ward behind him. Surrounded by death, he sat in silence even as more explosions rang out through the facility and death continued to rain down on the Human race.
A loud bang sounded in the hallway and Emily tumbled back into the room. Her gun was smoking, and she was covered in nasty cuts, her clothes soaked with blood. Soot covered her face, and her eyes were wild.
She looked at him, at the men on the floor, then back at her patients before letting out a howl of rage.
Raising her weapon, she placed the hot barrel against [Charles]’s chest. “You killed them!” she growled.
Slowly, and calmly, [Charles] shook his head. “No. They did.” He pointed at the soldiers. “And then I killed them.”
Emily hesitated and looked down at the dead soldiers.
“Why?”
[Charles] turned to follow her gaze. “I’ve already killed so many. What’s it matter if I kill three more?”
“You killed Humans. These were your own men.”
[Charles] looked down at them and then at Emily.
“They are, but unlike me, you won’t be able to convince them that your species is worth something.” [Charles] hesitated. “I have the weight of ten billion souls shouting at me from across the void for what I did, and that was barely enough.”
Emily slowly nodded. “No Human will ever forgive you.”
“Nor should they.”
[Charles] looked down at the soldiers.
“But I cannot go back to blindly following the doctrine and orders of my Empire.”
[Charles] stooped down and closed the eyes of the men he had just killed. “If you can find it in yourself, do forgive them. They might just be following orders as I did, but they do not deserve this.”
Emily grimaced. “They deserved death the moment they landed on our planet, [Charles].”
“I suppose I am not quite at your level of vindictiveness, then,” [Charles] mumbled as he straightened back up.
“No, I suppose not.”
Walking over to the small locker compartment, he extracted the Human weapon and held it in his hands for a moment. It was a heavy, solid piece of metal with no give. Like its creators: uncompromising, unforgiving, deadly, and blunt.
“What now?” [Charles] asked.
Emily sighed. “We’re falling back.”
“To where?”
“The reactor, on the lowest level. That bomb we were going to use on the soldiers, the one you were debating over? We’re going to use that to irradiate every single person left on this base.”
[Charles]’s eyes widened. “Yourselves included?”
Emily slowly nodded. “I don’t think many of us will last long enough to suffer from the radiation sickness.”
[Charles] glanced out at the corridor. Explosions and gunfire from both plasma and Human weapons could still be heard as the battle continued to rage.
“No, I suppose not.”
Stepping out of the medical ward, they immediately ran into two imperial soldiers as they rounded the corner. Emily raised her weapon, and [Charles] did the same, shouldering the Human weapon as he would a plasma weapon.
The soldiers paused for a half second, confused by the sight of the Dorvakian holding a primitive weapon on them in the middle of a class C extermination. Half a second too long. The Human, fighting for the survival of her race, and the Dorvakian, burning in guilt of the fires around him, both opened fire.
The soldiers collapsed onto the compound floor.
“This way,” said Emily, turning down the hall leading away from the majority of the fighting.
[Charles] glanced back at the soldiers and followed the Human. She stepped out around a corner, then dove back cursing.
“Cover!” shouted Emily as she ducked back behind the wall, barely avoiding the wide burst of slag-like plasma that hit the corner wall of the bunker.
[Charles] stared at the wall for a moment. The plasma had already cooled to molten slag, where it continued to bubble. To be hit by something like that would be an excruciating way to go.
Ducking out around the corner, Emily fired again. There was a cry and a thud, and no return shots.
“Let’s go!”
Charging forwards, weapon up, Emily charged into the stairwell access.
As [Charles] ran past the lone man she had shot, his heart fell. On the ground next to him was the child, the one that had stumbled out of the medical ward looking for his mother. The child’s body was mangled and burned, having been hit by a Skinner at close range. The small, pale face was screwed up in pain, even in death.
[Charles] tore his eyes from the scene and turned back to follow Emily, his resolve solidifying.
Jumping down the flights of stairs, Emily hardly slowed at the landings. The Humans guarding each level let her pass. A few raised their weapons at [Charles], but she quickly pushed them down.
“You need to have eye protection!” [Charles] yelled at them as he passed the third guard. “The standard practice will be to drop stunners down a shaft like this to disorient before attacking!” he yelled, not slowing as he tried to keep up the break neck pace Emily was setting. He’d spent months in the base bunker, but had yet to go this deep into it.
“We know that!” shouted Emily over another explosion above them.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Emily moved along a short corridor before shouldering open a door and running into the room beyond.
Hot on her heels, [Charles] paused as soon as he passed through the door. This was the largest room he had seen in the entire bunker. The ceiling alone had to be at least five stories high. Dominating the center of the room was a large piece of machinery that was steadily humming. The Humans’ fusion reactor, no doubt.
Inside the room was what was left of the Humans who were not fighting. The old, injured, and young. No women were present, besides those few who cared for the youngest. [Charles] shivered. No doubt they were fighting and dying above.
“General!” shouted Emily.
Turning his head to the direction of the yell, [Charles] spotted the Human leader standing next to a large cylindrical device at the foot of the reactor.
“The infirmary is lost. All my patients are dead,” Emily said bitterly. “Although our resident alien did try to stop them.”
The General looked over at [Charles]. “You’ve made your choice then? It’s a little late.”
“I’ve already killed billions. Another few dozen shouldn’t matter! But,” [Charles] hesitated and looked around the chamber before continuing, “it does for some reason. I can’t condone killing any more of you. You might be class C, but you’re not vermin. Killing you just because of that classification is…”
[Charles] swallowed and collected himself.
“It’s wrong.”
The Human General stared at him. [Charles] weathered the gaze without comment, not sure of what else he could say. Nothing else came to mind.
“Well I suppose we can’t ask more of you. I certainly don’t have the will, or the authority, to forgive you for your crimes.”
[Charles] shook his head. “I wouldn’t ask you to.”
The General grunted and turned back to the engineers laboring over the device.
“How close are you?”
“About twenty minutes,” grumbled one of the men.
The General nodded. “Twenty minutes! Pass it along! Hold out for twenty minutes!” he called out. The men in the stairwell quickly relayed the message.
“So now we die?” asked [Charles], looking at the device.
“Now we die, but we take as many with us as possible,” the General growled in response.
“This is not something I would ever do, it seems almost needlessly vindictive to take more lives even after you are dead,” said [Charles].
“You do understand why we are doing it, though?” asked Emily from where she was busy treating a wound on a man’s leg, despite the fact he would be dead in less than an hour.
[Charles] sighed. “I think I do. You’re Human.”
Emily and several others around her chuckled.
[Charles] sat down on the ground next to the device and stared at it. The two engineers still working on it hardly glanced over at him.
“General,” [Charles] started, beckoning to him.
The Human looked over at him and came closer. “Yes?”
“Truthfully, did you have the designs?”
The General smiled weakly. “No. We destroyed every copy when the Ark left the system. Every single fucking copy of the FTL data was scrubbed immediately.”
“Then all of this was for naught.” [Charles] leaned back onto the floor, and began to laugh. The sound echoed off of the walls of the room, barely audible over the sound of the reactor humming in the background.
“All of this was for nothing!” shouted [Charles] in his own language, shouting at anyone who would listen.
He began to cry.
He was a traitor.
He was a coward.
He was a butcher and a mass murderer.
He was without a purpose.
All he had left in life was to die with those he had wronged.
The minutes slowly ticked by. [Charles] had never felt so conflicted, and yet so at peace with his lot in life.
“Five minutes,” reported one of the engineers.
“Good,” said the General.
A faint low hum suddenly filled [Charles]’s ears and he winced. “What is that?” he asked, putting his hands over them.
The Humans around him all looked confused.
“You don’t hear that?” asked [Charles].
“Hear what?” asked Emily, confused.
“It almost sound like a…” The alien Captain’s eyes widened. “A drill! Above us!” he shouted, pointing at the ceiling of the chamber – just in time to see the machine breach the rock.
With a thunderous roar, the machine fell onto the reactor.
The light of a star poured from it for a half moment, blinding everyone in the room. The hum of the reactor soon died and was replaced with the screams of the last remnants of Humanity.
Soldiers on ropes came down through the hole they had created, guns firing with little discrimination. Vast swaths of burning plasma covered the humans around the outskirts of the chamber, and the yells of fear turned into screams of pain and anguish.
The Skinners were not a kind weapon; they were barbaric and cruel.
“Stop!” shouted [Charles] in his own language at the men as they descended.
In front of him, Emily raised her weapon and let loose a stream of bullets, hitting several of the men. The General reached into his belt and extracted an ancient looking weapon with a long barrel and a cylinder on the back of it, opening fire as well.
The men on the ropes turned their attention to them and the other Humans directly below the reactor and opened fire. Before she had a chance to step aside or seek cover, a gout of plasma landed directly on top of Emily.
[Charles] had jumped forward to push her out of the way, but once again he was too slow, only getting close enough to be hit by a smaller blob of plasma that splashed off her and tore into [Charles]’s chest. He could smell it burning his flesh, feel it clawing into his chest, but he ignored it.
Emily was still standing, somehow, even as most of her body continued to burn grotesquely. [Charles] watched, horrified, as bone was exposed and the woman finally collapsed. The woman who had fought so much to stave death away from her comrades fell into his arms without any ceremony or the dignity of any final words.
With the pain in his chest adding to the amount of anguish he now felt for Humanity, [Charles] collapsed down on the ground next to her. “No. No!” he screamed as he looked down at the corpse, and then around the rest of the reactor room. Imperial soldiers were sweeping their weapons side to side, finishing off any who were still alive.
He was still next to the Human’s radiation weapon. The General was there as well, half of his head missing. The single eye of the Human stared at him from the void. One of the engineers was still alive and working, having been missed in the first round of fire since he was tucked in under some machinery. [Charles] watched as the man hurriedly tore his former co-worker’s charred hand from the console where it was burned in place and adjusted some final value.
A solider turned and fired. The engineer collapsed and a small detonator slipped from his hand directly in front of [Charles].
Ignoring the pain in his chest, [Charles] reached out for the small device that was the last retribution of Humanity.
Clutching it in his hand, his eyes rolled up in his head as the pain finally overwhelmed him.
“Sir?”
[Charles] blinked and groaned. His head was pounding from a hangover, and his chest burned like someone had been using it for target practice. Which is not far off from what had happened.
“He’s awake!” someone shouted. [Charles] winced. It was his own language that was being shouted with jubilation. The language of the Empire.
Slowly opening his eyes, [Charles] looked around. “Where am I?”
The medic turned to look at him excitedly. “We’re taking you back up to the [Singer], sir! We just took off! I can hardly believe you survived! With those savages!”
[Charles] looked at the medic. He was young. Like he himself must have been once, eager and loyal to the Empire.
“It was difficult. Now let me rest,” growled [Charles].
The young man nodded and turned away to continue talking to those in the front of the shuttle.
Opening his palm, [Charles] looked at the detonator still clutched in his hand. It was the last will and testament of Humanity.
He owed it to them.
Flipping back the safety on the device, [Charles] closed his eyes and pressed the trigger.
Nothing happened. [Charles] waited, hoping it was perhaps on a timer. The seconds ticked past and still nothing exploded. No radioactive explosion. No final retribution of which he would be subject.
He aimlessly pressed the detonator several more times. Still no alarms sounded in the shuttle that was now taking him to orbit. No alerts of an attack on the surface, no radiation klaxon. Nothing. Turning the small device around in his hand, [Charles] saw the problem: the bottom of the device had been melted away by something.
Humanity would not get its final retribution.
[Charles] could feel the weight of the souls, those last few hundred souls from the Bunker, joining the ten billion now looking down on him. Emily, the General – they were now among the souls passing judgement on him.
Holding onto the detonator, he wept.
[Charles] looked around the Consul’s office. The last time he had been here had been years ago, when the man had explained the Hygonix weapon to him. [Charles] had, at the time, though it was a perfect weapon: wipe the vermin from the face of a planet without harming any infrastructure. The colonization teams could move in with even greater haste.
Shaking his head, [Charles] reached into his jacket and extracted his flask, taking a large gulp.
“We managed to extract some phantom data from the computer systems on the planet,” said [Sam] as she set the tablet down on the desk in front of her.
“Anything of value?” asked [Marcus].
“We got some basic data on the mathematics of their FTL. Preliminary research, mostly. Nothing else though.”
“That is unfortunate,” said [Marcus].
Reaching across the desk, he picked up the tablet and paged through the analysis.
“Your resignation has been accepted in any case, [Charles].”
The former Captain said nothing.
[Sam] glanced over at the man. He had been different since they had saved him from the C1764 bunker. An experience like that would be enough to change anyone… he had spent nearly [a year] below ground with them. How he was still alive, she had no idea.
The creatures had been preparing some type of dirty nuclear device when the final raid had taken place. If it had gone off, it would have irradiated everyone in the compound with lethal amounts of radiation. From the reports she had read, the device had been complete. The only thing that had been missing was some sort of detonation signal.
Why it was never triggered was a matter of some mystery, and perhaps just dumb luck.
“We did manage to get some tertiary data, though. Some sort of medical invention that they were using looks promising.”
The Consul nodded. “I’ll add it to the docket for items to be researched.”
[Sam] placed her hand over her eye and turned, exiting the room, leaving only [Marcus] and [Charles].
Looking up at the Consul, [Charles] felt the weight of Humanity on his shoulders. They were watching him, waiting with baited breath.
“You know you haven’t killed them all. The ones that escaped, and survived. They will be back.”
“I’m fully aware of that, [Charles]. If it weren’t for your blunders in obtaining the FTL technology, we would be able to eliminate them now,” growled the Consul.
“They’re not inferior.”
“Excuse me?” asked the Consul.
“The class C’s, or at the very least Humanity. They’re not inferior. Different, but not inferior,” [Charles] repeated.
[Marcus] looked at him for a moment, disgusted. “They are not Dorvakian. That alone is reason enough to eliminate them,” he spat.
“No it’s not.” [Charles] hesitated. “It’s not genetics that determines a class C rank, is it?”
[Marcus] simply looked at the Captain, remaining silent.
[Charles] stood up and walked out of the office without paying his respects to the Consul. Humanity couldn’t be the only race that had been improperly classified, improperly treated by the Empire. In the pit of his stomach [Charles], knew the truth.
The souls of every other race to ever be designated class C turned their gazes to him, joining Humanity in weighing down his soul.
[Marcus] watched him go and simply shook his head. Such a waste.
Next week is the Valiant Few!
Preview:
Allen’s eyes widened, and he leaned forward as well the two placed their helmets together. The contact was just enough for vibrations to pass through the materials.
“Peace?” shouted the alien, her voice sounded distant and tinny, but nonetheless audible in his helmet.
“Peace!” shouted Allen in response, and the two of them smiled. Allen noticed that her canines were slightly longer than normal, for Humans at least. Nothing that made her look like a fictitious vampire, but long enough to give her a slightly more predatory visage. It only enhanced the exotic beauty in front of him