The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  LSP had once been something else, before the aliens had deemed it unusable and demolished it. Another set of letters. “At least,” my father had told me, “they kept a human name on the port.”

  Most of the humans in the port flaunted expensive suits and waited in glassed-off areas with subdued lighting. They sat on lounge chairs where attendants came by to take their orders. We watched them eat, laugh, and sashay around.

  Someone pushed a pink dog in a stroller back and forth across the waiting area, cooing at it, feeding it tiny snacks.

  The hushed, quiet space behind that glass could have been mine. I could have been mixing with those upper-class civilians, enjoying finger food and traveling the world. If I hadn’t thrown away my usefulness as a propaganda tool.

  Now . . . I rubbed my short hair.

  What was taking so long? We’d been just sitting here for twenty minutes, hands on shoulders, bored.

  “Look at that,” Keiko said with wonder in his voice. “I saw her get hauled off for beating a kid up. You saw that, right?”

  I leaned far forward. At the very end of the line the girl with silver eyes and still-purple hair sat on the ground as two human instructors conferred over her.

  “Smell that,” I said, my attention drifting across the hall as my stomach growled.

  For those in a hurry, a Brooklyn brownstone had been pulled apart, brick by brick, and painstakingly reassembled in the terminal. And on the steps, in front of it, an “authentic” food cart sold hot dogs and cheeseburgers.

  “Did you get a chance to eat before getting shoved out to the beach?” Keiko asked.

  “No,” I said. “Look, we’re about to be shot off to who the hell knows where. We’ve been drinking balls of juice in round slime containers. Because it’s optimal and easy to feed us that way. This might be our last chance to eat something real for a long, long time.”

  “We have to stay put,” Keiko said. “They’ll kill us. . . .”

  I looked down the line. The instructors were still focused on paperwork and the purple-haired girl. “Last chance,” I hissed. “Even if I get in trouble: It’ll be all on me. I promise, it’ll be worth it.”

  Recruits on either side had been listening in. “Just grab my shoulder when he goes,” someone suggested.

  “How you gonna pay?” someone else asked.

  I glanced back down the line. The instructors had their backs to me. I let go of Keiko.

  “Shit, man, don’t do this,” he whined.

  I lit out away from the group, quickly, just to get distance. Then I walked casually over. “Hey,” I called out.

  The older lady at the cart looked startled. Her blue eyes darted back and forth. “I can’t help you run, son,” she hissed. “It’s humans-only in this terminal anyway, you can’t go anywhere without passing a checkpoint.”

  “No,” I spread my hands. “This is our last chance to get any real food. Before . . .”

  She let out a deep breath.

  “Look, my father’s name is Thomas Hart. I don’t have any way to pay on me, they took everything away, but if you contact him, he’ll . . .”

  “What do you want?” she asked quickly. She just wanted to get rid of me, I realized.

  “Anything I can carry,” I said quickly. She slid me a box of doughnuts and five hot dogs on a cardboard tray. I eased back across into the line.

  “Holy shit, holy shit,” Keiko hissed as I slid back into line. “Holy shit.”

  “Come on. Pass these along. Hurry up! Drop the box on the floor when we’re done, put a doughnut in your pocket, a hot dog in the other.” I stuffed my hot dog into my mouth.

  Oh man. Never had street food tasted . . . So. Fucking. Good.

  “Move on up!” the instructors shouted, turning around, their paperwork done. Actually, no, I realized: A struthiform instructor had arrived. The human instructors had been waiting for the real leadership to show up.

  The doughnut scraped sugar on the outside of my pocket, but I wiped it off best I could.

  “Let’s go! Keep it moving! Get aboard the jumpship.” I chewed my hot dog surreptitiously as I passed the instructors waving us through down to our new transport.

  The wedge-shaped jumpship’s blistered and pockmarked skin, which I’d glimpsed near the docking tube, meant it had seen quite a few reentries. There were no portholes, no screens. Just ribbed metal hull and foam seats for us. Two carapoid pilots sat behind a bulkhead and door, however. They shut it as we entered.

  “Buckle in. You should know how to use a buckle. So get it done already! You, sit. Sit there. With your buddy.”

  Minutes later the ship rose through the air. I could feel engine pods under our feet, and then even heavier Accordance engines kicking on behind us. This was no hopper. The engines behind us growled with energy and shoved us back into our seats. Manhattan’s Accordance-spired skyline fell away as we tilted toward the clouds and flew up.

  With alacrity. The pressure of acceleration continued to press on my chest. Whenever I thought the squeezing had to stop, it continued to press harder.

  Until, with a gasp, it went away.

  Weightlessness. A big smile grew on my face, despite myself. There were no portholes, but I knew we were in orbit. I knew that from here, if I could see anything, I’d be looking down at the continents and the curve of the Earth.

  “What the fuck is this?” an instructor asked, unbuckling herself to rise up into the air to grab at something.

  It was a doughnut, trailing sugar glaze in the air.

  “What is unauthorized food doing on my transport?” the instructor shouted. Her ponytailed hair bobbed behind her as she looked around. “Who did this?”

  She only got a series of blank looks from my row.

  Another instructor bounced up into the air. “Don’t anyone unbuckle. We’re going to search you. . . .”

  Ken raised a hand. “Instructor: I know!”

  “Rat motherfucker,” I hissed. I barely had time to say even that. One very angry instructor’s face was right up in mine as she positioned herself in the air next to me.

  Then the other.

  The yelling began, and behind them, Ken held up a doughnut of his own and took a bite with a big smile.

  It looked like his natural state of asshole had come back online.

  8

  Everyone poured excitedly out of the docking tube into Tran­quility City. “Hey. Gravity,” someone said.

  “I can’t bounce around like those old astronaut videos. What gives?”

  “Antigravity in the floors,” Ken announced. “When my family visited Tranquility, they told us humans aren’t allowed dense attractor technology.”

  “Antigravity,” someone chimed in.

  “Dense. Attractor. Technology,” Ken repeated.

  That was why the one human space station struggling in orbit still had people floating around in it. And our transport, a cheap craft used to move recruits around, had none either.

  But somewhere underfoot, Accordance engineers had laid down a grid of material that pulled us all down toward it. Immensely expensive, and done just so that they could be comfortable here on the moon.

  The cargo bay’s vaulted ceilings stretched far overhead, like a giant’s ribcage. Robotic forklifts with long, articulated, spiderlike arms scurried around the football-sized open floor, pulling square containers off five-story racks that they sometimes had to climb up to reach.

  “I saw a whole program about the people they flew to the moon to do the construction,” Keiko said. This part of the city had been dug out by humans helping run alien-built mining machines. The end of the cargo bay was a massive airlock designed for giants, with train tracks running through it into the bay.

  “Okay recruits, keep walking!”

  We trooped out of the busy cargo bay in obedient lines and snake
d our way into Tranquility City’s subways and tunnels. Then up a series of escalators, everyone still making sure to keep a hand on the shoulder of the recruit in front of them.

  The familiar architecture of Accordance spires appeared when we broke street level.

  “Fuck me,” Keiko said. “We’re on the surface of the moon.”

  “Keep moving!” the instructors shouted as we stumbled, looking around.

  “Nothing like on a screen,” I said, awed and also stumbling after the recruit in front of me.

  Translucent material capped the streets between buildings, letting us look up into the black sky. Bright light dripped from luminescent globes and strips, filling shadows and crevices with a soft green light to augment the natural sunlight. Gray hills circled around the city where the streets ended, plunging back underground.

  “I thought I’d see stars,” someone said.

  “Too much light. Washes it out. Just like at a stadium.”

  “It’s Earth,” Keiko whispered as we turned the gentle curve of an Accordance skyscraper’s base.

  It hung in the sky, blue and small. Everyone stopped as they looked up. The entire line bunched into a crowd. I craned my neck, ignoring the busy street.

  “What’s that?” someone else asked. A comet-like silver shape high overhead occluded the Earth briefly, casting us in a flitting shadow before moving on.

  “A Pcholem ship,” someone said. “They came in those ships.”

  “That is a Pcholem. Not a ship. Pcholem.”

  “What?”

  “Move!” a struthiform instructor hissed, coming up alongside us. “Move now.”

  Carapoids moved around us on the street, and more struthi­forms bobbed past to avoid us. The streets ran thick with aliens going about their business. Several water-filled glass bubbles with Arvani inside trundled past.

  “It’s just us,” Keiko said. “We’re the only humans out here.”

  Most humans on the moon worked for the Helium-3 mines, or on Accordance construction.

  We kept moving, still looking up for a last glimpse of home, until we passed under another large airlock at the city’s edges. Humans glanced at us from several small eateries that lined the edge of the oval common area.

  No shiny, green-tinged metal cleaning robots in here. Trash and dirt littered the crosswalks and graffiti filled the walls.

  Welcome to the human section.

  “I gotta go,” Keiko whispered.

  “What?”

  “Bathroom. We’re in a human zone, right? I gotta go.”

  “The instructors are out for my blood already, now we’re going to get noticed again?”

  “That’s not fair,” Keiko said. “As your buddy, I’m going to catch all that shit too. So the least you can do is help me take a dump.”

  I groaned as Keiko raised a hand and waved.

  “What is it?” the nearest instructor asked, her ponytail whipping around.

  “I need to use a bathroom, instructor.”

  “Buddy up. The nearest one is right across the museum. You have ten minutes. If you’re not aboard . . .” She let the missing words hang in the air.

  I wondered what they did to recruits absent without leave here on the moon. The Accordance owned it outright, now. It didn’t belong to humans anymore, even though they could see Tranquility City’s lights from Earth.

  Humans hadn’t been using the planets and their moons, the Accordance had noted. It was better they be developed by a civilization actually able to do so. It would happen anyway. That was the stick. The carrot was the offer to keep autonomy by signing off.

  On Earth, humans still demanded the right to run them­selves directly despite occupation, and would cause trouble to keep that. Here? The Accordance could do anything they wanted.

  Be careful up here, I thought. Make it out the other side.

  “Where’s the museum, instructor?” Keiko asked.

  She pointed between the restaurants across from us. Hand on shoulder, Keiko and I crossed the hundred yards of common area.

  The Apollo Cultural Heritage Preservation Site. The pictures I’d seen had never shown it surrounded by a pair of restaurants filled with tired-looking lunar miners in overalls.

  On the other side of the translucent doors I saw a familiar boxy shape.

  Keiko made a strangled sound. “Bathrooms, here we go.” Right outside the museum, between the nearest restaurant and the museum.

  “I’m going to let go of your shoulder now,” I said.

  “Yeah, whatever.” He scurried inside, and I heard a stall bang shut.

  And just on the other side of the wall from where he squatted, something that took humanity decades to create gathered dust in an exhibit. The pinnacle of achievement in outer space. The farthest a human had ever gone from our world. The Apollo Lunar Module descent stage.

  The Accordance had crossed stars. We had made it to the moon.

  Keiko clamped his hand on my shoulder and I yelped. “You look deep in thought,” he said.

  “Yeah, well.”

  We crossed back. “What were you thinking so hard on? How much we’re going to kick ass at training camp?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but the response never came. A wave of hot energy smacked into the back of my head with a roar. The explosion came a split second later. Or, at least, my awareness of it did.

  Things spun around me until my head smacked into the steel-and-concrete ground.

  Everything faded. I lay still, blinking and looking at the world askew.

  The roar hadn’t stopped. It kept thundering on. A wind rushed past me up toward the ceiling. I wiped blood on my sleeves and twisted around. “Keiko?” I croaked.

  People ran past us, trying to get through the ten-foot-thick doors that trundled toward each other to seal off the human section. They dodged chunks of metal and dirty moon concrete and just barely slid through.

  A flurry of sharp dust whipped around, stinging my throat as I tried to pull in a deep breath.

  “Recruits: on board, now!” an instructor shouted. “In, in, in!”

  “Keiko!” I staggered back in the direction I’d been tossed from and away from the airlock where the instructor stood. “Keiko.”

  “Recruit!”

  I glanced back. No gray shapes stood in line anymore. They’d all boarded. Gotten safely inside the craft that would take us to our training camp. If I ran there, I might make it in. They would have to shut the door soon, to stop losing air.

  Because that was what the wind was: air getting sucked out of the cracked top of the human section. It had been half-buried under one of the hills surrounding Tranquility City, where all the rock and dirt came from.

  Keiko lay next to a chunk of roof, a pool of blood slowly spreading around him. I scrabbled over. A supporting beam the size of a car had pinned his leg, bent it, and trapped him in place.

  I saw white bone when I looked underneath. And more blood. It kept pulsing out the ruined mangle of flesh.

  He stirred slightly, a moan of pain, but his glassy eyes looked through me as I grabbed his bloody hand and squeezed it. “Hold on!” I shouted. “Just hold on.”

  I panted and blinked, dizzy and coughing in the dust still whipping around me. How could I stop the bleeding? We didn’t have belts, and there was so much damn blood.

  And I could barely focus. Or breathe.

  Hands behind me pushed a mask against my face. “Take a deep breath.”

  “Okay. . . .” I turned. Silvered eyes, purple hair. Behind a similar emergency rebreathing mask.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Devlin,” I murmured. Then stronger as oxygen cleared my head. “Devlin!”

  “I’m Amira.” She kicked off one of her boots and unlaced it. “Give him air too. You take a couple of pulls,
give it to him for a couple.”

  “Right.” My senses rushed back as my brain got moving again. Three deep breaths, then I got the mask on Keiko. “Do you know what to do?”

  “I’m reading instructions right now,” she said, voice muffled behind the rebreather.

  The eyes. The nano-ink tattoos. Like Cee Cee, she could ride invisible bandwidth. A hacker. Full of bioware and other computing and neural hardware. She’d be pulling up entries on how to stop bleeding and following the instructions. I took two pulls on the rebreather, then set it back on Keiko’s face. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing; there was no fog on the glass visor.

  “Hands up!” came an order shouted so loud my ears buzzed. Struthiforms in thick, full-black armor and helmets ran at us. “Hands up, don’t move.”

  Amira was trying to get the shoelace around Keiko’s thigh and cinch it. Blood soaked the lace, and her fingers dripped red. I moved in front of her and Keiko, my bloody hands in the air. “We’re CPF recruits!” I shouted into the thin air. “We need medical attention for—”

  The head struthiform in the wedge formation struck me with a wing hand. I crumpled to the ground, dizzied by the hit. It held my face down in Keiko’s muddied blood as another Accordance soldier zip-tied my hands.

  “If you continue to struggle, you will be shot.”

  “I don’t understand,” I gasped, the dizziness creeping back over me. “We’re CPF. Why are you doing this?”

  Amira looked over, her face also shoved into the ground. “It was a bomb. A human bomb. All humans in Tranquility are getting arrested.”

  9

  Amira wriggled her shoulders, stretched, and then pulled free of the zip tie. She rubbed her wrists and put the tie on the table between us.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “Isn’t your dad Thomas Hart?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he didn’t teach you to cross your wrists and flex before getting zip-tied? Or how to break them off ?”

  “We never fought the arrests,” I told her. The struthiforms that interrogated me in a separate room had retied my hands in front of me. I held them toward her now. “Can you help?”