The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  “Just relax, smile, and one, two, three. . . . Mr. Hart, what prompted you to volunteer to join the fight against the Conglomeration?”

  I licked my lips and tried not to look at the drone and its spiderlike clusters of unblinking camera lenses. “I . . . just want to do my bit to serve, and protect our world.”

  “And how did your parents feel about this, Mr. Hart? Are they proud you joined the CPF?”

  I gritted my teeth. “I think they understand why it was important that I make this choice.”

  Anais smiled broadly. “So they weren’t happy about it?”

  “No,” I told him. “No, they were not.”

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. Hart. And thank you for your service. Your world appreciates it.”

  The drone flew away, and Anais leaned forward. “Off the record, kid: You’re going to have to do a lot better than that if you want your family to stay out of trouble.”

  Kid? Really? He was calling me a kid? Who the fuck was he? “I gave you what you needed,” I snapped. “I’m here, aren’t I? You got me to join, now leave me the hell alone.”

  Anais grabbed my collar and yanked me forward. When I tried to pull away from him, he tightened his grip. “Listen,” he hissed. “I saw you tuning out the speech the sergeant gave back there. You think it’s all just words. But what’s out there, it’s real. There’s a black hole of an alien empire out there, reshaping the galaxy for its own purposes. It is old, impla­cable, and more alien than the aliens around us. The CPF needs minds and bodies to fight for the Accordance. This isn’t about your wounded pride, or your family’s. It’s about something far, far bigger. Your usefulness as a tool to the CPF is just beginning. So get with the fucking program and start selling it, or it’s going to get far worse, recruit.”

  4

  Fifteen recruits, dressed up in their grays, stood with me in the train car as the countryside swept by at five hundred miles an hour on the high-speed rail line from New York to Richmond. The sort of high-speed rail that Americans had never been able to build until the Occupation, as Accordance propaganda was always fond of pointing out. “You are about to meet the acting president of the Regional American Council,” Anais said.

  He walked back and forth in front of us.

  “This is a big fucking deal,” Anais said slowly. “President Barnett has been an important part of Colonial Administration for a decade now. You will shake his hand. You will answer his questions. Then you will circulate and shake more hands. Be polite, be enthusiastic. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” we shouted back.

  Anais sighed and then practically growled back at us. “How many times do I have to tell you there are no ‘sirs’ here in the CPF! The Arvani don’t want tribal honorifics. Drop that shit. And definitely drop that shit in front of any Accordance. Got it?”

  “Yes, s—” We choked back the follow-up word as Anais stared us down.

  Once Anais left the train car, we relaxed.

  I’d expected boot camp. But yesterday I’d been peeled off from my fellow trainees, stuffed into dress grays, and ordered out into an oval courtyard. A wasp-shaped Accordance ship spiraled down out of the sky, engines kicking up grass as it settled on its skids, and Anais had prodded us aboard.

  I paused near the heavy door that swung up, looking over at the bulging engine pods sticking out from either side. Deep inside the engines, dark matter collided and swirled around, as advanced to human nuclear technology as a reactor might be to someone accustomed to shoveling coal into a steam-powered engine.

  “What’s the matter, recruit?” Anais asked. “Never been flying before?”

  “Not in an Accordance jumpship,” I said.

  “Not a jumpship,” Anais said. “Jumpships go to orbit. The engines on this aren’t powerful enough, though the frame looks similar. We call these hoppers. Intra-atmosphere only.”

  The engines kicked the ship off the ground, rattling us around inside as we bumped and shook into the air. A few hundred feet up, the pods rotated, and then a subsonic thump shivered through the hopper as we sped up. A minute later the hopper hit supersonic.

  After the flight from New York to London, we’d publicly helped other recruits get tattooed and inducted into the Colonial Protection Forces. And I’d been interviewed again about my parents. Again I’d all but disowned them, and talked about my pride in protecting my world. Only this time, with Anais watching me like a hawk.

  At the repurposed barracks of Windsor Castle, we’d jogged around the courtyards for the cameras, waved, and then boarded another Accordance hopper to Jakarta. And then we’d come back to New York for another recruitment drive. I’d done interviews near the steps of the Empire State Building, which had been converted into a barracks for CPF soldiers.

  And now we approached the city of Richmond.

  “Don’t look so glum,” Hammond told me. An older recruit, in his twenties, he came from a predominantly Accordance-owned area of Harlem. “Make them happy, you get an early discharge and a spot in civil service. Get a job in Colonial Administration and you’re set for life.”

  DC’s ruins swept by our windows. Swamp crept over the rubble of the city. The white, skeletal remains of several walls and some columns flashed by as the rail line cut through the heart of the demolished capital.

  “Colonial Administration is for aliens, you idiot,” another recruit said from the bar. She shook her head. “You’ll work for them, but you’re not going to advance up the political chain.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said.

  “What the hell do you think you know? They’re not going to hand you a position: Your parents are terrorists,” Hammond snapped. “In fact, be careful. You screw this up for us, I’ll fuck you up so hard you won’t even remember your own name. Only reason you’re here is to shit on your parents.”

  I took a deep breath. I wanted to jump across the velvety carpet and punch him in the face.

  But if I blew this opportunity, my parents would suffer.

  Hammond saw the resignation on my face and laughed. “Thought so.”

  I stalked out of the train car to try to get some space to myself to stew. I wandered out to look at the other inhabitants headed for Richmond. The rich and powerful, the humans who worked with their alien rulers to help keep everything down here running nice and smoothly. They sipped champagne and chatted about stock prices; their eyes widened when they saw my uniform.

  I wasn’t on duty. I didn’t have to suffer their inane questions and chatter, so I just kept walking. I stopped when I reached the locked doors leading to the alien section of the train.

  No humans past this point.

  I turned around and walked back.

  + + +

  Acting president Barnett took over the capitol building in Richmond as his private estate when he ascended to power in the Colonial Administration. Through the heavily guarded gates, we could see the tall white building within Accordance-built walls that defended the complex.

  Between us and the walls: hundreds of protestors. Not nearly as thick a crowd as New York, but still determined.

  “Jesus, you’d think they’d have learned by now,” Hammond said.

  “Okay recruits,” Anais shouted. “You’re in after our guests get rolling. Shoulders back, beam with pride, and let’s get inside.”

  “What about the protestors?” I asked. They didn’t look disci­plined. And they weren’t standing in any authorized zone.

  Anais looked blankly at me. “What about them?”

  Hammond shoved me forward and hissed, “Grow a pair.”

  We staggered forward. The upper-crust guests roared ahead in armored vehicles, struthiform soldiers running alongside them. Unlike the armor on the soldiers in New York, this black-and-red armor covered the aliens entirely. They ran easily, joints making a loud snicking sound. Powered armor, I realized. The
struthiforms were as protected as the vehicles, and far more dangerous.

  It didn’t take more than a few seconds for the fifteen of us to fall in line and walk. Our routine fell into place easily, even after just a few days of practice: Wave for camera drones. Look like excited recruits.

  Inside there would be good food. All we had to do was shake politicians’ hands. Pose next to the human machine that kept Accordance interests on Earth running smoothly.

  And all I had to do was try not to think of my parents seeing the images.

  “This isn’t like the other protests,” someone said, eyeing the crowds shouting at us. Usually we heard words like “traitor” or “collaborator.” Since the occupation, and then Pacification, most countries had been following the same pattern as the one in the Americas: peaceful protest. Carefully organized, very publicized.

  The Pacification came after the occupation, when humanity rose up to fight on the streets and the Accordance responded. At the time I was only five, but I’d watched the grainy, green nighttime livestreams of hunks of rock arcing across the sky to descend on Jeddah, Moscow, and Cleveland. The plumes of debris that kept rising and rising into the air, all that was left of the cities.

  The Accordance did not like dissent.

  This crowd had worked itself up to spittle-flecking anger.

  “Are those flags?” Hammond asked, in shock. “They’re illegal.”

  I recognized the X pattern of stars and stripes. “It used to be the flag for the South,” I told him.

  “Like Old Mexico?” he asked.

  He didn’t recognize the flag. No one taught indigenous history anymore. Accordance-approved history downplayed smaller regional history for a big sweep. Indigenous history is not conducive to their desire to create a global human culture and to reduce regionalism.

  That was how my father had lost his job at NYU. Teaching US history in too much detail. Not enough focus on the UN and larger regional commonalities, as the Accordance ordered.

  “It’s nationalistic,” Hammond muttered, disgust in his voice.

  My father’s lecturing voice bubbled to the tip of my tongue as I prepared to educate Hammond. But a bottle of liquid struck the ground in front of us and exploded.

  “Molotov cocktail!” someone shouted. Fire spread across the road, separating the line of recruits.

  Ahead of us, on the other side of the fire, I saw Anais look back. He spoke into his wrist, annoyed. One of the recruits swore up a storm as he kicked and stamped out his smoldering pants.

  The struthiform soldiers snapped back around in unison, flocking together as they loped through the guttering fire left by the bottle’s debris. They broke free of their tight cluster a second later as another bottle arced up over the crowd at them.

  The foremost struthiform leapt twenty feet into the air, following the arc of the homemade explosive, and scattered protestors when it landed in their midst. A man struck the alien on the back with a tire iron, and the struthiform backhanded him.

  I watched the man fly through the air, arms flailing until he hit the wall with a wet sound. He slumped to the ground and didn’t move.

  “Get over here,” Anais shouted. I realized it was the second or third time he’d yelled at us: We’d just frozen in place.

  Several gunmen mixed in with the crowd opened fire on the struthiforms. Bullets thwacked against alien armor over the crackle of little fires left from the Molotov cocktails.

  Not all the protestors had been planning violence. Most of them scattered. I fixed on one mother and her son, who looked about eight years old, as they ran past. Her head snapped back and misted red blood in the air around us, then she pitched to the ground.

  The kid fell with her, eyes wide and screaming. He scrabbled in the dirty road and picked up a rock.

  I ran. Not even thinking twice.

  He threw the rock past me at the nearest Accordance soldier. When it struck armor, the struthiform spun and aimed. Shielding the kid behind me, I held my hands up and winced, closing my eyes.

  The shot never came.

  Anais grabbed my hair and yanked me out of my half crouch. “Move!” he screamed. Struthiform soldiers fell in on either side of us.

  Everyone retreated through the gates, which snapped shut after us with startling speed.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Anais shouted at me. “What the fucking hell were you thinking?”

  “Sir . . .”

  I bit my tongue and let the last part of the word hang in the air as Anais glared at me. “You stood down an Accordance soldier. You’re lucky it didn’t just shoot you.”

  “It was going to shoot a child,” I said.

  “You should have stood aside and let it do what it needed to do,” Anais said. He grabbed my elbow hard, the points of his fingers digging into the flesh to bruise muscle as he shoved me up the great steps into the capitol building. Two human guards in light armor stood on either side of the columns.

  “Inside,” Anais snapped.

  One of the recruits sat on the ground, blood covering her grays. A medic squatted next to her, sealing a wound with a spray can of bioglue and checking vitals.

  We were in a foyer. I could see that beyond the doors a reception under crystal chandeliers was quietly going on. Men in suits, struthiforms with red command strips located just above their wings on their tailored uniforms. A carapoid lumbered around a corner of the room, moving a large table full of drinks into place.

  And I noticed something that made my mouth go dry. A spherical tank of clear water wrapped around the bullet-­shaped flesh of what looked like an octopus, but most certainly wasn’t.

  Arvani. The tentacles under the clear, body-conforming tank were mechanized, wrapped around the Arvani’s natural tentacles. They undulated, shifting the tank expertly around as the alien rose up on the tips of its tentacles to look at a human politician eye to eye.

  The creators and leaders of the Accordance.

  Only a handful of Arvani lived down on the surface. They preferred their space stations, filled with giant pools that let them re-create their oceanic home environs. When they did live on the surface, they preferred the coasts.

  A politician ignored the whole reception to stride through the doors toward us. He carried a bottle in one hand, a glass in another. Acting president Barnett, seventy years old, scowled as his pinched, leathery face regarded the scene in his foyer.

  Anais left to talk to someone by a marble pedestal. Barnett focused on me. “I just looked over the video. You’re the idiot who stood in front of the kid?”

  My mouth dry, I nodded.

  Barnett motioned me closer. He rubbed absentmindedly at a dry, bloodshot eye. “I have five women waiting for me back in my bedroom. Can you imagine that? A whole damn harem. They’re buck naked and standing along the side of the mirrored wall for me. You know how many pills I have to take just to keep up with that? You can’t imagine. Maybe you can, you’re young. I’ll bet you can imagine all sorts of things. Multiply it, son. I’ve done things that would’ve shocked even me when I was your age.”

  This was not what I expected. I also didn’t want to think about the president naked and sweaty . . . No. Just no. What the hell was happening?

  “You know,” Barnett said. “I used to hate people like you.”

  “Younger . . . ?” I floundered. I saw this man on screens all the time. Yet here he stood in front of me, swaying slightly.

  “Brown,” Barnett said bluntly. He poured some of the amber alcohol into the glass in his other hand. He drank it like someone thirsty would down a glass of water. “Brown people.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I stood and blinked.

  “You look tan. Hard to tell. Maybe you’re out in the sun too much. Maybe you have a background. Where’s your mother from?” Barnett moved closer to me. The smell of alcohol
rolled out of his pores. I was surprised his clothes weren’t dripping with it.

  I didn’t want to answer. But this was the acting president of the Americas, and I could recognize the ton of shit I’d stepped into. “Puerto Rico,” I stammered.

  He nodded knowingly. “Thought so. Latina. Nice. . . . During the occupation, I linked up with my fellow soldiers in units all over the South. We negotiated with the Accordance to stand down. It was the Federal’s fight with the ETs, not ours. We saw a chance to rise again, we took it. Now, from Richmond to Tampa, ain’t nothing but the right kind of churches, and the right kind of folk. And you know what?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t.

  “We all still have problems. The poverty, that didn’t go away. Those people out there, they’re still facing seeing their children get drafted. Or ‘volunteered.’ That’s why they’re angry. Angry because they can’t eat. Because they barely have any work to go around, unless it’s for the Accordance. Angry because there’s still some war off in the distance. And they’re angry at me. I thought it would get better. I was wrong. And now, I know things. The Accordance: They’ve shown me what’s coming. And I’m going to eat, screw, and party until I drop dead. I’d recommend you try the same.”

  Anais smoothly appeared next to us both. “Mr. President, your presence is needed.”

  Barnett glanced over at the two Arvani in their mechanized water tanks waiting for him. “Well, fuck. Here we go. Time to be obsequious and do my duty.”

  Anais held up an open palm with a pair of blue pills in it. “Your personal aide suggested I pass these on.”

  “Ah.” Barnett picked up one of them and eyed it. “You’re going to make me sober up. Do you know how much expensive bourbon it took for me to get to where I am right now? Never mind, rhetorical question.”

  He swallowed the pills dry, blinked, and took a deep breath.

  Anais indicated that Barnett should go first, but the presi­dent grabbed his shoulder. “The Arvani are going to lecture me. Before I go, Anais, make sure this boy is taken care of. If the Accordance bayoneted a kid out there, that mob outside would have overrun my estate.”