We were riding the skeleton of a ship to orbit.
+ + +
The engines kicked out. Titan’s clouds passed far underneath us and the curve of the planet-like moon could be seen on the horizon.
“We’re still alive,” Min Zhao marveled.
“Amira?”
“Shut up and don’t talk to me. Orbit mechanics suck.” The jumpship spun around and the engines fired up, nudging us back down toward the clouds a bit. Then it shifted again, pointing forward and firing. Amira was constantly changing orbit.
Occasionally, Amira would swear.
The entire horizon lit up, something white-hot blazing away. It started to move, gathering speed, and then faded off into the dark. Then another blinding spot did the same.
“Carriers making a run for it,” Ken said.
“Hold on,” Amira said. “They’re coming for us.”
“I don’t see anything.” I looked out the numerous holes in the jumpship around us.
“There we go,” Tony Chin said from closer to the front.
Something slipped across the darkness between us and Saturn. Inky blackness slipped off its skin.
“That ours?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” Amira said.
The darkness opened its mouth and revealed a cargo bay full of other jumpships inside. It was moving faster than I realized. “Oh, shit!”
The lip of the cargo bay slammed into the jumpship, which spun all the way around until the back end struck the deck and halted the spin. The ship bounced across the bay, smacking into pillars, and came to a stop up against the back wall of the bay.
Four struthiforms in full armor bounced up to the side of the jumpship and ripped the doors off. “Get out!” they ordered.
The docking bay was closing up like a large mouth after swallowing, Titan disappearing behind it.
Accordance lights began to strobe and flash.
“Launch is imminent. Secure yourselves!” The struthiforms scattered and bolted for safety.
A deep thrum vibrated through the Accordance carrier. Then it launched. Anyone not holding onto something was shoved back to the wall. A damaged jumpship farther up the bay groaned, its tie-downs snapped by our ship on the way in.
“Watch out!” Ken shouted.
The carrier accelerated harder still, gravity pressing down on all of us. The jumpship slid down the bay and slammed into three of the team in armor.
“Everyone okay?” I shouted. “Who got pinned?”
Before they could answer, a beam of light sliced through the cargo bay, burying itself deep in the ship. Everything shuddered, but the carrier kept moving. But now the entire side had been sliced away, and we were all staring out into space. Staring at the beams of light searching and stabbing for us and the other carriers.
We watched the winking lights and explosions of the battle we were accelerating away from and held on tight.
10
We built an impromptu camp at the corner of one of the sealed bays after the acceleration eased and the alarms cut out. Struthiform crew in harness uniforms came by with crude cots.
A veritable cross section of Accordance subjects crowded in around us. Struthiform soldiers in their own powered armor, carapoids lying along the back wall like large lumps of polished rock, and other humans with their gear.
One recognizable struthiform approached us, his scarred and half-machine face blinking at the bright, stadium-like lighting in the docking bay. “I heard your approach to the ship.”
Lilly Taylor jumped up. She’d shucked her armor. It was behind her, splayed open like something hungry and half machine, half biological, waiting to eat her again. The bright lights seemed to get soaked up by her skin as she went for Shriek’s throat. “You bastard!” She’d spoken before with a more precise, almost British accent. Now I could hear the Kenyan accent coming out with her anger.
Min Zhao was on her feet, grabbing Taylor and spinning her off to the side.
Shriek seemed neither surprised nor concerned, regarding them both with his dinner-plate eyes.
I was on my feet too, leaving my armor behind to back Zhao up. “Thank you, Max.”
“Maria is gone. We died trying to get up here. Trying to save these civilians,” Taylor shouted.
Zhao wrapped Taylor up in a bear hug. “He’s an alien, Taylor. We’re alien to him. He’s a lost soul and he’s not going to look at it the same. But he still fixes us up, don’t forget that. Okay?”
Taylor crumpled for a moment in Zhao’s embrace.
Shriek looked back at me. “This is why I do not learn names,” he said coolly. “They die. Now I know the dead one was named Maria. What good is that now for me?”
I groaned. “Fuck, Shriek, now’s not the time.”
“It’s good that she grieves. You should all grieve. Grieve now and let each other go,” the cyborg struthiform said. He pointed toward one of the large high-definition displays on the bulkhead wall over our heads. “See that small dot there? The blue one? That is your world. Your Earth. I would find a place on this ship, or wherever we end up, to go and look at it one last time. Because the Conglomeration comes for it, and they’ll burn it. And then, eventually, you too.”
I pulled Shriek away from the platoon. Alpha and Bravo were used to this shit and just looked annoyed. But Charlie and Delta were ready to kill the medic.
We needed a medic.
“I’m half ready to kill you myself, Shriek,” I said, out of earshot. “You might be an alien, but right now you’re being a real asshole. Shut up about all that. Did you find Ken?”
“As you requested,” Shriek said. “He was shot. It happened on the surface, but he didn’t report it to you. His armor kept him stable but was compromised. I assume he didn’t want you to worry about taking him into pure vacuum.”
I let out a deep breath. “Let me go armor up and we’ll go look at him.”
“The armor stays in the bay,” Shriek said. “Ship rules.”
“Rockhoppers don’t shuck,” I said.
“You’re on an Accordance carrier accelerating away from the field of battle,” Shriek said. “If you want me to take you to see Ken Awojobi, you shall leave your armor, like any other person who wishes to walk the ship.”
I bit my lip. “I’ll get Amira.”
+ + +
Ken was cocooned in a medical pod, its spider-like arms tucked neatly away. He sat up as he saw us, pulling coconut-like fibers sinking into the skin on his back out to their limit. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?” I shook my head. “Shut up, I don’t want to hear about that. I’m just glad you’re okay. When you stopped responding, and we didn’t know where in the bay you were, we didn’t know . . .”
“How is everything?” Ken asked. “How bad? I saw the whole side of the ship get sliced off.”
“Maria Lukin, one of the new soldiers,” I told him. “She was over there. She saved my life in the corridor, back on Titan. Shot Chef when the driver took him. Shook her up. She was a quick thinker.”
There was nowhere to sit. Apparently, aliens didn’t expect bedside visitors. Amira folded her arms. “How you feeling?”
Ken nodded. “Better. I’m pretty drugged up. We’ll see when I get released how I really feel, because right now it is warm and very fuzzy, which doesn’t feel right. We just barely got out alive. It doesn’t even feel real to be sitting here, to be still.”
“Barely alive,” I agreed. “I think I believed that when the Accordance handed us some resources and weapons, we’d get in there and show them how fucking hard we could fight. I thought, maybe they just didn’t have the warrior spirit. Weren’t motivated enough. But that was a nightmare. We lost Saturn, and now Titan, too. What’s it going to be like when they reach Earth?”
“I get that from Shriek,” Ken growled. “I don’t
want to hear it from you, too. Listen to me: I didn’t almost die for nothing just now. We didn’t fight for nothing. We’re going to go back to Titan. We’re going to go back and kick their asses, and I’m going to be first on the ground. Because the Accordance is not going to roll over and surrender. The Accordance is better than that. They are strong. We are lucky they are our allies.”
+ + +
There was no food for humans aboard the carrier. By the end of the second day, the engineers were lying down and taking sleeping pills that Shriek offered them, while the rest of us armored up. The steady nutrient drip jacked into our spines was enough to stave off the worst, but it was strange to just mill around in full armor, conserving power and waiting.
Halfway through the third day, the monitors lit up with something other than the outer ship cameras.
A series of rocky asteroids connected by clear tubes and girders flashed on screen. “These are the Trojans,” a familiar voice explained. “These asteroids trail along Saturn in its orbit, and serve as something of a naval yard for our Saturn operations and a rally point for Accordance ships engaged on the Saturn Front.”
The asteroid base faded away, and a familiar face appeared on the screen with the triangular CPF logo up behind him.
“It’s Colonel Anais,” Amira muttered, with all the enthusiasm of someone who found dogshit on the heel of a shoe.
“Here at the Trojan naval base, we will begin preparations to defend against any incursion into trans-Jovian Accordance territory,” Anais said. “Your valued participation in the wars around Saturn has helped reduce Conglomeration forces. You have struck a great blow. Now please gather yourselves for the next stage.”
“What about Titan?” someone shouted, as if Anais could hear them. “We just leave them all there to die?”
Anais droned on more about future plans and the bravery of the CPF.
“We left a lot of people behind,” I muttered to Ken, now recovered and suited up. “What are we doing here? We should be going back to save them.”
“We’re surviving,” Amira said. “We’re still here. We can’t help them.”
“Apparently,” Ken said bitterly. The news that we weren’t going back to Titan seemed to have shaken him. His previous bravado had faded away as the drugs left his system. But I was still surprised. Ken had joined the CPF to get into the officer corps. He’d wanted this. Badly. He’d been a full believer. In the Accordance, in our role in it.
Looking over at the remains of Charlie and Delta squads, and the tired faces of my platoon, I realized Titan had left us all broken.
11
After several days crammed into a docking bay, filling it with the stench of human and the acrid odor of struthiforms and carapoids, the platoon was moved out from the carrier and into the rock of one the Trojans.
We were close to the surface. On the second day, one of the walls blew out and sucked half a dozen people away.
The Rockhopper’s “no shucking” rule became ironclad. We walked around in armor or huddled together in the carved-out end of a tunnel.
“Millions of miles through outer space, kitted with cutting-edge weapons, and we’re sleeping in a cave,” Ken noted.
Seven plastic buckets spaced out around our spot captured water dripping slowly, like honey, from a broken pipeline over our heads. Accordance had installed a gravity plate somewhere so we could walk around the asteroid, but it was a third of Earth’s gravity. And it was strung through the center of the rock, which meant weird things happened if you turned your neck too quickly or turned a corner.
All night long we lay and listened to the drip, drop, drip.
A few miners came by on the second day with a large auger and some baffles. They’d drilled through the rock, breaking out into the vacuum. As the air whistled away, they calmly installed the baffles, sealant, and then a simple plastic box over the hole.
“We now have an outhouse,” Ken pronounced in disbelief.
In full armor, we joined the morning mess call, surrounded by humans covered in dirt finishing their drill shifts. They looked exhausted, haggard. More like zombies than real people.
I remembered on the moon seeing Earth First slogans and general anti-Accordance graffiti.
These people didn’t have the energy.
“These conditions are inhumane,” Ken muttered.
Amira raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never heard of the Paris work camps? LA?”
“Those are for terrorists,” Ken said. “Agitators.”
“This is the Accordance,” Amira said. “Half the people on my block were hauled away to work in worse places than this. This is a fucking hotel, Ken.”
“They created infrastructure in my country when no one else would bet on us,” Ken said. “They changed everything. The way things were before they came? My parents would have died. Of hunger. Or disease. The Accordance did many things for humanity; it’s just that the little slice of a percent that stood on the backs of others before the Pacification are upset they are no longer Earth’s royalty.”
I stood up with a ball of Accordance human-optimized feed in one hand, and a globule of water in the other. Since the retreat, with nothing to do, they’d been circling around each other. Amira, raised on the streets that fought back against occupation, black market nano-ink proudly marking her as hostile, criminal, to the Accordance. Ken, raised by his family to be a part of the officer corps working for the Accordance.
Maybe our friendship had only been that of three people stuck in a foxhole together, trying to survive.
Now we were living in a cave that dripped, shitting into outer space, and eating Accordance glop while we waited for . . .
. . . I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for.
Min Zhao waited for me as I got back to our cave and shucked out of the armor. When I stepped out, my paper underclothes soaked and stained with sweat, she said, “We need to figure out how to divide the squads. Charlie . . .”
“Not now, Max. I just need to sit and eat my human kibble.”
I sat on my cot and nibbled at the tasteless ball of gray playdough.
Zhao shot me a look, and I sighed. “Seriously, Zhao, leave me the fuck alone.”
Looking hurt, she nodded curtly and retreated back down the cave.
+ + +
Shriek came to find us a few days later, once we’d fallen into a schedule of clomping over to the meals and then getting back to our cave. We cleaned it up as best we could, but we were jockeying against every other soldier among a variety of species stuck in the warrens inside the asteroids the Accordance had pulled together to make the yard.
We were still showering with wet napkins and flushing them out the crude space toilet. Welcome to the Trojan point, where clumps of asteroids followed the majestic ringed planet around in the same orbit. And humans flushed their waste and trash out into the same trailing orbit.
“What are we waiting for?” Ken had asked, and no one had an answer for him.
The Accordance had us in storage for now. We’d been saved from Titan, and now we weren’t needed as the spaces on the board got rearranged.
“You need to take advantage of this time,” Shriek said. “I can give Amira directions to the human holds. There are places to drink, eat, and enjoy the company of the other humans here. You are no longer on the front wing of the attack, and you need to realize this.”
“We’ve been fighting for a long time, Shriek. You don’t need to lecture us,” I said.
“You barely survived a full evacuation. You need to spin about in the wind and realize that, just for now, being alive is its own amazing moment,” the struthiform said. “Because if you do not, what was the point of trying so hard to stay alive.”
“Ostrich ET’s gotta point,” Amira said.
“Alright, armor up,” I said. “We’ll go over, check things out.”
/> “No armor,” Shriek said.
“Rockhoppers don’t shuck,” I said.
“Then you stay here, in this damp cave, by yourselves. Well done, humans, you have made staying alive as exciting as a scabby infection.”
But I knew with certainty that leaving armor meant leaving us vulnerable. “Bravo, Charlie, Amira, Ken. Let’s go investigate.”
Groans floated through the cave.
“Tomorrow we switch,” I said. “We need people standing by the armor. We will not leave it alone.”
Shriek clicked approvingly and led us off through the tunnels and warrens of the asteroid. “This will be good, my little adopted humans,” he said happily. “Follow along, follow along.”
I was counting the turns back.
Just in case.
Our party came out of the tunnels into a large cavern filled with shanty structures made of leftover plastic panels, recycled paper partitions, all of it rigged with lights clamped onto angular, leaning structures.
People stared out suspiciously from behind peepholes, while in the makeshift alleyways the sound of chatter bounced around.
Due to the low gravity, some of the buildings looked like kids’ experimental popsicle-stick buildings. Stories high and bundled together by twine. Yet standing.
Shriek led us through the dense clusters of leaning buildings and into the first floor of a wicker dome with a neon sign that blazed the name from the apex: THE PARLIAMENT.
Inside, where it was hazy due to the light gravity, low-circulating air, and total lack of carbon dioxide scrubbers, people crammed up against tables and the bar.
“What do they serve?” Amira asked. “More Accordance gloop?”
“No,” Shriek said. “Rocket fuel.”
“What?”
“Or,” Shriek said, “more like station-adjustment fuel. I believe there are rockets that use forms of alcohol. Someone, somewhere, managed to confuse the purchase ordering forms for rocket fuel and get alcohol delivered instead. Then the humans handling the loading diverted it.”
“How is it that the alien in our platoon figured out where the bar was?” Ken asked.
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