Humanity's Last - Ch. 1 & 2, Rough Draft

Act I – In the Beginning, the End

Scene I - Sacrifice

How had it come to this?, questioned the boy in his mind.  Was it destiny when we left to become this fierce, this brutal?  Or did we just play the cards wrong?
“Douglas, we’re venting in living quarters five,” called a man from behind the boy, who was grown now.
“Hold them off, fire main batteries, assault pattern Charlie.  How’s hull status?”
“Twenty percent.”
“Crud, oh bloody crud,” he mumbled under his breath, so no crew member could hear.
The boy, now a man, signaled his wife and one of his bridge commanders, “Order the Odin and the Fenir to retreat into the asteroid belt, and have them take the supply ships with them.  Tell the Jarl to move into formation with us.  The Ninhogg will take the brunt of the attack while they retreat.”
She obeyed and inputted the instructions.  She then turned to the boy, who had been her greatest friend, and with a look of “What now?”, waited for his command.
“Everyone abandon ship.  Take the cargo ships and evacuate to the Jarl.  I’ll send them away once everyone is aboard.”  He picked up the headset in front of him.
“This is Douglas.  All personal, abandon ship.  Abandon ship to the Jarl.  That is a direct order.”
He hung up and shouted, “That means all of you too.”
The command center, his home for close to five years of his life, began to empty as personal helped each other to cargo hangers.  Soon all who remained were Douglas and his wife.  He spoke to her, as the hull strength fell to ten percent.
“I meant you too.”
She touched his arm.
“I’m not.”
He knew what she was thinking, but it didn’t matter.  He had made up his mind.
She came to him and he held his love in his arms.  “I love you more than anything.  That’s why I need to stay here.  I am going to end this here, right now.  I must confront her.  Humanity then might survive.”
She shivered, in fear, fear of what might come over the horizon.
“It’s alright.  You will go onto one of the ships and go on with your life.  You will find a new job on the Jarl or the Odin.  And you will live.  As long as you live, then my life had purpose.  If humanity survives, then I have accomplished my mission.”  He paused.  “I need to finish my mission.”
He felt the tears trickled down her face and onto his as she held him close, breathing him in.
“Fate sometimes isn’t fair, or wanted.  Now go.  That’s an order.  You two,” he ordered, as the central doors hissed open, “take her and make sure she gets on the Jarl.”
The woman unwillingly left, being dragged along by the two men, wanting to make sure they got off this ship if she did.
I love you, he mouthed as she disappeared behind the doors. 
Douglas sat down in the chair, his chair, where he had commanded, and fought.  He wearily rushed his hand through his hair when the motion sensors went off.
“Intruder alert.  Hull break.  Boarding in progress.  Intruder alert.”
“Let them come!” he cried to no one.  “This time I am ready for her.”
The minutes ticked away as he awaited for his last command to be fulfilled.  Finally, another message flooded the room.
“Cargo bays open, ships away.”
Douglas fumbled for his headset.  “Cargo One, do you hear me?”
“Yes sir, we hear you.”
“Have you escaped to the asteroid field?”
“We passed undetached, like you said.”
“Then it was a success.”  He paused.  “Men, it has been an honor to command you.”
“Likewise, sir.”
And with that, the transmission cut out.
More minutes ticked by, and Douglas twiddled his fingers as the time passed.  He knew his guns were still a blazing, but had so little affect now that the enemy had stopped firing on them.  The missiles they did still fire were destroying the hull on every level.  He was trapped within their grasp, and they had no real need to retaliate on the ship.  They would much rather have a new, if damaged, ship for their fleet of madness, he supposed.  They could then transform it into one like their own.
Finally, he heard foot steps down the hall.  “So, here ends the life of Douglas.”  And then he said to someone, “Protect my family, protect my people.”
She walked in alone, while her guards waited outside.  They had nothing to worry about.  It was just one human, with no strength at all.
“It took you long enough to hack the encryption codes,” laughed Douglas, “I was worried for a moment that you couldn’t break through.”
She smiled.  “You always celebrated too early, Douglas.  But now you have finally lost.  I will personally chase the rest of your people into the field, and they will be captured.
“I doubt that.  In fact, you will never leave this section of space, but instead will be blasted into oblivion.”
“Now I doubt that.”
“You don’t have to do this.  You can fight it.  I know you better than that, my….”
“Don’t you dare speak that name.”
“No, I won’t.  But did it really have to lead to this?”
“We are the future, you are the past.  We are the new, you are the old.  You are pests, and we are mandated to exterminate you.”
The former boy got up.  “Will you really shoot me?  Will you?”  He began walking slowly.  “Will you pull the trigger and end it for me?  Because that’s exactly what I am ordering you to do.”
“I no longer take orders from you.  I never took orders from you.”
He kept moving taking around-about way to get to her.  She then asked, “You know what has had me thinking these last few nights, during the calm before the storm?  That it was your faults that led to this situation.  If you hadn’t been so greedy, this would have never happened.”
“No, if you hadn’t been so prideful, this would never have happened.”
She fingered her blade (though Douglas couldn’t see it), the same blade that had ended their friendship exactly five years ago to the date.  At least they are punctual, thought Douglas.
Finally, she exclaimed, “Why don’t you just surrender?  If you get on your knees and beg right now, I won’t kill you.  Sure, humiliation and torture will occur, but you will live.  Isn’t that what your ultimate goal is, both species-al and personal?  Self-survival, at any cost?”
Douglas smiled.  “I turned away from that road personally along time ago, when I atoned for my sins.  And as a people, a race,” he spoke proud now, “every people has a right to live.”
“Believe that if you will, fool,” she said with disgust, “but the powerful always control the weak.  That is how the universe is made up of.  Power trumps weakness.”
The boy quietly whispered something, under his breath, short and simple.
She, not hearing him, said again, “This is my last warming.  Surrender now, or pay the cost.”
“Listen, old comrade,” the boy said, following her cold voice, still stepping even closer to the Unborn leader, the Empress, “I have no plans for surrendering, as you should know.  Why ask?  My choice has never fluctuated.  Get that through your head, as mad as it may be.”
The girl frowned.  “I am sorry to see you feel that way.”
Douglas was now within a few feet of this inhuman form, and he stood face to face, less that a foot apart from her.  “Well, it ends here, now.  But before this showdown occurs, I just wanted to let you in on a little secret.”  He leaned and put his mouth next to her ear, and whispered two small words into her ear.
The look on her face was calm, yet inside Douglas knew she was fuming.
“Goodbye, old friend,” he said, his face unreadable.
“Goodbye Douglas.”  And with that, she stabbed him, right in the chest.
Douglas smiled.
“Thank you.”
And with that, he fell to the ground limp, blood pouring everywhere, and closed his eyes, and spoke no more.

Scene II - Discovery

15 Years Before

         Twinkling lights filled the mind of the boy, as in the darkness of his eyes, he saw the world he knew gone to nothingness.  Black was there, but the boy, always a big dreamer, instead saw the possibility of a hope, and light, in this time.  In 2012.  Or so she’d think for a while.
         His eyes awoke, and his mind refreshed itself.  He lay there a few moments, staring up into the light.
         But that’s when his mind clicked.  He had made it.  He had traveled in time, to a new time, one better for all, one that he could make good.  And them he could do what he really wanted: create a business that would make him wealthy, and filthy too.  It would probably have to be shady and underhanded, as that was the way of acquiring money, wasn’t it?
         He sat up.  A new time.  A new life.  He stood up and stretched.  He supposed time travel really made sore the muscles.  He wondered how long he had been out.  A few seconds, hours, days?  He felt refreshed.  It must have not been too long, or else someone would have discovered me here.
         He began to walk around in the dim lights, because it was dim in the room, wherever he was.  As he walked he looked all around in every direction but one, studying everything in his new world.  He probably should have also looked down, for soon he tripped on something and fell face first on the hard floor.
         “What the hell?”
         “Who the hell is that?”
         “Is that you?”
         “From the future?”
         “Ya.”
         “Yep.”
         “Well, I’d congratulate you for being one of the first two to travel successfully in time, but I can’t see you.”
         Suddenly she appeared by his feet, and the boy turned his head.
         “Are you alright?” she asked.
         “Ya, only my head was injured, and that wasn’t the machine’s fault.”
         “Well good.”
         They stared at each other for a moment, then asked as one, “Did we really make it?”
         “Let’s have a look,” spoke the boy, getting up, but not helping the girl to stand, which she did eventually.
         The stood by each other, taking a look at their surroundings.  The boy kept checking right over the girl’s head, since she was so short.  He looked at her.  She looked bloody.  She took a look at him.  He looked mucky.
         “We look awful,” muttered the girl.
         “Yes we do,” agreed the boy.
         “I am thinking we ended up in a storage area,” hypothesized the girl.
         “What makes you think that?”
         “The storage containers around us,” she said.
         He looked.  There were a ton of containers in the room.
         “Oh, right.”
He wondered off and looked at the containers.  The first one he saw said, Mechanics – Electrics – Tools.  He took a look at another one.  Mechanics – Filtering – Emergency Replacements.  So far so good.  He looked at a few others.  Mechanics – Electrics – Circuitry Replacement.
“I have the strange feeling that we are in a mechanical storage room,” he said out loud.
“I see,” replied the girl, intrigued by something else.
He ignored her disinterest and instead continued his reading.  Mechanics – Conditions – Cooling – Replacement Gel.
Next was Mechanics – Propulsion – Replacement Thermal Converters.
Now that is really odd.  Which is good.  I think it worked.
Meanwhile the girl had been walking aimlessly, getting a bearing for her surroundings.  It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in what the boy had said.  It instead was the feeling that something wasn’t right.  For one thing, she thought the boy’s head’s hair was just wacky for him.  His head reminded her of a tan candle, burning off the top.
But that wasn’t the main reason she felt weird.  It was that she didn’t feel stable.  As in what was keeping her down.  She expected that gravity on Earth would be a different feeling then artificial gravity on a cruiser.  But standing up she felt exactly the same.  And she felt familiar for some reason, like something hadn’t changed.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a window.  A dark window.  Must be night now.  She walked over to it to get a peak at the Earth they had come to.
“Hey, check this out,” yelled the boy, still studying the containers.  “These are very interesting.”  He turned to find her staring out the window.  “Excuse me.  Are you even listening to me?”
“Come here.”  Her voice sounded very distant, very far off.
“No, first come here, and then we can stare out the pretty window.  This is very interesting.”
“Come here.”  This time she sounded depressed.
“What is so important at the window?”
“Come here.”  Repeated, this time there was emptiness in her voice, no motion.  The boy though he heard a whimper.
Angrily, the boy got up and stomped over to the window.  “There, you happy?  What is so important here?”
“Take a look.”
“Fine, whatever, I’ll play your games.  I’ll look out this….”  He paused.
It was completely dark outside the window.  Except for a few distant lights in the background.  He had seen this sight before.  They hadn’t reached Earth.  They were in space.
◙
“Calm down, friend.  Calm down.”
“I will not freaking calm down.  We are still in space!  We failed!  We failed!”
“Come, sit down, let’s think about this,” said the boy to the freaked out girl, pale even with the blood on her face.
They sat down on two of the containers marked Mechanics – Heating – Marker Probes.  He sat calm.  She sat scared.  Together they were an emotional equilibrium.
“So, what do we know?”
The girl pondered a moment, sniffled (for she had been tearing up), and then contemplated.
“We know the time machine worked in some ways.  For one thing, we are not at the last moments.  The ship, if it is a ship, is not damaged, and there is no debris outside.  And I am pretty sure that this isn’t the same ship.  And finally, I am pretty sure this technology is a bit different from the one we know.  It looks a bit older.”
“So, to conclude?”
“I think we travel backwards, but not far enough.  We ended up after 2012 sometime, but before the last moments.  We most likely are sometime during the Exodus Period.  Or close to.”
The boy nodded.  “I would agree.  That would explain the older technology and the being in space.  The machine must transport to the location of the most humans.  Since Earth was uninhabited, the computer must have recalculated to here.”
“Which is where?”
“I don’t know.  We should fine a way to figure that out.”
They sat silent for a moment, the girl still thinking, the boy with his head down.  Then the boy sat up and said, “I know.”
He began to look around the container he had been sitting on, moving it and searching it up and down with his eyes.
“What are you looking for?” asked the girl.
“Here it is,” immediately responded the boy.  “The Solar River.  Class – 1491 Passenger Transport.  Dedicated on December 25, 2032.”
“Passenger Transport?  Are you sure?” questioned the girl.
“Yes, that’s what it says.”
“Then we are definitely back from the last moments.  Around the time when we were born, all of humanity’s remaining ships that weren’t cruisers or helmships, which were few, were either transformed into cruisers or salvaged and abandoned, in order to arm the fleet due to the increase in attacks.”
“Interesting.”
They sat longer in silence.  Finally, the girl always resourceful, spoke up.
“We need to develop a plan?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, clearly we can’t travel back to the last moments, or try again to reach 2012, so we are stuck here, wherever here is.  We need to develop what we are going to do.  For example, the first thing I suggest is getting cleaned up and getting some new clothes that will blend with the population here.”
“Agreed, good idea.  Then we definitely need some food and spirits.  I’m starved!”
“And how will spirits help on that?”
“Surely spirits handle all problems?”
“You know, they enforced the drink age for quite a long time, including probably now.”
“Oh well, worth a try.”
“Alright,” said the girl, a bit disturbed and questioning the benefits of keeping this boy around, “as well I think we should blend in.  Get weak positions or jobs that don’t bring attention to us.”
“And we should probably stay away from all MPs and such.”
“Agreed.”
“Alright, since we got that planned, what first?”
“Let me think.”
The boy thought as well, and then said, “Follow me.”
◙
         Sneaking around a transport is not as hard as it sounds.
         Transports were built to house as many people as possible, and to give them adequate if not spacious living conditions.  Maintenance passages connected most of the ship, as well as normal passage halls.  The good thing about maintenance passages, though, was their secrecy and their ability to keep whoever was inside hidden.  Crawling through the tunnels of the underbelly of the ship, the girl realized the boy had been correct: this was the best passage around the ship.
         “Explain to me again how you know of these,” the girl questioned back.
         “When I was abandoned and live “shadily” on the decks and such, my brother and I used these tunnels to sneak by MPs and other people.  Other gangs, etc.  I learned to navigate these tunnels like the back of my hand.”
         “Except we’re on a different ship, a transport ship,” the girl reasoned, “so wouldn’t the maintenance passages be different?”
         “I suppose,” reasoned the boy, “but they we’re all bit in the same fashion.  And besides, there are guiding arrows at every intersection.  Hold up a minute,” he told the girl as she reached one of the intersections, “let me see, alright, turn left.”
         They continued in this way for a short period of time, the boy using his knowledge of ship layouts and guiding arrows to navigate the girl, who led the way.  Finally, the girl was stopped by a dead end.
         “Well, wise guy, where do we go now?”
         “Press the upper right corner of the panel in front of you.”
         She did, and the panel slid open, revealing a restroom/bathing area.
         They got out of the tunnel and stretched their legs.  “Nice work,” the girl told the boy.  “Where are we?”
         “One of the public restrooms.  Good, no one is in here.  Quickly, get into one of the shower stalls, before anyone sees.”
         They took the two shower stalls at the end of the row, hoping everyone else would pick the ones closer to the door.  The boy threw off his clothing and made a small pile in a corner of his stall.  He turned on the water and relaxed as the warm water came on.  Years of grim and dirt melted off his skin.  How long has it been since I washed?  Three, four years?
         “Hey, I might have a problem here,” called the girl from the next stall, who had also undressed and had the water running, but was scrubbing her clothing.
         “What now?”
         “I can’t get the blood out of my wear, drat,” she announced, scrubbing with determination.
         “So?  Just get rid of them.”
         “I can’t, for I’ll have nothing to wear.  And I suggest you don’t wear your rags in public, no matter how clean they are.”
         “Wait, I think I have a solution.  Be quiet,” he said, as he heard the door open and two people walked into the restroom.
         “John, I am not sure about this,” said one of the people, who sounded like a woman.
         “Come on, Stephanie, don’t chicken out now.  Almost no one is monogamous now,” called John, who was definitely a man.
         “Really John?”
         “Of course.”  There was so incoherent whispering then, and the sound of one of the stalls opening.  They heard some other noises, though they couldn’t determine what they were.
         “You about ready?” murmured the boy to the stall next to him.
         “I am, what are you doing?  Hey, listen to me!” she spoke softly but angrily at the opposing stall.
         But the boy was already out of his stall and stealthily moving towards the second stall from the door.  He found two sets of clothing outside the door.  He quietly picked them up, glanced at the stall, and them silently returned.
         “Here, put these on,” he said while tossing a pair of clothes over the stall.
         “Where did you get these?” she asked.  Then, in a moment of clarity, “You stole these from those two people?  My gosh, now I am a thief.”
         “No, you are just a criminal of circumstance.  Come on, put them on, we need to get out of here.”
         The boy really didn’t care what the clothes looked like.  It was just a pair of jeans, and a long-sleeve of grayish origins.  Perfect to blend in.  And they were so generic, MPs would not be able to discover them if called on to search.
         He exited the stall and put the high-traction boots on his feet.  All shoes were made with high traction, due to the turbulence and high maintenance space flights or difficult maneuvers may cause on the stress of the footwear.  Instead of sliding across the floor, a man could actually maintain his station or stance.
         “Come on,” he muttered angrily, “we need to leave.”
         “I’m coming, sheesh, calm down.”
         She stepped out of the stall wearing a pair of working slacks, a blue sleeveless shirt, and similar shoes.
         “Man, these things are like twice my size.”
         The boy laughed, because it was true.  The pants ruffled at the ends for about a foot, and the sleeveless shirt hung below her hips.  She looked very unnatural, and in their situation, that was a very bad thing.
         “Well, it will have to do for now,” he said to both her and himself.  “Alright, be very quiet.”
         “You know, I am quite capable of knowing such things.”
         “Quiet.”
         “Alright, let’s go.”
         On their toes they quietly snuck pass the only other two people in the room.  As they reached the door, it open and another man walked in.
         “Oh, sorry, good day,” he spoke, not expecting someone there.
         “Good day.  We are just on our way out,” said the girl, but the boy was already dragging her out.