by Karen Bao
FIVE THOUSAND BATTERER TROOPS SPILL into the Dugout’s dingy subterranean hangar, their teal uniforms vibrant against the concrete walls. Enormous spacecraft dock; towering, storm-gray rovers that hold hundreds of personnel crawl out of their bellies. The rovers’ eight long legs are constructed to creep across rough terrain. Their roofs nearly touch the exposed metal struts crisscrossing the hangar’s low ceiling.
After the Batterer pilots park the Champion, the crew, Yinha, and I will have to wear pressure suits to walk through Defense, a small department added to the Dugout almost as an afterthought. The habitat is still leaking air into space because of damage sustained during the invasion.
While the pilots wait for a space to open up, I watch Alex help Wes climb out of their ship. I long to disembark prematurely and join them. Wes leans on Alex, tilts his head toward the Champion, and salutes. That was for me. My heart suddenly feels too big for my chest.
Someone taps my shoulder, interrupting my thoughts. Yinha.
“What I wouldn’t give to know what they’re thinking right now,” she says, pointing her chin at the teal masses of Batterer troops. Of the faces I see, almost all are unreadable. But their hands are shaking, their steps wobbly—I doubt their unsteadiness results from spaceflight alone.
“They look so professional,” Yinha says. “But I can guess what’s on their minds. All the usual questions: What if I suffer? Why should I—not my friends or family back home—risk everything for these strange people? Why, why, why? If there’s anything I’ve learned from watching Earthbound, it’s that they ask questions that don’t have answers.”
That wouldn’t happen on the Moon, where we frame inquiries solely in the spirit and style of scientific experimentation. We would ask nothing that we couldn’t answer by making observations, plugging data into spreadsheets, and running statistical tests. The Committee didn’t appreciate anyone engaging with the big questions—for example, why things were one way, their way, and not another.
“What makes you say that?” I ask.
Yinha sighs, her face softening. “That poor girl, Murray. She had so many questions that day in the park, and she fired them at me like bullets.”
I’d wondered about what they talked about but was afraid to pry.
“She wanted to understand. Why’d the Lunars attack Saint Oda, of all the cities on Earth? Why’d my squad kill her friend but leave Murray to live a smashed-up life? She said that the typical Odan answer—it was God’s will—wasn’t enough. She thought I’d give her something better.”
“Did you?”
Yinha shakes her head. “I said that if we knew why bad things happened to good people, it would justify their suffering. It’s better not to have an answer. Because once we can explain something, it becomes okay.”
I give her a puzzled look.
“Remember how people used to obsess about whether preventing radiation sickness was even possible? Then Asterion made those Gamma-Gone meds, and now we only think about cosmic rays busting our cells for as long as it takes to swallow the pill.”
She’s right. Once we solve a mystery, people get all matter-of-fact about it. They publish some papers, implement new gadgets, and move on.
“A bit of mystery isn’t so awful,” Yinha says, as if reading my mind.
While we’ve spoken, the Champion has slid into a tight space between two identical ships. Yinha grabs her pressure suit from the wall of the hold, preparing to disembark.
“Murray was so disappointed,” she continues. “She thought I’d tie up all the loose ends in her life, because I was there when the strings unraveled. Wherever she is now, wherever her atoms have spread—the sea or the sky or even space itself—I hope she has a better view of things.”
“We’ll give her one,” I say, stepping into my pressure suit. How clearly would Murray see us, and how uncluttered would the skies be, if this war came to an end?
I accept that we don’t know the answer. At least for now.
* * *
Outside the ship, Base II’s Defense Department feels haunted. Dovetail’s invasion has killed the power; only the red-orange emergency lights still function.
Clothed in a pressure suit, Yinha leads the Batterers and the recently returned Dovetailers past empty barracks, deserted mess halls, and gymnasiums full of crooked exercise equipment. Aside from a few scrapes on the walls, it’s as Asterion said: not much damage. But the air pressure gauge in my helmet gives a frighteningly low reading.
Moving fast, I catch up to Alex, and together he and I flank Wes. I can’t see Wes’s face through his visor, but he leans on Alex, gait uneven, movements stiff, as he’s trying not to break the new scabs over his leg wounds.
I offer him my gloved hand, and his palm lands in mine, heavier than expected. How much invisible weight does he bear on those shoulders? I wonder. Will he ever leave it behind?
THE FIVE THOUSAND BATTERERS INUNDATE the Dugout’s decrepit main corridor. Like the other Lunars, I can’t peel my eyes away from the soldiers—in their teal uniforms, they look like a wave that’ll wash us away. Dovetailers whisper to one another and children clutch their parents’ hands in fear, but none cry or turn aside. The Committee has conditioned us well, taught us never to show grief or fear. Civilians and soldiers alike hold themselves with robotic poise, even though I know they’re disturbed by the Singularity’s destruction and the subsequent arrival of scores of foreigners.
I sit with Dovetail’s leaders in the center of the second-floor balcony, surrounded by other Dovetailers, all of us looking down at the Earthbound. Anka positions herself in front of me—we’re the same height now—as if to shield me from the Batterer tide below. Cygnus watches the soldiers march past, his lips counting the rows. He’s improving, I think to myself. He can look at the guns strapped at their hips without flinching. But has his hacking assignment gotten any easier for him?
I remember our reunion, when they came to Defense to see me during my shift. A hug from Anka, a quick squeeze on the shoulder from Cygnus, zero tears or shouts of joy. Maybe they’re going numb too, not daring to hope or feel happiness.
Aside from the soldiers, there’s not much to see. The Dugout’s cramped interior lacks Base I’s glamor and even the Free Radical’s sleek minimalism. The floor plan follows the lunar lava tubes into which the base was built; the departments were constructed out of swells in the tubes. No windows disrupt the tunnel walls’ matrix of concrete reinforced with steel beams. The Dugout looks like what it is: an emergency shelter, a place where not even sunlight can break in. Branching off from the main hallway, the tiny, sad underground greenhouses grow plants for food and oxygen by blasting them with overhead lamps. A gigantic emergency bunker burrows even farther down. The Committee ordered it built before the Battle of Peary, knowing that they needed a refuge within a refuge to survive our then-enemies’ most advanced bombs.
Three beeps command everyone’s attention. The corridor quiets, and all heads turn toward us.
Asterion, standing to my left, leaves the group. On his other side are Andromeda, Sol, and most conspicuously, Minister Costa, who wears a shimmering gold suit and turquoise tie.
Yinha’s on my immediate right; Rose hovers next to her, her expression obscured by curtains of pale hair. Her runny nose is a red splotch on her white face, and she sips a steaming hot drink from a utilitarian insulated mug that I recognize as Yinha’s. Rose coughs, and Yinha puts a hand on the small of her back. It gives me a start: Are Yinha and Rose together now? I feel as warm as if I’d sipped from the mug myself, glad that my friends have found love and companionship even in these trying times.
Older Dovetailers might not feel the same. They grew up hearing from the Committee that same-sex relationships interfere with birthrates and thus population stability, or some other nonsense. But it’s about time they stopped believing those ideas.
Minister Costa clears his throat and
steps forward, his water-hair wavering around his head, betraying his nerves.
“Today marks the first peaceful interaction between Battery Bay and an extraterrestrial people,” Costa says. His shaky tone doesn’t foster confidence, but the Dovetailers hang on to him with their eyes. His troops could lead us to victory. “We are united today not only by a common enemy, but by common principles.”
There’s a huffing noise behind me. I turn to see my sister crossing her arms and rolling her eyes. She fixes me with a raised eyebrow. I should tell her to behave, but I don’t. Anka’s heard enough about principles, I think to myself. He needs to show us something real.
Costa offers his friendship and loyalty, expecting ours in return. Behind me, Ariel is talking to Alex, holding Alex’s paper notebook open between them. Ariel’s chin hovers a centimeter above Alex’s shoulder, and his eyes study the young Earthbound man with . . . something more than admiration. I’d suspected for a while that Alex’s magnetic personality had attracted the intellectually restless Ariel even more than most.
And Ariel’s feelings haven’t escaped him; Alex looks both depressed and slightly ill at ease.
Umbriel smacks his brother on the arm, and Ariel stops talking just as Costa wraps up his speech to courteous clapping.
Below me, thousands of Dovetailers stare up at Costa with wide, desperate eyes. Free us, they seem to beg, and we will do whatever you ask.
THE BATTERER SOLDIERS HAVE A SOMEWHAT icy quality about them, something I sense rather than see or hear. They say “Hello” to us but “Hey there, oh?” to one another; they make excuses to avoid sitting or conversing with Dovetail troops in their free time, and groups of them guffaw with each other but put on solemn masks when they notice our approach.
In the main hallway, Cygnus and I pass a trio of Batterer soldiers who stare at us for a heartbeat too long. At the sight of their half-meter-long handguns, my brother shudders and reaches for my arm. Up close, the weapons are still too much for him.
“What’s wrong with them?” Cygnus whispers. We’re en route to his job in InfoTech so that I can catch up on what he and the other specialists have been working on. Rose will update me on space battle logistics too, which I’ll need to know when I fly into the skirmishes taking place between the Earth and Moon.
“They act like we’re not here,” Cygnus says. “And stare like we’re the nutcases.”
“They may be homesick, Cygnus,” I say. “Don’t worry, we didn’t upset them.”
I don’t admit that the Batterers seem to dislike us, for some mysterious reason, as much as they tolerate us. The thought makes me uneasy. Being comrades-in-arms requires a stronger bond.
“Yeah.” Cygnus releases my arm. “Homesick. Makes sense, I guess. The food’s not much here, and the apartments are gritty.”
True. The tiny quarters in which my family lives have such low ceilings that Cygnus bumps his head on light fixtures, and we can hear our neighbors’ frightened conversations through the thin walls. A young couple with a two-year-old daughter, they’re terrified that if she survives the war, she won’t develop normal social skills because of the environment in which she’s growing up.
A lone Batterer officer, about to cross paths with us, nods curtly at me. Recognizing him as the Champion’s pilot, I raise two fingers to salute him, but he swerves to the side, taking a meter-wide detour to avoid contact.
Cygnus plods along, watching his feet. “I’m homesick too,” he says. “I miss our old base. But being here, away from where all that happened”—Mom’s death, his capture, and so many other tragedies—“it’s helping me.”
I turn to look at him, my worries about the Batterers temporarily banished. “How?” The burst of hope in my voice surprises me. “By letting you forget?”
“I’ll never forget,” Cygnus says. “But I have to move on.”
* * *
Rose seems to have slept in the InfoTech Department, or not at all. Her cold hasn’t improved since yesterday, and her sister is still dead. If this meeting wasn’t so critical, I would feel guilty for intruding upon her. No, scratch that. I feel guilty anyway.
Despite her obvious grief, Rose spares a smile for me and my brother as we enter the dark intelligence headquarters. Rows of desks with HeRPs stretch across the floor, strings of code swirling across the domed screens. A grim-faced hacker sits behind each one. The bitter scent of Three-Molar Coffee mixed with the stress-induced body odor of thirty information specialists hits me full force, and I blink back the tears that spring to my eyes.
As Cygnus takes his place in the second row, Rose waves me over to a corner where we won’t disturb anyone. On the backmost, rightmost monitor, Rose pulls up a 3-D projection of the Earth, the Moon, and the hundreds of blocky satellites swinging in elliptical orbits around both.
“Sorry I’ve made the model so big,” she says, sniffling. “My eyes aren’t the best.”
The entire diorama measures four human wingspans across—three, if the arms in question are Umbriel’s. He and I have seen each other once, in passing, and I miss him despite the fact that we’re geographically close again. He hasn’t told me about his experiences here, and I haven’t told him about the wonder and horror of Earth.
Earth. In Rose’s model, the planet’s about the size of my head, and the Moon so small I could grab and throw it with one hand. Despite being tiny as a fingerprint, the satellites look menacing, like fossilized cicadas and flies.
“As you know from all your flying around, space isn’t flat.” Rose pokes an icon on the HeRP, and the background blankness representing space shades over in gradations of gray. “The darker colors indicate greater gravitational force, and the lighter indicates less. See how the area near Earth is almost black, near the Moon is dark gray, and the area in between is nearly white? Gravity shapes the battlefield out there. Being in an area with less gravity is like being on a hilltop: it’s easier to lob something and hit your enemy, who’s below you, than to throw it upward.”
I nod, transfixed. I’ve felt gravity’s pull outside—invisible, inaudible—and have had to bend to its will, just as when Pacifian bullets rained down on us in Battery Bay, and we could not retaliate with the same weapons.
Rose goes on, the speed of her speech increasing with her enthusiasm. Some of the sadness leaves her as she talks. It’s inspiring to see, but I can’t forget that we’re using these maps to kill and avoid being killed.
“These five points are the highest of the high ground, where the gravitational fields of the Earth and Moon cancel out, and it’s equally effortless to attack either body.” Extending her arms, Rose points at five spots far from Earth, near the Moon’s orbit, each marked with a flashing yellow icon. The area around them is shaded white. “But only two of the points are stable. Put anything in an unstable point and it’ll fall out of orbit. The satellites Turner 1 and 3, which the Committee launched a century ago, move with each stable point as the positions of the Earth and Moon shift. We took control of Turner 3 last month, and have since warded off denial of service attacks and other grit.”
Rose glides into the band of metal satellites orbiting the Moon, and the light makes her skin look pearly. “Red tags indicate the thermonuclear warheads, and the tiny ones with green tags are active communications satellites used by the Pacifians. We’ve got a team of nine that reads and listens to everything that passes through there, and another team monitoring where the Committee’s spies have hacked us.”
“Battery Bay ending its movement to Great Barrier Reef!” shouts one of the information specialists. Her voice is low for a woman’s. “Current coordinates eleven degrees south, one hundred seventy-eight degrees east.”
“Duly noted!” Rose calls, trying to sound peppy. Turning back to me, she sighs and drops the mask. “We have people communicating with Earthbound allies and checking every city’s location to prevent surprise attacks. Other team members intercep
t and decrypt Committee communications.”
Once upon a time, Cygnus would’ve loved those jobs, and it saddens me to think he isn’t doing them now. “What about my brother?” I ask.
Rose’s pale eyes drift from mine, and pain, even guilt, flits across her face. “The first job I gave him—on the team that’s trying to hack into satellite-deployed nuclear weapons—seemed to . . . remind him of things. He was running proxies, keyscramblers, and other network defenses . . .” Like he was afraid of getting caught again. “It almost crashed his HeRP.”
I nod, remembering the near-disastrous flight from the Free Radical to Earth. As I’d feared, Cygnus was the cause of Rose’s “personnel issues”—he must’ve failed to take control of the weapons barring our ship’s way.
“So I switched him to orbit tracking. He watches each satellite’s trajectory around Earth and alerts us if anything wobbles or veers off course. Minimal coding involved. He’s good at it, very detail-oriented.”
Rose looks up at me, searching my expression for something: forgiveness, perhaps, for assigning Cygnus a horrendous first task. I hesitate, and then give her a smile. She was only following Sol’s orders and making him useful. But does orbit tracking fit the bill? It seems like a job Rose invented out of pity.
“Has he flagged anything important?” I ask.
“He’s alerted us to a couple of things. False alarms,” Rose says, and I feel the crush of disappointment. Before my brother’s capture, he could’ve out-coded everyone in this room. Now, he’s merely . . . here. Watching satellites move across his screen, serene concentration mellowing his expression. He sometimes zooms in on particular objects, studies them closely, and then zooms out again, seeming to conclude that everything is normal. He doesn’t seem useful, but he looks . . . okay. Okay is better than I’d hoped for.
